And it's not a big org or one with a strict division of responsibilities between clumsy juniors who update the website and carefully vetted experienced pros who do the real work, so this is likely to be representative the calibre of developer currently trawling through sensitive government databases....
In case you were asking genuinely: TDS is "Trump Derangement Syndrome." Generally coined to critique people who are furious with Trump no matter what he does. For instance, one time he ate McDonalds at the white house and there were articles criticizing the event for days. But it's often over-applied by Trump's supporters to dismiss any real criticism (the above being a perfect example).
This reductionist way of thinking isn't doing you or anyone any good. Unless you have at least some circumstantial evidence hinting at that, apart from "someone disagrees with me so they must be x", this isn't providing any value to the discussion.
You should probably address your criticisms to the gp. Giving trolls a pass and wagging fingers at people who reject their specious arguments is an increasingly common failure pattern.
Trolls don't get a pass. But neither do their critics.
You want to criticize a troll? Be my guest. Criticize away. (Or just downvote and flag.) But if you criticize, do better than false accusation. (There's a fine real accusation to make, namely "you're being a troll"; you don't have to make false accusations.)
Be better than the trolls. Don't stoop to their level.
I really think people can distinguish between a formal accusation and snark.
Now, I agree that in febrile political environments it's better not to rely on sarcasm and satire for communication because it imposes extra cognitive overhead and is subject to misinterpretation, but at the same time 'found the [negative stereotype]' is such a common joke format in American popular culture that it would be foolish to take it literally. It's like objecting to a 'knock knock' joke by complaining that the person is lying about being on the other side of a door.
And putting trolls and their critics on the same level is fundamentally foolish, and a much worse example of feeding trolls. It means attacking the critics for paying the trolls back in their own coin, which inevitably leads to a ratchet effect in favor of the trolls. There's good evidence that being rude to trolls is the most effective way for an online community to maintain itself: https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.03697
Lots of government websites are vulnerable early on.
Hope they used good proxies, because this seems like a felony.
> One of the sources told 404 Media that they were able to push updates to a database of government employment information after studying the website’s architecture and finding the database’s API endpoints.
> This person showed me two database entries they were able to push to the website, which are live on doge.gov as I write this (archived here and here)
All you had to do was actually read the article; it’s the very next paragraph from the one I quoted.
> push updates to a database of government employment information
Huh, what would be the goal of connecting this database to an API on or near doge.gov? Surely it's not the "actual"/"source of truth" database, more likely a copy: I can imagine the geniuses thought ""let's mirror everything online on a single system so it's easier for all of us to access it and do queries like "WHERE gender NOT IN ('m', 'f') OR race NOT IN ('white')" and get results from all the databases we know of."". (I assume there is no single federal employee database?)
And since the truth is whatever they say nowadays, maybe it IS the "source of truth" database.
The massive difference here is that the Doge team is acting as quickly making decisions about government funding and classifications of that spending e.g. if it's a "scam". If they're supposed computer experts making incorrect decisions about something as simple as web hosting you can be sure that they're making incorrect decisions in more important topics.
Odd question considering they didn't say that being an audit team is what makes them an expert at websites, or that they were experts at websites specifically.
Many on the Doge team are software engineers. And calling it an audit is being very generous. Looking at the Doge feed on approved state media it's mostly just DELETE FROM Contract WHERE Description like '%DEI%'
DOGE isn't staffed with seasoned auditors (the government actually has those, and they're called Inspector Generals, and they mostly got fired by Trump); it's staffed with engineers who are supposed to be making the government "more efficient", and who are completely unqualified to determine whether something is "wasteful" or not.
> Lots of government websites are vulnerable early on
Would like to see a source on this.
Governments are similar to large enterprises whereby every bit of code going into Production requires a full security, architecture and site reliability review.
There is no doubt bugs in bespoke web applications but for your typical website.
> Lots of government websites are vulnerable early on.
What data are you basing this on? Federal websites have an approval process which includes a security review so I’d expect some familiarity with that in your response.
It looks like the defacement was already cleared, but archives are available [0][1]. I posted these separately because of 404Media's soft-paywall, which is also linked separately here.
It's a "team" of junior hackers. What do you expect? I don't quite understand the motive. I mean the motive of the masses who cheer this on. Is it just to own the libs? They have to all be evil or completely misinformed. I assume most are ignorant and only a few are evil.
Well, the ministry of propaganda says this is la creme de la creme and we can trust their handling of government data blindly. So showing that DOGE is unable to even secure their website is a good exercise of hacker activism.
The times are mature to rediscover where the word hacker came from. It never rhymed with billionaire but it seems this website tried hard to change that narrative.
The same kids who have now access to vital US systems.
Better people learn about their lack of experience fro a hacked doge site than a hacked paxment system. The ones who will hack that won't be as friendly.
We got here because wealthy ideologues spent half a century creating a biased media ecosystem and attacking the idea that objective truth exists. Calling someone a Nazi because they made a Nazi salute isn’t causative, it’s just recognizing a problem which should have been tackled more aggressively 20 years ago.
What value do you think comes from trying to finely parse whether the “I was racist before it was cool” guy calling for a “eugenic immigration policy”, who “would not mind at all if Gaza and Israel were both wiped off the face of the Earth” has a slightly different self-identity than his boss who threw the Nazi salutes? “Anti-Semitic bigot who at the very least doesn’t mind being around people who throw Nazi salutes” is longer but doesn’t seem very different in terms of how decent people would view them.
The same value as finely parsing whether you are the same person as Stalin or whatever. You are viewing your enemy not as a bunch of flawed or even mentally ill people, but as some movie villain or even not-reall-humans. This is a problem. That's how you start down the path of justifying genocide. When the right becomes crazier, the solution is not for the left to become even crazier and starting some arms race of who can be most insane.
Don't lie to carry the water for Nazis. It empties you of all integrity.
How about blaming the people who are actually acting like Nazis, and also the actual self described Nazis who are supporting them and cheering them on and recruiting off of Musk platforming and promoting them, of emptying the word of all meaning, among other much worse things.
The Nazis are pretty successful to have convinced you to debase yourself by sticking up for them and criticizing anti-fascists for simply calling a spade a spade.
So who do you consider worse: the actual Nazis, or people who you believe are emptying the word Nazi of all meaning (boo hoo hoo)? Because you're siding with and defending the actual Nazis from being called what they are. Is there a word for what that makes you?
BEING nazi/bigot/transphobic/etc is what ATTRACTED every bigot and self admitted Nazi to the Republicans, and there you go, standing up for and defending them by denying reality.
If not yet, then at what point exactly would allow anyone to exercise their own free speech by calling Musk, a self described "free speech absolutist", transphobic? What more would he have to do, than to actually publicly attack and verbally abuse and humiliate and deadname and misgender and lie about his own child?
How about policing the actual Nazis and bigots and transphobes instead of the people like his daughter who rightfully call him what he obviously is by his very own words and deeds?
Elon Musk’s Transgender Daughter Says He Was ‘Cruel’ and ‘Uncaring’:
> BEING nazi/bigot/transphobic/etc is what ATTRACTED every bigot and self admitted Nazi to the Republicans
If that's the case, you have already lost anyway. Because if that's true you have so many nazis in the US now that the historical Nazis are a rounding error. Do you truly believe that?
> How about policing the actual Nazis and bigots and transphobes instead of the people like his daughter who rightfully call him what he obviously is by his very own words and deeds?
You can't police shit if you are the minority. That's absurd. You can't become the majority by being an ass to everyone on the fence. That's what the left has been doing and driving everyone away.
The left has to take responsibility for the failed tactic of going around screaming at people for wearing sombreros or whatever. After you do that enough, everyone who has been screamed at will want to vote for anyone who are against that crap. And yea, that was Trump.
Or maybe I'm wrong and you really do have 77,302,580 nazis in the US right now. I don't buy that. I have a much higher opinion of the American people.
> everyone who has been screamed at will want to vote for anyone who are against that crap
You're just speaking for yourself, trying to justify your own bigoted beliefs, with the old "you forced me to become a Nazi/racist/transphobe to get revenge on you because you hurt my feelings" defense, not because you take any personal responsibility for what you believe, what you say, who you vote for, whose water you carry, or whose boots you lick.
I didn't force you to defend Elon Musk or claim it's not fair for me or even his own daughter to call him a transphobe. That's all on you. You decided to do that, not me. Before you defend his Nazi salute, post a photo of yourself doing the exact same thing, and put it in a picture frame on your desk at work.
So answer the question instead of dodging it: Exactly WHAT would Elon Musk have to do, that he hasn't already done to his own daughter, that crosses the line and justifies finally calling him a transphobe?
If only I'd stop calling Elon Musk a transphobe, he'd finally start treating his own daughter like a human being who has a right to exist and self autonomy and love and respect from her parents, huh?
You have cause and effect and the direction of time reversed if you believe it's all everyone else's fault that people unfairly call Elon Musk a transphobe, which forced him to act the way he does towards his own daughter.
Or is it your position that nobody should call anyone else transphobic or racist or Nazi, no matter how obviously true it is?
Nazis aren't going to stop Nazing and transphobes aren't going to stop abusing their own children, if only you just respect them and stop calling them names.
Nope. I would have voted against Trump if I had voting rights in the US. Again, you're interpreting my statement of "we shouldn't lie about our enemies" as me supporting those enemies.
That was true at one point--I used to make the same objection--but it's 2025 and the threshold has been crossed.
If you wait for unassailable academic applicability, when you finally deploy it your prison guards won't care.
A quick sampling off the top of my head: The First Consigliere throws double Nazi salutes on national TV and smirks in ambiguity when questioned whether he intended it, the President defends a Nazi march as "very fine people", violent private groups serving their political ends have been placed above any (federal) prosecution, and the administration is actively boasting that they will remove undesirables by creating the largest deportation in the entire history of the nation using the same laws abused for the WWII Japanese internment camps.
The label may be rude, but it's not unreasonable... and the more reasonable it is, the better it is to be rude!
I agree with you, but I think it’s important to present facts as facts the best we can. There’s enough terrible things out there both Trump and Musk have said and done, there’s no need to have any shred of mischaracterization.
Is there really any point in being careful with the facts? It seems like the way to win is to convince people of low interest and/or intelligence, which is all about rhetoric and narrativizing anyways. What’s the utility in truth here?
Fair point. But I would argue if the goal is to really change minds then you have to remove little things that allow people to dismiss everything else you said. Low interest/intelligence supporters have probably been shown the rest of the video at this point, so they will label you as a lier and their side as telling the truth and move on. Is it an unfair standard? Yes! There's also so many other events to use hopefully to better effect.
This is not how you change minds in 2025. They are going to dismiss everything you say to change their minds.
You aren't having a debate, its a mental street fight, and you gain respect by proving you know how they think and meeting them there.
Its why I say the dems are always wrong. I know that the only converastion is from using their own facts and then their own values.
The dems are always wrong, they do corruption badly. Trump pardoned 1600 people, and made 2 billion or something from 2 meme coins right before he was inagurated.
What do the dems have to show for it? 6 pardons?
So the Repubs are up 1594 pardons and billions in meme coins?
Did Trump do anything illegal? no! He exercised his powers. See! the dems can't even be corrupt or serve their own self interests effectively.
You might be interested in this YouTube series, where the author tries to deconstruct and explain the rhetoric patterns of--and countermeasures against--"The Alt-Right Playbook."
I innately want to believe that a comprehensive refutation grounded and logic and citations will win the day, but that doesn't seem to be how it plays out.
To charitably-interpret the parent-poster, they didn't say that.
More like... Truth is important to convey, lies are not permitted, but meticulous and detailed truth simply doesn't work against lies with better marketing.
You shouldn't surround your truth with a bodyguard of lies, but just throwing on more Truth as a raw ingredient doesn't advance the cause of people actually adopting Truth.
Even in a world of perfect transmission, people are highly irrational when faced with ideas challenging their priors. We don’t have perfect transmission, we have, and always have had, systems which elevate attention-drawing, profitable, and easily digestible ideas to the top while filtering out ideas too far from the status quo or threatening to governance. This is almost a matter of nature. How can a news platform exist if it only publishes complicated things beyond the public, what good would that even do? How can it exist if it doesn’t draw attention to its newspapers, or its website. We remove the explicit government control of media but we leave so many back-alleys for influence, and is the government even the locus of power now, or is it the moneyed interests that aren’t even barred from controlling media? And again, even if we woke up tomorrow with perfect, unbiased communication, we haven’t been raised to deal with it. We’d instantly repurpose the platform into a slop-distribution machine and sell advertisements on it and so on.
I don’t believe in giving up on that ideal, but I think it’s a fiction in the sense that actually achieving any semblance of a “free marketplace of ideas” is a vastly complex problem we have no capacity to solve right now. Humans aren’t a collection of simple, isolated units, we’re a vast colonial fungus. We struggle to understand individual biological organisms, but we assume that all of humanity talking to itself will be a system transparent to study, that it operates on simple principles. Ask a skilled marketer if he or she believes in the free marketplace of ideas.
Solving the problem would involve building a completely different social system from the ground up. Since we can’t do that, and nobody knows how to start, what I’m suggesting is that people try to study the communication networks as they are now and the memetics people are responsive to and build, carefully and cleverly, narratives which will actually have the practical consequence of bettering people’s lives, and that they use the truth to figure out how to do that and what that narrative should be. It’s not really lies or the truth, I’m calling for a pragmatic attempt to use the extremely flawed communication channels at our disposal to do the best we can.
Wasn't one of them reported as saying he was racist before it was cool? The whole problem is that the people around Trump (and even more so Musk) do genuinely appear to have Nazi ish beliefs. This is why their attacks on key parts of the state are making such an impact.
The person in question published it openly on the internet (Twitter). Not gonna bother digging up the proof again because it's been widely reported and not denied - just minimized as some cheeky edgelord humor.
Not really. If you're open about it you don't have to hint at it and never say it openly. You know, actually being open about it.
Also, neo-nazis. Not nazis. Nazis were a very real political group. Some are even still alive. None of these teenagers were even born. Their PARENTS weren't even born.
Does that make a difference? Their views check every mark in the description of a Nazi, and they identify themselves as such. If someone walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, in a world where any sane person would do their best to not even appear a duck, they're ducks.
Many people who are not in tech circles think Elon is a brilliant expert in everything from artificial intelligence to space travel. People who largely think of technology fields as magic hail him as like the modern Galileo who cannot be wrong.
Many people in tech circles also think this. People in tech are no smarter or no more resistant to grift and propaganda. See this entire comment section.
Hanlon's razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity". I think for those cheering on it's a mix of both. Culture wars have made them gleeful when they see opportunities for others to suffer and they're ignorant of how this is negatively affecting them, their morals and society.
But it's definitely malice from Musk, Trump and the rest of the oligarchs. They have for a long time been clear that their plan is to tear down everything and rebuild around themselves and everyone else is a pawn to be used to their benefit. These people are purely transactional, they don't believe in societal goods, just what benefits them must be best for everyone.
It might be prudent to consider emigration or at least divesting from real estate assets. I assume property values will evaporate along with the stock markets if this train keeps on rolling.
> I assume property values will evaporate along with the stock markets if this train keeps on rolling.
The US government can prop up the stock market for a very long time. Anyone who purchased Puts early on during COVID times found themselves on the opposite side of a suddenly generous Fed that poured hitherto unseen amounts of liquidity directly into the markets. The chickens only came to roost in the next administration, but ai suspect they could have kept at it for 10+ years and still kept inflation under 12-15%
During the first Trump administration I regularly tried to discern the difference, but ultimately that was a mistake--a kind of engaging and draining analytical junk food--and one I'm not going to make a second time.
> Trump-scandals kinda killed Hanlon's Razor for me: A miasma inseparably blurring the lines between malice and incompetence, lies and ignorance, culpability and insanity, condensing into a greasy alloy which is definitely some amount of evil yet not worth anybody's time to separate and assay.
I refuse to feed the algorithm more pathological input for another denial-of-service attack. For anything from that crowd of repeat-offenders, I declare the answer to be both. If they want to assert something was just incompetence or just malice, the onus is on them to provide the argument either way.
Ever heard of the banality of evil?
Ignorance is in some ways worse than being genuinely evil.
You should be worried because the same guys who are resonsible for this web site are now in charge of much more vital systems and there are much bigger threats who just wait do get important data.
Calling something "evil" is implying an external force (often linked to religion), that I don't think should be used. It reduces the responsibility of the person doing "evil" acts.
I think the missing ingredient is simply not caring about the outcome. It could be because they don't have empathy (sociopaths), or that the society has trained them into normalising obedience to the cause (facsism / communism) or inhumanized their targets (consentration camps).
Acts can certainly be described as "evil", but I don't agree that "evil" is some type of force that affects people.
Not caring about the outcome doesn't make sense, people that are driven by something care about the outcome.
To go back to my original point, the simplistic equation falls apart if you spend a second looking for counter examples.
Sikhs give free food to any who asks, without expecting anything in return. They are deluded (they do to it please god), and need power and conviction to do so.
A good point. You can for sure accidentally do good things by being deluded and having conviction and power. One could also say that they have a small delusion (god) that gives them a bigger truth (being nice to people is good). So like their total delusion level in this regard is low.
I'm not a native speaker, and I see that I may have been unclear.
I was thinking of the human consequences. In my language they are almost synonyms.
They of course care about the outcome, but not the effect it has on the target group
It's strange how one can normalize cruelty. Just think of how prison rapes are joked about in media and movies, as if it is an accepted consequence of committing a crime. It is a cruel and evil act that many choose to simply ignore because it is so common
>There is only delusion + power + conviction. There is no other evil.
If you believe this, your beliefs are out of step with essentially every Western justice system, which hold murder to be a worse crime than manslaughter. The difference between them is solely the intention.
How does conviction (as OP used it) not align with intention? I don't follow your point here about murder vs manslaughter and how it contradicts what OP said.
It seems I interpreted their use of "conviction" in a very different way than you and others. I interpreted it as a word they chose to use because it contrasts with intention, specifically with intention to harm another person.
By "conviction", I understood them to mean a kind of blindness -- an unshakeable belief that what you are doing is right, regardless of what others may believe. That kind of conviction is orthogonal to intention to harm another person. I took the entire thrust of their argument to be that intention to harm another person is neither necessary nor morally important for evil. But that is not how most of the West sees it (as evidenced by the distinction between murder and manslaughter that I pointed out).
If, when they wrote "conviction", they in fact meant "intention to harm another person", then I agree with them. But in that case I'm not sure why they posted their comment at all, since that (namely, the thesis that intention to harm is morally important when actions cause harm) is already the accepted norm, at least in the West.
Not that I agree with GP at all, but you are strawmaning him. I'll steelman his argument with your example: Premeditated murder is worse than just murder: for you to commit murder, you have to be convinced you have to do it, and the power to push it through. And in case of a premeditation, the dellusion you'll be able to do it without consequences.
(I still think it's a bad example even presented like this, and I disagree with GP, but your example seemed wrong)
Manslaughter is when you kill someone without conviction and/or delusion. You can hit someone without the conviction that you need to kill them and they fall really badly and die.
Murder. You can hit someone in self defense where you have no conviction that the person must be killed (because for example they say you had sex with their wife, but you in fact know you didn't, it's a misunderstanding), and you don't have any delusion (you know the attacker is delusional in fact). And then you defend yourself and he dies because he hit his head badly on the way down.
By "conviction", do you simply mean "intent to harm another person"?
Because that is the only way I can interpret your examples so that they correspond with the legal distinction, which is based on intent to harm and TTBOMK never mentions "conviction". If so, we're in full agreement, since that is already the accepted Western norm and my original comment was based on a misunderstanding, and unnecessary.
But also if so: I'm puzzled why you chose to swap the natural and original word "intent" for a different word ("conviction") that is easily misinterpreted as a quality orthogonal to intention to harm, and about which an interesting but fundamentally wrong argument is periodically made (namely, that it, plus power are sufficient for evil, without any need for intent). I'm also puzzled why you made the initial comment I replied to at all, since it's then a defence of the absolutely uncontroversial status quo. It's like posting that you believe in gravity.
> By "conviction", do you simply mean "intent to harm another person"?
No, I mean "the probability function you ascribe to your beliefs". A person who believes something very weakly doesn't put on a suicide vest to blow up civilians in order to further this belief. A person with a strong belief might.
...in the 1700s. It's older than America. Jihadis want nothing else than 100% global sharia law/kalifate. The hate of America is because America is winning and they are losing. Don't be confused. We do NOT want to placate Jihadis. They are worse than the Nazis.
bin Laden and al-Qaida talked a lot about their motivations. For one it was disgusting to them that the house of Saud bowed and scraped for the crusaders in Washington, and so was the rather arbitrary abuse of Afghanistan.
They also were under the delusion that the US was a democracy, and hence the general population could be held responsible for the actions of its leaders. Understandable if they had mainly been exposed to US/Occidental state propaganda.
Today I don't think anyone would be inclined to hold such a belief.
Sometimes- it also just rains. The end of WW2 and free trade + technology, have given the futurist ideology that every problem is solveable way to much credibility. Some problems are just hard and inherently not solveable and sometimes not even workaroundable by technology.
Utopists who run into accumulating problems, closing resource windows and simple limitations of humans (tribal creatures) and the meta-machinery they built, are bound to just run around with their pants on fire.
I don't think it's ignorance. It's indifference. The vast majority of Americans simply don't give one iota of care as long as they are currently comfortable.
I don't remember the quote, but something about them only learning from catastrophe.
Ironically one of the few wars America objectively and decidedly lost - and on their home turf no less! Terrorism is to enact political change through acts of violence; I think it's pretty inarguable that America is a changed nation with regards to government surveillance, and the powers granted to law enforcement.
Suppose they do care. What would that look like? Posting memes to TikToks and Instagram? Would it look protests in all 50 states? Because 50501 did that and got barely any coverage. If you knew to look for them you could and can find coverage, but it didn't dominate the news cycle on all channels for days on end.
We're not united because they've goaded us into to fighting each other over two topics that really aren't, and there's only two teams to pick from. One was bad, and the other one worse.
> The vast majority of Americans simply don't give one iota of care as long as they are currently comfortable.
Can you blame them? They've been toiling hard for decades while getting poorer and poorer, while the privileged class has lived lives of wealth and comfort from milking these government institutions. Did they care about the vast majority being comfortable or not?
The repubs lost their battles, and decided they wanted to win at all costs. They had people show up to vote, vote in a bloc, volunteer for lower level positions, join multiple different organizations and basically organized them to dismantle the country.
If people can be driven to do that, then its not much to assume that at least a few more people could have done the same thing.
That's just laughable for entire generations of people, like Soviet headlines of how food production is beating all records while the store shelves are empty. People are getting absolutely murdered on rents and real estate inflation. If you're a landlord or can leverage your real estate, then good for you. You have never been wealthier.
For some reason quite a number of people seem to believe the purpoted goals of DOGE, removing waste and increasing efficiency of the government.
I can't really understand that as it seems obvious to me that they're just destroying parts of the government they don't like. And while there is certainly room for improvement in many areas, whatever they're doing is not going to improve anything, it's only destruction.
And, currently, firing everyone without just-cause protections (probationary workers, as well the contractor workforce - nearly equal in size to federal employees.)
It befuddles me too. My understanding is that government spending is approved by congress and that all organizations except the Pentagon have passed their audits. This is not to say that there isn't _some_ waste, fraud and abuse in between the cracks, but any large expense is approved by Congress and the executive can't unilaterally override those spending choices.
There's a reason the federal budget is several inches of very thin paper. The budget spells out how much money gets spent for various purposes, programs, projects, etc. Of course they don't specify the kind of paperclips the FAA buys. But they will approve or modify the FAA's budget plan which includes $X for office supplies, $Y for an upgrade to the FAA's network equipment in a branch office, $Z for upgrading some nav beacons, and so on.
The executive branch can't defund or "stop spending money on" anything. Nixon decided he just wouldn't spend money on programs he didn't like, and congress very rapidly passed a law that said that the president couldn't do it, because the "power of the purse" rests solely with congress.
It certainly can't stop issuing payments for existing obligations, and it especially can't take money back, which M did a day or two ago to NYC because he read a tweet that said NYC was spending money housing migrants in "luxury hotels", which shockingly turned out to be nonsense...
That's why all of this DOGE crap is such theatrical nonsense. Congress, representing their state's interests and the interests of those who live in their district, via two separate branches, approves all the budgets.
No matter what T and M say, no federal agency can just willy-nilly decide to spend money it's allocated by congress on other stuff.
> The executive branch can't defund or "stop spending money on" anything. Nixon decided he just wouldn't spend money on programs he didn't like, and congress very rapidly passed a law that said that the president couldn't do it, because the "power of the purse" rests solely with congress.
That's all great in theory: in actual reality those laws are just words on paper, Congress has no interest in asserting its authority, and enforcement rests with the executive.
Sure. But then the continuous narrative must be that Trump is violating the law. Every single person who supports Trump should have to confront the fact that Trump is doing this in a way that declares the end of our constitutional order and his position as an autocrat.
I don't think they see a problem with this. My grandfather used to say we needed to get a couple leaders from GE or whatever company was huge and successful then, and let them have free reign for a year.
You end up driving up the share price in the short term and destroying the company in the long term but by then you’re gone as CEO with your golden parachute. Not unlike presidents who will be gone in 4 years time (if second term) and let someone else deal with the consequences of their actions.
There are definitely people who think that a president who just violates the law in order to achieve these outcomes is a fine thing. Those people are lost. Nothing I can say to those people will stop them from eventually putting a bullet in my brain.
The goal should be messaging to everybody else. Especially those who might like the outcomes of Trump's crimes but would prefer not to have a president that just smashes through the law to get there. A way to help achieve this is to repeat, over and over and over, that Trump's actions are violating shitloads of laws.
Trump is breaking the law, but Congress has no interest in holding him accountable - and they're the only institution Congress specifies for having the authority to hold the president accountable.
So...Trump is breaking the law and getting away with it. What else is new?
This is different from immunity. What’s supposed to happen is the action is stopped, as though the EOs never happened. It’s not illegal to issue illegal EOs, they just can’t be followed. The only real point sanctions come is when a judge says “stop” and the people involved don’t. This is violating a court order, which is contempt of court. But Trump wouldn’t be violating it, Musk would.
Yeah, but contempt of court still is enforced by the executive (the court can order enforcement, but it’s the DOJ [US Marshal’s Service] that does arrests and the DOJ [Bureau of Prisons] that holds those arrested.)
BUT... even if the executive is under legal theory constitutionally unitary, it isn’t actually unitary, it consists of individual people who act based on their own perception of legitimacy, and when the President abandons the principle of government of law and not arbitrary individual will in dealing with the courts, well, that also threatens the theoretical infrastructure that binds the people carrying guns in various executive departments to his authority, and we can very quickly end up in one of those highly unpredictable periods of history that produces lots of really neat stories to read about afterwards but is somewhat less pleasant to live through.
Absolutely, I didn’t want to give the impression any of this is good. I just wanted to correct the common misconception that issuing invalid EOs is, itself, a crime.
This is a good example of what I mean. There is no evidence that DOGE is acting on actual fraud and abuse, that is immediately obvious if you consider how broad most of their actions are. And unless you think that the federal government should essentially not exist at all I don't think you can declare all this just "waste".
No – but why would you trust their Twitter feed and their Twitter feed only? Elon Musk himself has talked openly about dismantling the CFPB and USAID on his private account; in that case, it's a matter of "agency will no longer do anything".
I looked at the screenshot they posted about the 2.23M, which is all they posted. So we know, if I’m correct, absolutely and precisely nothing about this payment? Who was doing the equity assessment, how many people over what time period? What are the details of this, what was the purpose? I went digging briefly and found nothing. Why would I assume this is waste without any clue what it is?
Because the tech bros said it. Because that's how all tech bro gimmicks over the years went, be it crypto or investments or you name it - they claimed to "disrupt", "improve" and "revolutionize", and your guess how much of that actually happened.
The question is - are they fundamentally altering the function of government agencies.
I think you can get the answer from what they post. Cutting $400M in external contracts for a $10B agencies isn’t cutting major functions of the agency.
To be fair, the guy I was responding to got flagged so you probably can’t see it.
This wasn’t really our argument, and would look more like moving the goalposts.
To have the argument anyways, I looked back through their posts back to jan 20, and there’s really no information about most of the cuts. I presume that the few things they highlight, eg equity programs or whatever, are the worse of the worst that they could find, cause isn’t that what they’d show us? They could be cutting basically anything behind the scenes, and they themselves may not have a good idea what they’re cutting. As of jan 31st, they claimed to have cut 1-1.2 billion dollars overall. I assume that number is much higher now. Why would I trust that, while fumbling around looking at payment descriptions, one of Musk’s techbro zoomers didn’t hamper or cripple an important function of one of these departments? Where can I find the in-depth information on every cut?
Oh, they are posting a lot of cancellations, they rarely, if ever show what payments are for, exactly, and whether they are actual waste, or that it doesn't "neatly fits into the function the government agency is supposed to fill".
> but you see a few building leases sprinkled it.
You think agencies cannot lease buildings? And that it's a waste and fraud?
> I haven’t seen anything so far that says “Agency will no longer do X”, but happy to be be corrected.
They have literally unilaterally shut down several government agencies with bogus claims.
It's a damn shame the IRS funding is getting gutted and those billionaire 1% will be getting cuts anyways. Hard to go after those not paying when Daddy Trump and Daddy Musk cut the legs out from under the enforcement and audit folks.
Even if we decided that all of these were waste, that's still not even the bulk of their cuts. "Hey we got rid of some wasteful stuff because we closed 95% of the organization and some portion of that stuff was waste" is not sufficient.
the problem is labeling anything ideological as “waste”; one can get rid of anything under that cover, quite convenient.
You don’t need to write “the agency will no longer do X” you just need to fire the people doing X. Case in point the EPA and CFPB (which catch fraud among companies but were not worried about that anymore are we)
DOGE should be able to make those arguments themselves. They're also not particularly transparent, so we have to assemble information from various sources.
They're right now firing all probationary employees at multiple agencies. That is entirely indiscriminate, and almost certainly disruptive to the mission of those agencies.
The actions at NIH and NSF will likely kill a large portion of the scientific research they used to fund. So unless you consider science in general be a waste I think these broad cuts clearly don't target actual waste and abuse.
If you don't think foreign aid is important for the continued safety of the US then you don't understand soft power and have no business in modern politics.
Sadly the people in charge fit into this category, except for the ones like Marco Rubio who actually do understand this but have no spine and are willing to overlook this stupidity for a seat at the table.
You have a child like nativity if you think foreign aid doesn’t come with strings attached.
You do know the polio vaccine program in Pakistan where DNA analysis to find Bin Laden was done through USAID? The one that set vaccination back decades?
USAID, CFPB, 18F (free tax filing), DOJ (lawyers who worked on Trump cases), EPA (halting alternative energy projects), NSF/NIH (funding by keyword search of anything remotely DEI related) etc
There aren’t any examples so far of stuff that is clearly waste and abuse.
The Twitter DOGE account posted a screenshot of where a 'Gender Identity Section' had been removed from a website.
Where is the efficiency saving and where was the waste?
This is really what has been on my mind. Simone tagged Elon showing him a screenshot of some veteran website allowing you to select more than two genders. Elon replies with a “On it. @DOGE”
I thought doge was about efficiency, why is he spending resources on the culture war?
Everything they’ve been cutting so far has been ideological (DEI USAID and other agencies that are“run by Marxists”) or retribution (DOJ lawyers getting sacked) or self-serving (EPA CFPB).
The only example of waste are the 150 yr old SA recipients. Sure that happens (we’ve been hearing about “welfare queens” for decades) but certainly not something new the DOGE “uncovered “.
And why are we entrusting a bunch of young engineers to identify fraud? They might be qualified to refactor and streamline computer systems but are certainly not qualified to determine what is “legitimate “ spending and what is not.
While obviously true, I don't see what that has to do with anything.
The intent of my comment was not to claim that what Musk and co. are doing is good, or that it's bad. It was to point out precisely why the claims in the post I replied to will not convince anyone who is not already convinced.
If the poster I replied to just wanted to vent, fine. But if they wanted to persuade someone on the fence, they have provided nothing towards that.
Nothing, that is, besides the standard appeal to emotion that infests almost all such arguments (on both sides) and is effective on human brains for all the wrong reasons.
They are they are shrinking the government to find ~4T$ for for corporate tax cuts. You can call it legitimate policy but calling it "efficiency" is bit misleading.
That's a good read on the budget proposals the House Republicans are bringing to the table – the aggravating part, though, is that the loss of $4.5T of revenue won't help with the deficit or debt, since the current target for cuts in annual spending are only $1.5T. (Give or take increased defense and national security spending over the next few years.)
Nothing is legitimate about this. Literally everything they are doing is both illegal and completely unconstitutional. They have thrown out the entire rule of law and it is a pure flex of power, a shock-and-awe meltdown that they hope to execute faster than the normal processes can react. They absolutely intend to abolish resistance and they know they can suffer no consequences for it.
Dark times ahead. We're aren't arguing government efficiency or saving money, they are smashing it all.
Most people consider anything they don't like to be a waste of public funds. After all, they pay for the government through taxes, so it should serve only their needs. People in America do not view the government as a source for public good, but merely a piggy bank from which they should be able to extract funds. Just look at the student loan forgiveness crowd. I'm perfectly happy paying my dues, but a lot of people have decided that they want the government to give them a load of free money instead of using it for something productive.
Many countries don't have this boat anchor named "student loan" at all, so maybe the lesson here is that indenturing your people who actually want to study shouldn't be a must?
Whether you're right or not is beside the argument he/she made, which I think is pretty strong: that many Americans think anything government does that doesn't directly benefit them is a waste. Personally I find this to be somewhat more true among folks who identify as conservatives but I also hear plenty of self-identified moderates and liberals complaining about the expenditure of tax dollars when it comes to the military and foreign influence or tax policy as it pertains to corporations and high earners.
Why not? Student loans are a good protection against brain drain. If you offer free university, there's a likelihood that people will take you up on it then move out of the country, thus wasting the money invested in educating that person. A student loan guarantees a good return on investment for people you educate. Admittedly, America solves this problem by charging income tax for citizens living abroad, but a loan is better in my view since you can't rescind it like you could a citizenship. I actually think the concept of student loans should be extended down to primary education. I also think it would be good to institute a similar system for medical debt.
Why stop funding at the university level? Why not also defund high school and middle school as well? After all, by the end of the 5th grade you should be able to read, write, and do simple arithmetic. Anything beyond that you can fund yourself, right?
Subsidizing demand increases prices. When you subsidize university education, you increase the price of it. The metoric rise in inflation-adjusted cost of university education since the 70's or so is strong evidence of this.
If someone wants to major in feminist dance therapy, that should be on their own dime. Using my tax money to fund it is immoral.
>Why not also defund high school and middle school as well? After all, by the end of the 5th grade you should be able to read, write, and do simple arithmetic. Anything beyond that you can fund yourself, right?
I'm actually not entirely unsympathetic to drastically cutting down how much mandatory education we have for kids. There is very little (if any) correlation between the funding amount and actual results. See Abbott districts in Bew Jersey for a stark example of this.
> If someone wants to major in feminist dance therapy, that should be on their own dime. Using my tax money to fund it is immoral.
And if they want to major in economics, chemistry, physics, engineering?
I don't necessarily disagree with what you're saying wholesale, but "I don't like this tiny corner so throw the whole thing in the trash" is immature, foolish, and self-destructive.
Because you're taking other people's money by threat of lethal force to pursue a 4 year party vacation and getting a degree in something useless while you're at it.
"taking other people's money by threat of lethal force" in the form of taxes is seen as necessary for running society by most people, not a moral failing.
And we are not talking about "party vacations" we are talking about education. Maybe this is a commentary on the state of higher education today, but there are plenty of institutions that offer a quality educational experience here; America has the #1 university system in the world.
"a degree in something useless"
Who determines what is useless? You? Are arts degrees for instance useless? Artists don't think so. They are not typically profitable but that's a different conversation, your qualification was "useless". What makes a degree useless, who determines that, and how?
And even if we just assume a topic useless, how is giving people scholarships to study it immoral?
> Because you're taking other people's money by threat of lethal force
The government is doing that, not the dancer. If you consider general taxation immoral, fair enough, but then you're going to have to explain how a country can function without it.
> to pursue a 4 year party vacation
Boy, have I got bad news for you about a lot of students on what you'd consider more worthwhile courses.
> getting a degree in something [THAT I, PERSONALLY, CONSIDER] useless
And how do you make your country not crap? Well, it starts with educating people. But when you educate them, they leave. You've effectively been forced to subsidise the skilled workforce of another country and your own country is worse than it was to begin with. This is a stupid petty response that doesn't really make any sense and is also deeply and unnecessarily offensive to large parts of the world.
Most countries that are the recipients of skilled migrants won't allow entrance without a university degree. Education is a precondition for this migration. That's why it's called "brain drain". If people aren't educated, it doesn't matter if they leave or not.
To have a country worth staying in, you need an educated population. Can't get money if you don't have money. And it's especially hard if all the money you invest goes down the toilet from other countries freeloading off your investment.
As far as I'm concerned, "medical debt" is effectively extortion.
If I have some sort of major medical issue, such as cancer, it's absolutely fucked that my choices are to either die or to rack up an extreme amount of medical debt that I might not ever recover from. In either case, my life is ruined.
By "similar system", I am mainly considering one by which the debt doesn't actually have to be paid back by the individual. Generally my idea is that the debt is paid back by the country the person pays taxes in, though obviously this is not feasible at present.
The international financial system makes it very hard to "run away" from a loan. Unless you are genuinely willing to become a wanted fugitive, you will end up having to pay.
The amount of money and effort required to extradite a person far outweighs the average student loan. Not only that, it is not really a "crime" to not pay your debts. It is a civil violation. The court can seize your property, in limits. You can't seize someones house in some states, and some don't even allow you to seize cars. Even if they can, any given student loan holder may not have either.
This reminds me of one of the propaganda points used in Soviet times to justify denying permission to emigrate to Soviet Jews in 1970-80s. Since they got free education courtesy of the state, they were supposed to stay and "work it off".
"But Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former Republican director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), said the agencies Musk and Trump have targeted to date account for a tiny fraction of the overall federal budget ...
They are not going to go into agencies that are doing things they like. They are going into agencies they disagree with," Holtz-Eakin, who has participated in past tax and spending negotiations in Congress, told Reuters.
They don't like the NIH, the CDC, or the Human Services part of HHS, that's for sure. Hell, they don't like the NIH so much that they're willing to overlook the fact that the basic biomedical research infrastructure in this country is essentially reliant on it.
They're trying pretty hard to kill a large part of the scientific research happening in the US right now. They're messing with NIH and NSF grants, the cap on indirect costs is likely going to decimate research at universities. And even if some or most of these drastic changes are reversed, the enormous uncertainty they're introducing will likely reduce future investments in scientific fields.
Or how injecting disinfectants like bleach might help get rid of COVID viruses. (Actually, he's right -- it would probably kill the virus; the only problem is that you'd be dead, so maybe not the best and brightest idea.)
Also, plastic straws don't harm the environment. Oooh, science!
I have an experience working with the government (not US): the only way to improve is to destroy the parts making sure no one from the preexisting organization ends up in the new replacement.
The great american problem is that American bureaucracy is broken. Whether it's lottery systems for hiking in national parks, fixing roads, healthcare, or hiring across federal employers, all of these require a functioning bureaucracy and there is not one. And so what do Americans do? The left complains the bureaucracy is broken and the right complains the bureaucracy exists. There is little room left for ever fixing the bureaucracy in this situation. It leaves lots of room for people to grab power and change things unilaterally to their own benefit.
American bureaucracy is not broken (but is in the process of being destroyed). Claiming that it is broken is easy rhetoric for charlatans and backed up by a few cherry picked examples.
yeah, the claim that the bureaucracy is the thing that is broken-- can we look at a few things?
Every time the administration changes, the heads of all the departments change, and the incoming people are typically pretty ignorant of what the department does. How would a corporation work if every 4 years you rotated the C-suite and 2 levels down, with people from a completely different business sector?
Meanwhile, funding is shifted even more often. Or is just outright cut once every few years.
Meanwhile, every action they take is an official government action. Which means it is LEGALLY REQUIRED to happen in certain ways based on laws written by people who don't think about consequences or how they are enacted.
And it is 2.2 Million people. There are economies of scale here.
So I wonder how this compares to current Google, current Facebook. I've heard people here talking about how messed up those companies are, projects started/stopped at whim, massive investments that get abandoned 2 years later, etc.
Or to banks. Banks don't modernize their software because they can't, not because they don't want to. No wonder the US government has similar issues.
This all sounds like examples of how the bureaucracy is broken. I suppose a better way to say it is the bureaucracy is unable to respond in any sort of effective way to the problems it is meant to solve because there are far too many people who have the option to change the rules whether it's the president, congressional committee, judges, etc.
The American problem, speaking as an American, is the Americans. Their brains are incredibly smooth, and therefore they fear almost nothing. Famine? War? Environmental catastrophe? Societal collapse? Nah. The only thing they fear at all is someone who sounds like they might have a wrinklier brain than them. That's the problem.
Cutting DEI is blatantly and explicitly political. They can do that, within the laws and regulation that apply (this part is arguably something they don't follow). But it's not fraud or abuse, this is just "stuff they don't like".
They're cutting a lot more than that, this has been all over the media. One example would be biomedical research via NIH/NSF. This is not just DEI (in whatever overly broad and vague definition they use), but a lot more.
So maybe they're cutting a lot of other things and just highlighting the DEI stuff in order to draw attention away from the non-DEI stuff? I could believe that though I doubt anyone has done an analysis of the proportions yet.
What about this argument people are making in this thread that they're not actually doing any real cutting because they're not Congress? That seems like a stretch.
No, if I was deaf my views on this would still be the same. I would still think that "DEI" as an idea is not something the federal government should spend money on.
I would also still support the ADA and its enforcement.
These two ideas are not in conflict. No one is trying to strip the legal rights of deaf people, nor will it happen. That is a straw man/hyperbole.
“ Sec. 2. Implementation. (a) The Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), assisted by the Attorney General and the Director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), shall coordinate the termination of all discriminatory programs, including illegal DEI and “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility” (DEIA) mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government, under whatever name they appear.”
So I guess you’re happy with the concept of Redlining[0] and believe that any government spending on either preventing the practice, or undoing the decades worth of damage caused by historical Redlining are simply a waste of government time and money?
That preventing a repeat of the damage done to America cities by the national highway system[1], which was used mechanism to literally segregate American cities is also a waste of time and money.
Most of the US significant racial atrocities committed against its own citizens, where either committed by, or with the direct assistance of, the U.S. government (at both state and federal level).
There probably a good discussion to be had on how much should be spent on DEI efforts. But the idea that spending zero really doesn’t make much sense, we know what the consequences of allowing the U.S. government to become entirely occupied by white men. Ultimately a monoculture of people results in a monoculture of ideas, and monocultures never last, something comes along finding some critical weakness that common to every agent in the monoculture, and utterly destroys the organism (in the case of the U.S. government, that might be Trump and Musk). DEI is strategically important because diverse systems are more robust, produce better ideas, and are better capable of surviving extreme shocks. All attributes people should want in their government.
Don’t say “I’m avoiding any biases” with one breath and “I don’t want the gov to spend a dollar on DEI and don’t try to convince me otherwise” with the other. Seems you don’t understand what “bias” means.
A disappointingly high number of people think "DEI" means "choosing unqualified women/PoC over qualified white men".
The reality is that DEI is a campaign to get people aware of implicit bias. It's been proven time and time again that resumes with a name like "Shaniqua" are more likely to be rejected over one with a "John" even when all the qualifications are the same.
But now, of course, with the current political climate, if you're a woman or PoC, you have to be a perfect worker. If you make any kind of mistake, you'll be accused of being a DEI hire.
I suspect we're gonna start seeing this XKCD linked more often over the next 4 years: https://xkcd.com/385/
One could argue that Senators from small states are DEI hires -- since the reason Wyoming and California both get 2 senators was to ensure that small states were not otherwise disadvantaged due to their population size. Correcting inherent disadvantages in the system is the whole point of "equity".
I’m no Trump supporter by any means but I think this kind of comment must alienate Trump supporters and contribute to polarization around the topic rather than reasoned exchange. If you really want to oppose Trump I think your purpose is better served with respectful speech. I realize the anger many people feel must make respectful speech a challenge. But I also think that the rise of polarization on social media is one of the reasons we have gotten to the place we are today.
Hahaha. The right says the same thing about the left. Being obstinate just increases polarization. What you are seeing happen right now is precisely because of the position you are taking. People have been pleading for decades to cut government spending. Trying to do it "the right way" hasn't worked. So now we are to "fuck it" if they won't work with us just tear it down and ask for forgiveness later.
This is not a reason to think that impassioned speech will have the impact you want. It may still be counter-productive. At any rate, those who are acting in good faith will recognize the well-reasoned arguments as such and perhaps start to wonder about the reasoning for their beliefs.
This is an incredibly sweeping generalization. There are a lot of people who voted for Trump because of their perception of his merit/qualifications/plans vs Harris. Pretending they are all brainwashed simpletons not only alienates them but also sets up for future failures. There's a reason these people voted for him. What is that reason? Treating is as some temporary hysteria is just going to keep getting people like Trump (or worse) elected over and over.
Strongly disagree. Respectful discourse requires reciprocity and from Trump himself down to his supporters, that's deliberately absent in MAGA. The whole project is about dominating and putting down other people - and has been since day one - and only appealing to comity as a defensive or deflection tactic. With such a long track record of bad faith, it's foolish to engage with other postures than suspicion.
Thank you for your reply. I understand wanting to approach these conversations with suspicion. But I also think that MAGA is a heterogeneous movement whose participants have a range of motivations. Respectful speech doesn’t mean ignoring bad actors but refusing to label everyone that way. Some conversations with Trump voters can still be constructive. Respectful speech allows those conversations to happen. Conversely disrespectful speech contributes to polarization, effectively helping domination ideology to spread. That is why I believe it is counterproductive.
Efficiency-wise it is impossible for DOGE to move the needle. That line of reasoning is a smokescreen for destroying government agencies. Maybe they need to be folded, so petition the people. They have the Congress and Senate.
Because the parts they don't like align with the parts DOGE doesn't like. They agree with dear leader and so all that woke BS is wasteful. This way they will pay lower taxes now because we got rid of all this "waste".
I have seen some people who are undeniably very smart get drawn into this line of thinking.
If saving money was the goal surely there's be discussion akin to "let's cut the military budget". That's how you'd know they're serious. But as it stands it is clearly just an ideological axe grinder.
(I should note I'm not American, just watching bemused from the sidelines)
The way we know they're not serious is they're already planning to cut taxes taxes on the rich and corporations. There's no savings to be had, they plan to spend everything they cut on themselves, and another $3T beyond that.
On top of the $8 trillion in debt needed for the last round of billionaire tax cuts and unaccountable PPP helicopter money Trump spent last time around.
> whatever they're doing is not going to improve anything, it's only destruction
This is why DOGE is staffed with young people.
It's easy to convince inexperienced people there's a 2-step plan:
Step 1. Destroy the old.
Step 2. Build the new.
Yet people with experience know that Step 2 requires orders of magnitude more effort and time than Step 1.
So, you have ignorant people breaking things, congratulating themselves on how quickly they're making progress... and then hit Step 2. And realize it's hard. And get bored. And so just, not.
Thus in the end, you're left with a broken pile of what came before, and nothing new to replace it.
"Build the new" doesn't even seem to be on the table at this point. There's no proposals to replace any of this. At least not public anyway, we know they are replacing all of this with for-profit scams.
Step 4. MAGA sees more government inefficiency and corruption than ever, but is reassured that it's just those terrible liberals sabotaging DOGE's good work and the NEXT round will really purge them
This meshes well with the established policies of the Republican party, which is to campaign on how badly the Government runs, promise to fix it, get into office, then break the Government more, then run back to your constituency and say "I can't believe how bad the Government is, get me back in there so I can keep working on it."
They’ve long abandoned the pretense of fixing anything, and have gotten a lot of buy in from their base to just torch stuff and leave it in ruins.
Unfortunately (for all of us, including for their base) this isn’t actually what people want or need, except the ideologues pushing it with a clear understanding of the expected outcomes. The base just infers that the ruin of these “inefficient” programs is a noble end in itself, because their supposed inefficiency is the problem with the programs themselves.
To be fair, conservative ideologues over-shrinking the US government is an improvement on conservative ideologues invading foreign countries, which happened last conservative-populist time.
Depends why you objected to the Iraq war, I think. From a moral perspective, green lighting the permanent ethnic cleansing of Gaza sure seems worse to me.
You are being too kind to those young people. One doesn't need experience of bricklaying to see that building a house takes a lot longer than bulldozing it.
Anyone doing this kind of work is not merely ignorant.
> One doesn't need experience of bricklaying to see that building a house takes a lot longer than bulldozing it.
The experience of bricklaying will help you think about the future times when you'll have to lay the bricks. Without that experience you may not ever consider those times, especially in a scenario which has you excited about what you are currently doing.
> Yet people with experience know that Step 2 requires orders of magnitude more effort and time than Step 1.
And also that the steps here should be reversed. Sure if you are tearing down a building you destroy before creating, but systems aren't buildings. If you are going to create a new system to run the cash registers for your business you don't tear out the old one and worry about building the new one later. First you have the replacement ready THEN remove the old one.
Yeah even on HN where I would expect above average observational and critical thinking skills, there are plenty of people who don’t see or refuse to see what’s going on. Pretty shocking really.
The media are absolutely craven, too, constantly normalizing insanity and pretending like even idiotic things are legitimate proposals that should instead be laughed out of the room. Like, maybe the Earth is flat? Let's HAVE THAT DEBATE!!
The people cheering them on are an anti-elitist bunch, the see themselves as the revolution for the people. But they don’t understand the finer details of all the things going on in a modern government-society system, and most importantly they lost faith in it.
The masse cheering this on have been told for decades that this is what they want. This is a response to Reagan's welfare queens, The $600 dollar hammer, and "activist judges". They think this is freedom. That this is good governance.
Wheel-warring with democrats, who previously carried out their own subtle power grabs, perhaps. I wouldn't really know, but I suppose "corruption" might mean "things that benefit the other side".
The way I’ve been saying it is the Right did such a good job of inventing phony boogeymen to get them elected (and then never do anything about said boogeymen) that they finally bred a generation that thinks their BS is real.
I'm going to assume good faith here. Yesterday they just asked congress for $4.3 trillion in deficit spending (debt increase) to fund tax cuts for the people who pay the lowest taxes already. The majority of government spending is on defense, which hasn't been auditable in decades. You're either wildly misinformed, or trolling.
Well clearly that debt increase has all happened since Jan 20th, when Trump was inaugurated, so you are right to blame the Republicans for that.
I hope DOGE will also look at the DoD, and do the same to them as it has to other departments. I hope they review all the money that has been sent to Ukraine, Israel and other nations and make sure it is all accounted for.
//edit// I wish they would also audit the H1B visa programme, but that is less likely to happen.
You are aware that Obamas presidency lasted twice as long? So DJT added almost as much debt in absolute terms (6.7T vs 7.7T) and just over half as much in relative terms (33% vs 64%) in half the time. That's why I compared to Biden. They are much easier to compare.
Debt is the wrong metric. You really should be using deficit.
Bush ran up a massive deficit from from '00 to '08, which Obama then inherited. The debt increasing under Obama is Bush's fault. The deficit LOWERED under Obama.
Based on your reply, you don't really understand much. That's okay. It's okay to be ignorant. It's an opportunity to learn and improve.
Congress asked for a debt increase because they plan to cut taxes. The debt hasn't been accrued yet, they plan to cut taxes and it will cost 4.3 trillion.
DOGE isn't trying to make the government better or more efficient. They want to cut programs and staff they're ideologically opposed to which is in theory all government, but in practice all government that doesn't enrich Trump or Musk.
What do you find objectionable about that statement? I don't consume any social media. This is the closest thing. I assume you must at least use Twitter or some other right wing propaganda outlet to think DOGE is about efficiency.
Most government spending is military. DOGE has targeted things like: Meals on Wheels, the Department of Education, National Institute of Health. The evidence I see suggests DOGE wants to implement Project 2025 with Elon's personal touch. An opportunity he paid for with his 270$ his campaign contribution.
They've been in power 6 weeks or so. I would imagine they are starting with the low hanging fruit such as USAID to prove the model, and then move to the big departments.
I'm not sure what monetary advantage you thing Elon is personally getting for ending operas about transgenderism in Guatemala (or whatever the example was).
But, this is what people voted for. It sucks that you don't like it, but that's democracy.
What's low hanging about USAID? That will have untold consequences such as the impact on Meals on Wheels, which was a USAID program. It seems like USAID was something Elon hates because of their work helping to end apartheid in his home country.
Elon's companies are great beneficiaries of government funding. Yesterday the federal government decided to acquire $400 million in armored Teslas. I have no idea what opera in Guatemala you're describing. That sounds like something you would learn on social media. Not very concrete.
Trump was in debt prior to the 2016 election. Had hundreds of millions in debt that he could never pay. Now he's rich and still scamming because ??? I think it's because he's been so criminal he has no choice.
I don't consider it democracy. Democracy has been co-opted through mass manipulation and mind control with social media. Donald Trump and now Elon Musk have found a way to defeat reality.
It's not that simple there are a lot of layers. The rejection of reality, family, and fighting against their own self interest. It's cult-like behavior and nearly incomprehensible for someone who sticks to reality. And that appears to be the desired outcome.
I'm not a partisan or member of any party. I am American and concerned for our country. The guy who won tried to other throw democracy and hasn't ever admit defeat. I strongly believe there's a good chance Trump or JD Vance will be the last American president.
I wish somebody would build a platform where people can actually put their money on these things like the Simon–Ehrlich wager [1]. I'd happily be putting down £100 with internet randos that (absent a nuclear war) presidential elections will happen in the usual fashion in 2028, or that Trump won't serve more than 2 terms.
Trump won't live that long. He's ancient and very unhealthy. It's unlikely he lives to 2028. They reject democracy when if they lose as shown in 2020. elections will occur. Will they be free and fair? No.
Yes, the standard deduction effectively doubled. That helped lower my federal income tax, and probably the taxes of anyone who didn't own multiple properties. I'm not a fan of Trump at all, but he did cut income taxes in his first term.
Yes, the standard deduction doubled, but that was offset by the reduction in the personal exceptions per dependent and dropping the individualized deductions, so for families with children (like us), unless they were higher income (which we are not), the tax cuts just about broke even. Maybe you're higher income or don't have kids.
Here's a summary of the impact[0]
> The average tax refund was $90 higher in 2018 than 2017, according to 2019 IRS data. (This statistic covers tax filers who used a version of Form 1040.) However, more detailed IRS data, released February 2020, shows that the refunds were not equally distributed across the population.
> Taxpayers with an AGI of less than $10,000 received 11.5% fewer refunds in 2018 than 2017, and the total value of their refunds was 17% less. (A 2018 analysis from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found single filers who earned minimum wage and had no children were least likely to save on their income taxes in 2018.) Across tax returns with an AGI between $1 and $50,000, taxpayers received 4.5% fewer refunds in 2018 and their refunds were worth 2.7% less.
> Taxpayers with AGI between $50,000 and $100,000 received 2.5% more refunds but those refunds were worth 1.8% less than in 2017. Those with an AGI of more than $200,000 received 45% more refunds in 2018 and the value of those refunds was 203.4% higher. Taxpayers with an AGI of $1 million or more received 216% more refunds than in 2017 and those refunds were worth 394.3% more.
I am always reminded by a critique of the Obama v Mitt Romney (2012) how if there is one thing the left and right are in full agreement on, it is to massively spend on the military. The left and the right can disagree on health, taxes, and the economy, but when it comes to the military they are in a full agreement.
> I'm going to assume good faith here. Yesterday they just asked congress for $4.3 trillion in deficit spending (debt increase) to fund tax cuts for the people who pay the lowest taxes already.
Completely - it's again propaganda vs reality. They keep showing exactly what they believe by their actions, but from.what I see people on the right keep believing their words/propaganda. There is such and echo chamber on the contermporary right it's incredible. No matter how much tangible, see-it-with-your-own-eyes evidence of something is presented, as long as there is a cover story given that denies it people seem to keep believing the story. And then afterwards when it becomes clear that reality was the case and not the story it all swaps over to rationalizations and the cycle begins again with a new topic.
I remember when it was "there is no way this candidate really will do the extreme things he claims. He's just saying them for effect." To "he doesn't really mean he'll work to be a dictator from day one when he says it" "he doesn't really mean vote for him and you'll never need to vote again".
Then when he starts doing it but gives a different cover story it: "Yah he's not really doing that, he's just cutting waste", to what will be "he's not really doing that he's just fixing unfair election procedures" and so on.
Then finally it will be again "yes he actually did those things but here's why its ok and it doesn't change my mind".
Extremely prominent SV backers in the VP side of the administration have said/implied multiple times if it's democracy or their world views, they choose instituting their world views - and somehow people are still making justifications saying "they don't really mean that, they won't really do that." Even with the clear evidence of what's happening now.
Why do people refuse to believe people when they are explicitly stating their intentions?
Sidestepping any specific political topic, this new view of "I'm against the other party's political touch point item that I'd rather throw out 250 years of democracy" is really wild to witness.
How can you repeat exactly what he said verbatim and then call him misinformed or trolling? I'm going to assume bad faith here and remind other readers that only a small portion of the country is productive and those people should be incentivized to work above all others, even if it means paying them.
This has been the status quo for a long time, rather than pay taxes and get it all back in controversial and bloated government contracts (which is what gives the appearance of government spending working) it's better to stay lean and just have them not pay, as this removes the middlemen.
Let a company do it's job and you get people crying about them raping the planet and exploiting workers
Stick a company with red tape, tax them a billion, give them (and yourself) a billion to complete a political project that goes nowhere and it's labeled a great success with people cheering in the street and using it as an example of socialist success for the next 60 years.
Lower tax bills for the rich. Proposed tax cuts would make the higher incomes less taxed and the not 1% incomes (or something around that 1%) more taxed
The problem is that “waste” is now “anything Trump and Musk don’t like”.
I’d be happy if they actually saved real money by cutting the military budget in half, but that’s not going to happen because the US is an industrial-military based economy.
How much did Trump’s 2017 tax cuts lower your tax bills? They didn’t lower mine. I benefited more from Biden’s tax policies (child tax credits) than Trump’s. Even taking it from the point of view of “fuck the gov, fuck climate change and our future, I want what’s mine, now” Trump did nothing for me in his 4 years on power and is doing nothing for me now - gutting a bunch of gov agencies doesn’t put money in my pocket.
"Stupid or Evil" has been my go-to logic for approaching far-right agenda items for a long time.
You're either so dumb you believe every piece of propaganda you are shown, and never notice the harm being done, or you are fully aware of what's happening and you're cheering on the chaos and suffering.
Commonly the propaganda or myth is a better story than the truth. It's nicer to be in a story about pedos conspiring in a fast food restaurant than being forced to work to pay for universal healthcare in Israel but not getting it yourself.
The toil and confusion and nastiness of everyday life under capitalism is not as fun and exciting as an imminent invasion at the southern border or the coming rise of the God Emperor or the final solution to groceries being expensive. Running a soup kitchen and washing clothes for the homeless just hasn't the same attraction as doing nothing by chasing the next Q-drop.
Especially when (my background, I gave that all up - maybe later than I should have) you already believe in spiritual beings daily fighting over your very soul, etc..
Instead of assuming the worst, you could at least try to imagine that the people who cheer it on can be thoughtful and intelligent people. It might even be you are the idiot, and not the other people.
It's incredibly hard to imagine anybody cheering this on to be thoughtful or intelligent. I see no critical thinking, intellectual rigour, or even any interest in real evidence or data. In what way is any of this intelligent or thoughtful? It's the complete opposite of both.
I'll leave the imagining to you. I'm using my actual senses to observe, and what I observe is that the people who cheer it on are bringing the national average IQ down. If you think anything about the way this is being done is OK, you have been utterly, irreversibly brainwashed. I voted conservative. I did not vote for this.
> They have to all be evil or completely misinformed. I assume most are ignorant and only a few are evil.
I thought that after 2016, I no longer do. It's the reverse. Maybe "evil" is a strong word but they are definitely what I would consider "bad people" based on their extreme selfishness. Most pretend to be ignorant, or "low information" in person but they follow news very closely.
Agreed. The 2016 were self-serving grifters that didn’t understand the mechanisms of government and were mostly bumbling around. The 2024 team are also self-serving grifters but have a much more coherent plan to shape things to their liking and much smarter people in play. Miller - arguably one of the smartest but also someone to whom the “evil” label perhaps best applies - plays a much bigger role this time around.
They were always fine with it until we found out on what that money was spent on. It turns out, that the most of it was a waste at best and grift at worse.
As for 'juniors', it's not like we've seen this sort of thing before such as those here happy to propel the opinions of so-called 'climate expert / activist' (Greta Thunberg) who didn't finish school and was used by the media as the face of 'saving the planet' and throwing unfounded claims of disaster by 2023, despite a significant lack of understanding of climate change and what she was talking about.
But then again, I have not heard back from Netflix's elite team for a postmortem of that live-streaming disaster which there were no juniors to blame this time despite being inexperienced in delivering live-streaming on their platform reliably.
That’s a straw man. Show the waste they are cutting. Musk didn’t even know which Mamas he was talking about when he found out”waste” at USAid and, when told, just shrugged and said it was the press’ job to correct those mistakes.
The odds of a junkie recognizing good or bad spending is very low.
Why do you guys keep going back to this? No one ever said that whatsoever. We have problems with the way this is being done. If you can't gather that and process it after reading this thread, you may have a problem with ADHD that you should see someone about. No one in this entire thread has said they want to waste taxpayer money.
> I don't quite understand the motive. I mean the motive of the masses who cheer this on. Is it just to own the libs?
You're surely being obtuse. I'm a progressive independent and even I understand why they are doing it, even if I'm not convinced this is the correct way to do it.
I think you're the one who's being obtuse. He said the movtive of the masses, not the Trump administration. The masses know nothing of the US national debt. They just hate liberals, feel that the liberals have had power over them for the last 4 years, and want their revenge. This is the pendulum swinging the other way.
No they're going to be insufferable for the next 4 years celebrating literally every action the current admin takes no matter what and blaming every problem on the last guy in office.
Having a front row seat to the fall of the biggest empire in history is certainly something.
Every other intelligence agency on the planet is about to scoop a ton of American data via cyber and basic HUMINT. It's free for all out there, I guess.
I've been wondering this myself, not that I necessarily believe it. If they _were_ acting at the behest of a foreign adversary (pick your reason: leverage over an individual because of a targeted campaign, leverage over all of them because of the SolarWinds/Salt Typhoon hack, cash, etc.), how different would their actions look?
Its not just this website. Since DOGE, China probably canceled all vacation days for their hackers, as its a free for all. Firing of most so many people including security departments and most likely the (good) femboy furry hackers.
Is the newly created user with name "bigballs" who downloads whole government databases a foreign TA or just DOGE? Who knows. Who cares, certainly not the Government.
The data and access gained currently by China, Russia, NK and SA will continue to be useful until and way after the next war.
Oh I have no doubt about that. You have people, who would not be able to obtain a security clearance in a 100 years if they tried, running around, accessing government databases and taking "backups" offsite. Maybe law enforcement/Pentagon/intelligence data is not under threat at the moment, but in a couple of years who knows. Meanwhile people get fired, proper access protocols and communications continue to breakdown, and you get chaos. And every spy agency loves chaos.
I'm honestly just hoping "security by obscurity" is helping things for the moment. There's no way a 20 year old is figuring out the data structures of an entire department and getting all the data in a single day.
Nothing they have done or will do is supposed to make America better, it's designed to destabilize the country. They want America to fail so that they can rule over the ashes.
That's not why Assange spent a decade hiding in an embassy, which also wasn't house arrest. Before he got kicked out, he could have left any time he wanted — it was the police outside who weren't allowed in.
He spent a decade hiding in an embassy to avoid extradition to Sweden for unrelated crimes, ostensably for fear of what ended up happening in the UK where he was apparently happy to stay while insisting Sweden wasn't safe.
> and the people in prison can leave anytime they want - it is just prison guards outside who would shoot them.
By that standard, given what the guards would do, you would need to also claim that "prison is a death sentence".
He wasn't under house arrest — he went there against the desires of the police force outside who stationed officers there to perform an arrest for skipping bail.
Calling this "house arrest" is akin to calling voluntarily serving on a submarine "drowning" or working in the antarctic "hypothermia": he chose to go there, and to keep staying there. More than that, he chose to commit a new and easy to prove crime by going there.
His argument against going to Sweden, *after having been arrested for the Swedish extradition hearing in the UK*, was a fear of a thing the UK ended up doing, and which it should have been obvious the UK would do willingly whenever the US asked for it. The US has no need to make things more complicated by asking for Swedish involvement given how friendly the UK government is.
The UK is infamous for doing whatever the US tells it to, so if you're afraid of US prosecutorial/extradition overreach, the UK is one of many countries where you don't want to be. Sweden, not so much.
If the US wanted him back in 2010, they could have had him directly from the UK with full support of the UK government, without any of the convoluted extra steps in this conspiracy theory that makes the Swedish judicial system into patsies.
> And what happened to those crimes in Sweden once he resolved his US issues?
The statute of limitations happened. Bits were already timing out even before he overstayed his welcome by Ecuador.
Nevertheless the prosecutors did try to reopen that prosecution and to get the UK to extradite to Sweden first over the US, only to be told no by the judge because the evidence was too old to secure a conviction.
That pre-existing cancellation was why the British didn't feel the need to bother telling Sweden when his asylum was cancelled and he was arrested, much to the annoyance of the Swedish prosecutors: https://www.courthousenews.com/%EF%BB%BFsweden-tells-uk-it-t...
And only after all that had already happened, did the US issues get fully resolved.
>he went there against the desires of the police force outside
>is akin to calling voluntarily serving on a submarine
> he chose to go there, and to keep staying there.
it isn't called "voluntary"/"choosing" if the alternative to the "voluntarily"/"choosing" is a police force desire of putting you into Gitmo (or SuperMax if you're lucky) for life or even capital punishment to politically prosecute you. (Assange's actions weren't criminal at the jurisdiction where he performed his actions. US prosecution of him was pure political and a pure projection of US force beyond US jurisdiction. Crowds of people in US collect classified info from other countries, and US doesn't extradite those people into those other countries. Because jurisdiction matters for determining whether actions constitute a crime. I for example say a a lot of things which are crime in Russia - like calling the Ukraine war a war - which aren't crime in US. Should i be extradited to Russia and face the "legal process" there? And if i caught in a Russia friendly country and hide from extradition in a UK or US embassy it wouldn't be a voluntary choosing to visit the embassy, it would be a "voluntary choice" to stay in the embassy instead of getting treason conviction and 20 years in GULAG - such "voluntarily chosen" stay at the embassy is a de-facto house arrest.)
>The statute of limitations happened.
No. You're again inventing things. Like with your invented definition of the "voluntary choosing" above.
No, he did a most of a decade hiding out in an diplomatic enclave to avoid legal process, and three years in jail fighting extradition; he spent no time under house arrest.
> Is the newly created user with name "bigballs" who downloads whole government databases a foreign TA or just DOGE? Who knows. Who cares, certainly not the Government.
Someone willing to work without morals for money can just be bought by the next highest bidder. Anything they touch should be treated as compromised.
If they'd only been downloading data that would be bad enough, but they've been modifying code as well, code that they don't understand. It's the biggest security disaster in recent history (perhaps Kim Philby giving everything to the Russians was worse) and entirely self-inflicted.
>> Since DOGE, China probably canceled all vacation days for their hackers, as its a free for all.
> Is there a source for the vacation days thing?
The "vacation days" line seems to be a jokingly hyperbolic prediction. China might have directed more resources (including hackers) toward collecting the data exposed by DOGE and Elon Musk's actions (and might try to widen the crack), but is unlikely to have literally cancelled all vacation days for said hackers.
They don't even need to: they have direct access via their agents. Such as the new intelligence chief and a couple of the DOGE boys who've already been caught directly selling NDA'd information.
Sorry if this comes across the wrong way; I'm just trying to stay in the loop: Is that referring to the DOGE boys who were caught between months and years ago, or is there a confirmed leak of the new information?
I think the good thing is that the DOGE team seem extremely humble and willing to learn from their mistakes, rather than pass the blame in ignorance. Just like their leader!
Important to clarify that USDS (DOGE) does not have access to any military systems or intelligence systems. They only have the current access due to the historic process of the USDS.
They certainly have access to classified intelligence-related information, since they published it (regarding NRO), whether or not they have access to intelligence systems.
I think you are missing the entire point of this. It's not that it had sensitive data or anything of importance. It is that a .gov domain under the command of the self proclaimed Mr. Efficiency and smartest person of Earth about servers and car manufacturing was wide open for script kiddies to deface and access data from. It is a show of hypocrisy and how cutting corners like Dr. Emerald Mine Child here wants will shape the rest of this administration.
> Every other intelligence agency on the planet is about to scoop a ton of American data via cyber and basic HUMINT
I was replying to what was written. I read this as implying that sensitive (or any) data was available.
> and access data from
Again, is there any evidence that any data was accessible, beyond what is visible on the webpage? If you read the article, the flaw was that anything could be pushed. Could you link a source that says extra data was accessible? Your claim is not made in the above article, and I can't find anything mentioning data access, with a quick search.
There’s zero evidence of either of it, just because they got an A record with a .gov at the DNS doesn’t mean this tiny site had any connection back to larger data, and based on my own analysis of how hard every furry hacker on the planet is hitting this, if there was, it would be leaked to the moon already and not speculated on.
Pretty gross to think of these people doing code reviews for projects they have no familiarity with - along with of course this bafflingly incompetent tweet: https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1889062581848944961#m Donald Trump said DOGE were "super-geniuses," and according to his standards they probably are.
(The way Trump's election directly led to "retard" being a common pejorative again hasn't been discussed enough. Just awful.)
Games are written for Windows, therefore webapps should be written with "Microsoft C++" (presumably meaning Visual C++, though I suppose there's an outside chance that he means "Microsoft C/C++", from the early 90s).
Reading that set of quotes, it really is incredible how little Musk knows about even extremely basic things. He doesn't understand there are different problem spaces in tech, and that different problem spaces require completely different approaches and skill sets. To him, something like World of Warcraft is very impressive, so if you build Paypal on the same technology it will be impressive too. Like, honestly it's shocking that this guy is allowed near anything that has a button.
Obviously there are many problems in the web world that are just as hard as problems in the game world. Some of them are even the same problems.
But having done both, making any game beyond the absolute most basic game in Unity is harder than what 95% of web developers do day to day.
I’m currently in web dev because it pays so much better, but game dev really is more technically challenging than most web dev.
It’s hard to compare average skill levels between the 2 because so many people are drawn to games because they love them and to the web because of the pay. But if I had to guess, I’d put my money on there being a significantly higher floor for game dev.
Sure, I also think game dev is more challenging than frontend webdev (and definitely more challenging than BUA MVC CRUD-fests on the backend), but IMHO any safety-critical[0] shit is simply where things start to get serious, though maybe it gets less challenging because most of it is paperwork, and if it works you are pretty sure it keeps working. All of this was also true of government, until quite recently.
[0] Which Musk maybe have heard of given he has a bit of experience lurking around automotive tech.
It is wrong to compare games and websites. What you should really compare is browser engines and game engines, and the former obviously requires much more effort and expertise to develop, so it is definitely not wrong to say that game developers (game engine developers) are better developers than web developers (browser engine developers).
I do think that game companies have a higher percentage of top-tier programmers. This is both due to pedigree and size of the field.
There are some incredible programmers in both big tech and game dev, but big tech has vastly more developers with less pressure to have top-tier talent.
Median developer at both probably represents the same skill because of normal distributions.
I agree, but the core reason for this has nothing to do with either of the points you mention. There are few other sub-cultures that come anywhere close to the (avg.) level of passion and narrow focus than game dev. And you absolutely need it, because it is very complex and usually badly paid.
Having never read that - it reads incredibly similar to how Trump talks but with better sentence structure. It all sounds believable, but it’s really useless platitudes.
It's all very bullshit-ese, but it's worth pointing out that the majority of Google's important backend services are written in C++ (on Linux though). And not just stuff written in that same era, but all the way up to about 5-10 years ago.
Granted: Google was not so dumb to imagine deploying on NT / IIS. And their reasons for doing C++ were nothing like what Musk is blathering about here.
The biggest issue here isn't even about the technology. It's Musk as management stepping outside of his domain trying to tell the professionals working under him exactly what to do... because he's an egomaniac narcissist.
1,253 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 512 ms ] threadYou want to criticize a troll? Be my guest. Criticize away. (Or just downvote and flag.) But if you criticize, do better than false accusation. (There's a fine real accusation to make, namely "you're being a troll"; you don't have to make false accusations.)
Be better than the trolls. Don't stoop to their level.
Now, I agree that in febrile political environments it's better not to rely on sarcasm and satire for communication because it imposes extra cognitive overhead and is subject to misinterpretation, but at the same time 'found the [negative stereotype]' is such a common joke format in American popular culture that it would be foolish to take it literally. It's like objecting to a 'knock knock' joke by complaining that the person is lying about being on the other side of a door.
And putting trolls and their critics on the same level is fundamentally foolish, and a much worse example of feeding trolls. It means attacking the critics for paying the trolls back in their own coin, which inevitably leads to a ratchet effect in favor of the trolls. There's good evidence that being rude to trolls is the most effective way for an online community to maintain itself: https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.03697
Hope they used good proxies, because this seems like a felony.
> One of the sources told 404 Media that they were able to push updates to a database of government employment information after studying the website’s architecture and finding the database’s API endpoints.
Oof, not something to put in your article.
All you had to do was actually read the article; it’s the very next paragraph from the one I quoted.
Huh, what would be the goal of connecting this database to an API on or near doge.gov? Surely it's not the "actual"/"source of truth" database, more likely a copy: I can imagine the geniuses thought ""let's mirror everything online on a single system so it's easier for all of us to access it and do queries like "WHERE gender NOT IN ('m', 'f') OR race NOT IN ('white')" and get results from all the databases we know of."". (I assume there is no single federal employee database?)
And since the truth is whatever they say nowadays, maybe it IS the "source of truth" database.
Yawn.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joke
Yawn indeed.
This logic only holds if they’d have knowledge about websites, as opposed to other topics.
There’s many SDEs with long careers who would make security mistakes on websites, yet nonetheless are tech experts.
Would like to see a source on this.
Governments are similar to large enterprises whereby every bit of code going into Production requires a full security, architecture and site reliability review.
There is no doubt bugs in bespoke web applications but for your typical website.
https://xkcd.com/932/
What data are you basing this on? Federal websites have an approval process which includes a security review so I’d expect some familiarity with that in your response.
Citation?
[0]: https://archive.md/XzvTY
[1]: https://archive.md/cMeco
The times are mature to rediscover where the word hacker came from. It never rhymed with billionaire but it seems this website tried hard to change that narrative.
Better people learn about their lack of experience fro a hacked doge site than a hacked paxment system. The ones who will hack that won't be as friendly.
How about blaming the people who are actually acting like Nazis, and also the actual self described Nazis who are supporting them and cheering them on and recruiting off of Musk platforming and promoting them, of emptying the word of all meaning, among other much worse things.
The Nazis are pretty successful to have convinced you to debase yourself by sticking up for them and criticizing anti-fascists for simply calling a spade a spade.
So who do you consider worse: the actual Nazis, or people who you believe are emptying the word Nazi of all meaning (boo hoo hoo)? Because you're siding with and defending the actual Nazis from being called what they are. Is there a word for what that makes you?
If not yet, then at what point exactly would allow anyone to exercise their own free speech by calling Musk, a self described "free speech absolutist", transphobic? What more would he have to do, than to actually publicly attack and verbally abuse and humiliate and deadname and misgender and lie about his own child?
How about policing the actual Nazis and bigots and transphobes instead of the people like his daughter who rightfully call him what he obviously is by his very own words and deeds?
Elon Musk’s Transgender Daughter Says He Was ‘Cruel’ and ‘Uncaring’:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/26/business/media/elon-musk-...
Elon Musk's Daughter Attacks Trump's Order, Addresses 'Nazi Salute':
https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-daughter-attacks-trump-ex...
Elon Musk's trans daughter, Vivian Wilson, calls out his Nazi salute: 'Call a spade a spade':
https://www.yahoo.com/news/elon-musks-trans-daughter-vivian-...
Elon Musk’s Trans Daughter Vivian Jenna Wilson Calls Him a “Grubby Little Control Freak”:
https://www.them.us/story/vivian-jenna-wilson-elon-musk-grub...
Elon Musk’s transgender daughter, in first interview, says he berated her for being queer as a child:
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/elon-musk-transgender...
If that's the case, you have already lost anyway. Because if that's true you have so many nazis in the US now that the historical Nazis are a rounding error. Do you truly believe that?
> How about policing the actual Nazis and bigots and transphobes instead of the people like his daughter who rightfully call him what he obviously is by his very own words and deeds?
You can't police shit if you are the minority. That's absurd. You can't become the majority by being an ass to everyone on the fence. That's what the left has been doing and driving everyone away.
The left has to take responsibility for the failed tactic of going around screaming at people for wearing sombreros or whatever. After you do that enough, everyone who has been screamed at will want to vote for anyone who are against that crap. And yea, that was Trump.
Or maybe I'm wrong and you really do have 77,302,580 nazis in the US right now. I don't buy that. I have a much higher opinion of the American people.
You're just speaking for yourself, trying to justify your own bigoted beliefs, with the old "you forced me to become a Nazi/racist/transphobe to get revenge on you because you hurt my feelings" defense, not because you take any personal responsibility for what you believe, what you say, who you vote for, whose water you carry, or whose boots you lick.
I didn't force you to defend Elon Musk or claim it's not fair for me or even his own daughter to call him a transphobe. That's all on you. You decided to do that, not me. Before you defend his Nazi salute, post a photo of yourself doing the exact same thing, and put it in a picture frame on your desk at work.
So answer the question instead of dodging it: Exactly WHAT would Elon Musk have to do, that he hasn't already done to his own daughter, that crosses the line and justifies finally calling him a transphobe?
If only I'd stop calling Elon Musk a transphobe, he'd finally start treating his own daughter like a human being who has a right to exist and self autonomy and love and respect from her parents, huh?
You have cause and effect and the direction of time reversed if you believe it's all everyone else's fault that people unfairly call Elon Musk a transphobe, which forced him to act the way he does towards his own daughter.
Or is it your position that nobody should call anyone else transphobic or racist or Nazi, no matter how obviously true it is?
Nazis aren't going to stop Nazing and transphobes aren't going to stop abusing their own children, if only you just respect them and stop calling them names.
Nope. I would have voted against Trump if I had voting rights in the US. Again, you're interpreting my statement of "we shouldn't lie about our enemies" as me supporting those enemies.
Don't you see how absurd that is?
If you wait for unassailable academic applicability, when you finally deploy it your prison guards won't care.
A quick sampling off the top of my head: The First Consigliere throws double Nazi salutes on national TV and smirks in ambiguity when questioned whether he intended it, the President defends a Nazi march as "very fine people", violent private groups serving their political ends have been placed above any (federal) prosecution, and the administration is actively boasting that they will remove undesirables by creating the largest deportation in the entire history of the nation using the same laws abused for the WWII Japanese internment camps.
The label may be rude, but it's not unreasonable... and the more reasonable it is, the better it is to be rude!
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-very-fine-people/
You aren't having a debate, its a mental street fight, and you gain respect by proving you know how they think and meeting them there.
Its why I say the dems are always wrong. I know that the only converastion is from using their own facts and then their own values.
The dems are always wrong, they do corruption badly. Trump pardoned 1600 people, and made 2 billion or something from 2 meme coins right before he was inagurated.
What do the dems have to show for it? 6 pardons?
So the Repubs are up 1594 pardons and billions in meme coins?
Did Trump do anything illegal? no! He exercised his powers. See! the dems can't even be corrupt or serve their own self interests effectively.
https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJA_jUddXvY7v0VkYRbANnT...
I innately want to believe that a comprehensive refutation grounded and logic and citations will win the day, but that doesn't seem to be how it plays out.
If you don't believe in facts and truth, you are just as big of a problem as Trump is.
More like... Truth is important to convey, lies are not permitted, but meticulous and detailed truth simply doesn't work against lies with better marketing.
You shouldn't surround your truth with a bodyguard of lies, but just throwing on more Truth as a raw ingredient doesn't advance the cause of people actually adopting Truth.
I like to say that the US used to have "the marketplace of ideas" as a goal, but has now become "the cesspool of ideas", which isn't a good thing.
I don't know what the solution to that is, but I don't think lying is going to get us out of it.
I don’t believe in giving up on that ideal, but I think it’s a fiction in the sense that actually achieving any semblance of a “free marketplace of ideas” is a vastly complex problem we have no capacity to solve right now. Humans aren’t a collection of simple, isolated units, we’re a vast colonial fungus. We struggle to understand individual biological organisms, but we assume that all of humanity talking to itself will be a system transparent to study, that it operates on simple principles. Ask a skilled marketer if he or she believes in the free marketplace of ideas.
Solving the problem would involve building a completely different social system from the ground up. Since we can’t do that, and nobody knows how to start, what I’m suggesting is that people try to study the communication networks as they are now and the memetics people are responsive to and build, carefully and cleverly, narratives which will actually have the practical consequence of bettering people’s lives, and that they use the truth to figure out how to do that and what that narrative should be. It’s not really lies or the truth, I’m calling for a pragmatic attempt to use the extremely flawed communication channels at our disposal to do the best we can.
What’s that mean? In how cool and fun they are? In their capacity to win elections?
Also, neo-nazis. Not nazis. Nazis were a very real political group. Some are even still alive. None of these teenagers were even born. Their PARENTS weren't even born.
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/06/nx-s1-5289337/elon-musk-doge-...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c93q625y04wo
Tell me you really want your personal data in the hands of those people.
But it's definitely malice from Musk, Trump and the rest of the oligarchs. They have for a long time been clear that their plan is to tear down everything and rebuild around themselves and everyone else is a pawn to be used to their benefit. These people are purely transactional, they don't believe in societal goods, just what benefits them must be best for everyone.
The US government can prop up the stock market for a very long time. Anyone who purchased Puts early on during COVID times found themselves on the opposite side of a suddenly generous Fed that poured hitherto unseen amounts of liquidity directly into the markets. The chickens only came to roost in the next administration, but ai suspect they could have kept at it for 10+ years and still kept inflation under 12-15%
> Trump-scandals kinda killed Hanlon's Razor for me: A miasma inseparably blurring the lines between malice and incompetence, lies and ignorance, culpability and insanity, condensing into a greasy alloy which is definitely some amount of evil yet not worth anybody's time to separate and assay.
I refuse to feed the algorithm more pathological input for another denial-of-service attack. For anything from that crowd of repeat-offenders, I declare the answer to be both. If they want to assert something was just incompetence or just malice, the onus is on them to provide the argument either way.
You should be worried because the same guys who are resonsible for this web site are now in charge of much more vital systems and there are much bigger threats who just wait do get important data.
Mao killed tens of million of his own people because of his misconceptions about farming, economics, and ecology.
Hitler killed millions because of his misconceptions about jews.
9/11 was executed becuase of a small group that were very confused about the basic facts of reality ("god").
There is only delusion + power + conviction. There is no other evil.
I think the missing ingredient is simply not caring about the outcome. It could be because they don't have empathy (sociopaths), or that the society has trained them into normalising obedience to the cause (facsism / communism) or inhumanized their targets (consentration camps).
Acts can certainly be described as "evil", but I don't agree that "evil" is some type of force that affects people.
To go back to my original point, the simplistic equation falls apart if you spend a second looking for counter examples.
Sikhs give free food to any who asks, without expecting anything in return. They are deluded (they do to it please god), and need power and conviction to do so.
I was thinking of the human consequences. In my language they are almost synonyms.
They of course care about the outcome, but not the effect it has on the target group
It's strange how one can normalize cruelty. Just think of how prison rapes are joked about in media and movies, as if it is an accepted consequence of committing a crime. It is a cruel and evil act that many choose to simply ignore because it is so common
If you believe this, your beliefs are out of step with essentially every Western justice system, which hold murder to be a worse crime than manslaughter. The difference between them is solely the intention.
By "conviction", I understood them to mean a kind of blindness -- an unshakeable belief that what you are doing is right, regardless of what others may believe. That kind of conviction is orthogonal to intention to harm another person. I took the entire thrust of their argument to be that intention to harm another person is neither necessary nor morally important for evil. But that is not how most of the West sees it (as evidenced by the distinction between murder and manslaughter that I pointed out).
If, when they wrote "conviction", they in fact meant "intention to harm another person", then I agree with them. But in that case I'm not sure why they posted their comment at all, since that (namely, the thesis that intention to harm is morally important when actions cause harm) is already the accepted norm, at least in the West.
(I still think it's a bad example even presented like this, and I disagree with GP, but your example seemed wrong)
Manslaughter is when you kill someone without conviction and/or delusion. You can hit someone without the conviction that you need to kill them and they fall really badly and die.
Murder. You can hit someone in self defense where you have no conviction that the person must be killed (because for example they say you had sex with their wife, but you in fact know you didn't, it's a misunderstanding), and you don't have any delusion (you know the attacker is delusional in fact). And then you defend yourself and he dies because he hit his head badly on the way down.
Because that is the only way I can interpret your examples so that they correspond with the legal distinction, which is based on intent to harm and TTBOMK never mentions "conviction". If so, we're in full agreement, since that is already the accepted Western norm and my original comment was based on a misunderstanding, and unnecessary.
But also if so: I'm puzzled why you chose to swap the natural and original word "intent" for a different word ("conviction") that is easily misinterpreted as a quality orthogonal to intention to harm, and about which an interesting but fundamentally wrong argument is periodically made (namely, that it, plus power are sufficient for evil, without any need for intent). I'm also puzzled why you made the initial comment I replied to at all, since it's then a defence of the absolutely uncontroversial status quo. It's like posting that you believe in gravity.
No, I mean "the probability function you ascribe to your beliefs". A person who believes something very weakly doesn't put on a suicide vest to blow up civilians in order to further this belief. A person with a strong belief might.
They also were under the delusion that the US was a democracy, and hence the general population could be held responsible for the actions of its leaders. Understandable if they had mainly been exposed to US/Occidental state propaganda.
Today I don't think anyone would be inclined to hold such a belief.
Or maybe the Gelatin art crew?
Utopists who run into accumulating problems, closing resource windows and simple limitations of humans (tribal creatures) and the meta-machinery they built, are bound to just run around with their pants on fire.
I don't remember the quote, but something about them only learning from catastrophe.
Worse. 1.1 million people died in a deadly plague and there's no national mourning, just straight back to the culture war and polarization.
We're not united because they've goaded us into to fighting each other over two topics that really aren't, and there's only two teams to pick from. One was bad, and the other one worse.
Can you blame them? They've been toiling hard for decades while getting poorer and poorer, while the privileged class has lived lives of wealth and comfort from milking these government institutions. Did they care about the vast majority being comfortable or not?
The repubs lost their battles, and decided they wanted to win at all costs. They had people show up to vote, vote in a bloc, volunteer for lower level positions, join multiple different organizations and basically organized them to dismantle the country.
If people can be driven to do that, then its not much to assume that at least a few more people could have done the same thing.
This is, by every metric, completely wrong. We have never been wealthier.
I can't really understand that as it seems obvious to me that they're just destroying parts of the government they don't like. And while there is certainly room for improvement in many areas, whatever they're doing is not going to improve anything, it's only destruction.
There's a reason the federal budget is several inches of very thin paper. The budget spells out how much money gets spent for various purposes, programs, projects, etc. Of course they don't specify the kind of paperclips the FAA buys. But they will approve or modify the FAA's budget plan which includes $X for office supplies, $Y for an upgrade to the FAA's network equipment in a branch office, $Z for upgrading some nav beacons, and so on.
The executive branch can't defund or "stop spending money on" anything. Nixon decided he just wouldn't spend money on programs he didn't like, and congress very rapidly passed a law that said that the president couldn't do it, because the "power of the purse" rests solely with congress.
It certainly can't stop issuing payments for existing obligations, and it especially can't take money back, which M did a day or two ago to NYC because he read a tweet that said NYC was spending money housing migrants in "luxury hotels", which shockingly turned out to be nonsense...
That's why all of this DOGE crap is such theatrical nonsense. Congress, representing their state's interests and the interests of those who live in their district, via two separate branches, approves all the budgets.
No matter what T and M say, no federal agency can just willy-nilly decide to spend money it's allocated by congress on other stuff.
That's all great in theory: in actual reality those laws are just words on paper, Congress has no interest in asserting its authority, and enforcement rests with the executive.
Companies can declare bankruptcy and fold their hand: governments, notsomuch.
The goal should be messaging to everybody else. Especially those who might like the outcomes of Trump's crimes but would prefer not to have a president that just smashes through the law to get there. A way to help achieve this is to repeat, over and over and over, that Trump's actions are violating shitloads of laws.
Jack Welch is the reason corporate America is a shit show, and GE is a joke.
So...Trump is breaking the law and getting away with it. What else is new?
Yes
He has immunity
BUT... even if the executive is under legal theory constitutionally unitary, it isn’t actually unitary, it consists of individual people who act based on their own perception of legitimacy, and when the President abandons the principle of government of law and not arbitrary individual will in dealing with the courts, well, that also threatens the theoretical infrastructure that binds the people carrying guns in various executive departments to his authority, and we can very quickly end up in one of those highly unpredictable periods of history that produces lots of really neat stories to read about afterwards but is somewhat less pleasant to live through.
Republicans who work on bipartisan platforms are punished and primaried.
They were even able to account for all their crayons! PT belts on the other hand...
Or unintended 2nd order effects.
Who knows if the final outcome will be an improvement but it resembles fixing a TV by dropping it from a height and hoping.
Where did you get this from in their comment?
Where did this come up?
* They cut things blindly, eg: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43046466
It's a clown show.
I think you can get the answer from what they post. Cutting $400M in external contracts for a $10B agencies isn’t cutting major functions of the agency.
To have the argument anyways, I looked back through their posts back to jan 20, and there’s really no information about most of the cuts. I presume that the few things they highlight, eg equity programs or whatever, are the worse of the worst that they could find, cause isn’t that what they’d show us? They could be cutting basically anything behind the scenes, and they themselves may not have a good idea what they’re cutting. As of jan 31st, they claimed to have cut 1-1.2 billion dollars overall. I assume that number is much higher now. Why would I trust that, while fumbling around looking at payment descriptions, one of Musk’s techbro zoomers didn’t hamper or cripple an important function of one of these departments? Where can I find the in-depth information on every cut?
> but you see a few building leases sprinkled it.
You think agencies cannot lease buildings? And that it's a waste and fraud?
> I haven’t seen anything so far that says “Agency will no longer do X”, but happy to be be corrected.
They have literally unilaterally shut down several government agencies with bogus claims.
That's $0.70 per taxpayer (assuming 166M US taxpayers).
Was it worth it?
Now do that 10,000 times and tell me what the total is per tax payer (noting that 40% of taxpayers don’t pay taxes).
I get $14,000 per tax payer, what do you get?
Can you put together an adult argument?
Perhaps because you yourself have none?
You don’t need to write “the agency will no longer do X” you just need to fire the people doing X. Case in point the EPA and CFPB (which catch fraud among companies but were not worried about that anymore are we)
They're right now firing all probationary employees at multiple agencies. That is entirely indiscriminate, and almost certainly disruptive to the mission of those agencies.
The actions at NIH and NSF will likely kill a large portion of the scientific research they used to fund. So unless you consider science in general be a waste I think these broad cuts clearly don't target actual waste and abuse.
Compared to what? The Biden administration? Who never even held a press conference for months?
And what evidence? Did you want a downloadable pdf of justification for each cut?
The partisan nature of the criticism is obvious - Trump and Musk are bad, so nothing they do can be good. Produce evidence? Not good enough!
If you don't think foreign aid is important for the continued safety of the US then you don't understand soft power and have no business in modern politics.
Sadly the people in charge fit into this category, except for the ones like Marco Rubio who actually do understand this but have no spine and are willing to overlook this stupidity for a seat at the table.
You do know the polio vaccine program in Pakistan where DNA analysis to find Bin Laden was done through USAID? The one that set vaccination back decades?
And now you’re defending it. Amazing.
There aren’t any examples so far of stuff that is clearly waste and abuse.
I thought doge was about efficiency, why is he spending resources on the culture war?
The only example of waste are the 150 yr old SA recipients. Sure that happens (we’ve been hearing about “welfare queens” for decades) but certainly not something new the DOGE “uncovered “.
And why are we entrusting a bunch of young engineers to identify fraud? They might be qualified to refactor and streamline computer systems but are certainly not qualified to determine what is “legitimate “ spending and what is not.
The intent of my comment was not to claim that what Musk and co. are doing is good, or that it's bad. It was to point out precisely why the claims in the post I replied to will not convince anyone who is not already convinced.
If the poster I replied to just wanted to vent, fine. But if they wanted to persuade someone on the fence, they have provided nothing towards that.
Nothing, that is, besides the standard appeal to emotion that infests almost all such arguments (on both sides) and is effective on human brains for all the wrong reasons.
https://apnews.com/article/house-republicans-budget-blueprin...
Nothing is legitimate about this. Literally everything they are doing is both illegal and completely unconstitutional. They have thrown out the entire rule of law and it is a pure flex of power, a shock-and-awe meltdown that they hope to execute faster than the normal processes can react. They absolutely intend to abolish resistance and they know they can suffer no consequences for it.
Dark times ahead. We're aren't arguing government efficiency or saving money, they are smashing it all.
Among many other reasons:
Subsidizing demand increases prices. When you subsidize university education, you increase the price of it. The metoric rise in inflation-adjusted cost of university education since the 70's or so is strong evidence of this.
If someone wants to major in feminist dance therapy, that should be on their own dime. Using my tax money to fund it is immoral.
>Why not also defund high school and middle school as well? After all, by the end of the 5th grade you should be able to read, write, and do simple arithmetic. Anything beyond that you can fund yourself, right?
I'm actually not entirely unsympathetic to drastically cutting down how much mandatory education we have for kids. There is very little (if any) correlation between the funding amount and actual results. See Abbott districts in Bew Jersey for a stark example of this.
And if they want to major in economics, chemistry, physics, engineering?
I don't necessarily disagree with what you're saying wholesale, but "I don't like this tiny corner so throw the whole thing in the trash" is immature, foolish, and self-destructive.
Those at least serve a practical purpose to society as a whole, but even then I still would question taking other people's money by force to fund it.
If you dig deep enough, subjective experience is what we’re often trying to improve. Both science and art contribute to that.
Why is that immoral?
"taking other people's money by threat of lethal force" in the form of taxes is seen as necessary for running society by most people, not a moral failing.
And we are not talking about "party vacations" we are talking about education. Maybe this is a commentary on the state of higher education today, but there are plenty of institutions that offer a quality educational experience here; America has the #1 university system in the world.
"a degree in something useless"
Who determines what is useless? You? Are arts degrees for instance useless? Artists don't think so. They are not typically profitable but that's a different conversation, your qualification was "useless". What makes a degree useless, who determines that, and how?
And even if we just assume a topic useless, how is giving people scholarships to study it immoral?
Presumably the people actually footing the bill
If someone is footing the bill, does that not imply a certain amount of "we don't think this is useless"?
That's a vanishingly small list
The government is doing that, not the dancer. If you consider general taxation immoral, fair enough, but then you're going to have to explain how a country can function without it.
> to pursue a 4 year party vacation
Boy, have I got bad news for you about a lot of students on what you'd consider more worthwhile courses.
> getting a degree in something [THAT I, PERSONALLY, CONSIDER] useless
Fixed that for you.
Subsidizing also increases creates more utilization. You seem to be of the mind that more education is a bad thing. I’m not sure we all agree.
Yes, you lose some. But not all. And that's how you start.
One manager asked, “What if we train them and they leave!?”
To which a more senior manager quipped, “What if we don’t train them and they stay?”
As far as I'm concerned, "medical debt" is effectively extortion.
If I have some sort of major medical issue, such as cancer, it's absolutely fucked that my choices are to either die or to rack up an extreme amount of medical debt that I might not ever recover from. In either case, my life is ruined.
Y'all have the delulu American exceptionalism brain. People will leave if they don't like living here. A loan eill not stop them.
The amount of money and effort required to extradite a person far outweighs the average student loan. Not only that, it is not really a "crime" to not pay your debts. It is a civil violation. The court can seize your property, in limits. You can't seize someones house in some states, and some don't even allow you to seize cars. Even if they can, any given student loan holder may not have either.
"But Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former Republican director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), said the agencies Musk and Trump have targeted to date account for a tiny fraction of the overall federal budget ...
They are not going to go into agencies that are doing things they like. They are going into agencies they disagree with," Holtz-Eakin, who has participated in past tax and spending negotiations in Congress, told Reuters.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/musk-cuts-based-more-politi...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/02/13/upshot/nih-tr...
Trump and Musk are poised to destroy science research in America. Actual scientists are all scrambling to save their jobs and research.
Also, plastic straws don't harm the environment. Oooh, science!
Every time the administration changes, the heads of all the departments change, and the incoming people are typically pretty ignorant of what the department does. How would a corporation work if every 4 years you rotated the C-suite and 2 levels down, with people from a completely different business sector?
Meanwhile, funding is shifted even more often. Or is just outright cut once every few years.
Meanwhile, every action they take is an official government action. Which means it is LEGALLY REQUIRED to happen in certain ways based on laws written by people who don't think about consequences or how they are enacted.
And it is 2.2 Million people. There are economies of scale here.
So I wonder how this compares to current Google, current Facebook. I've heard people here talking about how messed up those companies are, projects started/stopped at whim, massive investments that get abandoned 2 years later, etc.
Or to banks. Banks don't modernize their software because they can't, not because they don't want to. No wonder the US government has similar issues.
They're cutting a lot more than that, this has been all over the media. One example would be biomedical research via NIH/NSF. This is not just DEI (in whatever overly broad and vague definition they use), but a lot more.
What about this argument people are making in this thread that they're not actually doing any real cutting because they're not Congress? That seems like a stretch.
I would also still support the ADA and its enforcement.
These two ideas are not in conflict. No one is trying to strip the legal rights of deaf people, nor will it happen. That is a straw man/hyperbole.
“ Sec. 2. Implementation. (a) The Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), assisted by the Attorney General and the Director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), shall coordinate the termination of all discriminatory programs, including illegal DEI and “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility” (DEIA) mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government, under whatever name they appear.”
So… not exactly a strawman.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/endi...
That preventing a repeat of the damage done to America cities by the national highway system[1], which was used mechanism to literally segregate American cities is also a waste of time and money.
Most of the US significant racial atrocities committed against its own citizens, where either committed by, or with the direct assistance of, the U.S. government (at both state and federal level).
There probably a good discussion to be had on how much should be spent on DEI efforts. But the idea that spending zero really doesn’t make much sense, we know what the consequences of allowing the U.S. government to become entirely occupied by white men. Ultimately a monoculture of people results in a monoculture of ideas, and monocultures never last, something comes along finding some critical weakness that common to every agent in the monoculture, and utterly destroys the organism (in the case of the U.S. government, that might be Trump and Musk). DEI is strategically important because diverse systems are more robust, produce better ideas, and are better capable of surviving extreme shocks. All attributes people should want in their government.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining
[1] https://www.npr.org/2021/04/07/984784455/a-brief-history-of-...
The reality is that DEI is a campaign to get people aware of implicit bias. It's been proven time and time again that resumes with a name like "Shaniqua" are more likely to be rejected over one with a "John" even when all the qualifications are the same.
But now, of course, with the current political climate, if you're a woman or PoC, you have to be a perfect worker. If you make any kind of mistake, you'll be accused of being a DEI hire.
I suspect we're gonna start seeing this XKCD linked more often over the next 4 years: https://xkcd.com/385/
So how about we start by purging the Senate.
This is an incredibly sweeping generalization. There are a lot of people who voted for Trump because of their perception of his merit/qualifications/plans vs Harris. Pretending they are all brainwashed simpletons not only alienates them but also sets up for future failures. There's a reason these people voted for him. What is that reason? Treating is as some temporary hysteria is just going to keep getting people like Trump (or worse) elected over and over.
If saving money was the goal surely there's be discussion akin to "let's cut the military budget". That's how you'd know they're serious. But as it stands it is clearly just an ideological axe grinder.
(I should note I'm not American, just watching bemused from the sidelines)
No one is serious about “saving money”. It’s just to justify the corporate tax cut.
This is why DOGE is staffed with young people.
It's easy to convince inexperienced people there's a 2-step plan:
Step 1. Destroy the old.
Step 2. Build the new.
Yet people with experience know that Step 2 requires orders of magnitude more effort and time than Step 1.
So, you have ignorant people breaking things, congratulating themselves on how quickly they're making progress... and then hit Step 2. And realize it's hard. And get bored. And so just, not.
Thus in the end, you're left with a broken pile of what came before, and nothing new to replace it.
Step 1. Destroy the old
Step 2. ???
Step 3. Profit!
"Build the new" doesn't even seem to be on the table at this point. There's no proposals to replace any of this. At least not public anyway, we know they are replacing all of this with for-profit scams.
Step 2. See? The government doesn't work! Just like we said!
Step 3. "Fix" the problems created from Step 1
Step 4. MAGA eventually realizes the swamp was enlarged and made worse, not drained
Unfortunately (for all of us, including for their base) this isn’t actually what people want or need, except the ideologues pushing it with a clear understanding of the expected outcomes. The base just infers that the ruin of these “inefficient” programs is a noble end in itself, because their supposed inefficiency is the problem with the programs themselves.
So at least we're not invading Iraq?
Anyone doing this kind of work is not merely ignorant.
The experience of bricklaying will help you think about the future times when you'll have to lay the bricks. Without that experience you may not ever consider those times, especially in a scenario which has you excited about what you are currently doing.
I wonder if the DOGE kids will be also sent off to the countryside once they're not useful anymore...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sent-down_youth
> Step 1. Destroy the old.
> Step 2. Build the new.
Feels very 'cultural revolution'-y
And also that the steps here should be reversed. Sure if you are tearing down a building you destroy before creating, but systems aren't buildings. If you are going to create a new system to run the cash registers for your business you don't tear out the old one and worry about building the new one later. First you have the replacement ready THEN remove the old one.
Wilful ignorance equates to evil in this case.
The media are absolutely craven, too, constantly normalizing insanity and pretending like even idiotic things are legitimate proposals that should instead be laughed out of the room. Like, maybe the Earth is flat? Let's HAVE THAT DEBATE!!
"Those guys walked on the grass. Therefore I'm entitled to demolish the building."
I hope DOGE will also look at the DoD, and do the same to them as it has to other departments. I hope they review all the money that has been sent to Ukraine, Israel and other nations and make sure it is all accounted for.
//edit// I wish they would also audit the H1B visa programme, but that is less likely to happen.
https://www.investopedia.com/us-debt-by-president-dollar-and...
Also it seems like you're confused by what a budget plan is for, it is what they want to do, not about the past.
But less than his predecessor.
And I didn't vote, I'm not a US citizen or resident.
Bush ran up a massive deficit from from '00 to '08, which Obama then inherited. The debt increasing under Obama is Bush's fault. The deficit LOWERED under Obama.
Congress asked for a debt increase because they plan to cut taxes. The debt hasn't been accrued yet, they plan to cut taxes and it will cost 4.3 trillion.
DOGE isn't trying to make the government better or more efficient. They want to cut programs and staff they're ideologically opposed to which is in theory all government, but in practice all government that doesn't enrich Trump or Musk.
Most government spending is military. DOGE has targeted things like: Meals on Wheels, the Department of Education, National Institute of Health. The evidence I see suggests DOGE wants to implement Project 2025 with Elon's personal touch. An opportunity he paid for with his 270$ his campaign contribution.
I'm not sure what monetary advantage you thing Elon is personally getting for ending operas about transgenderism in Guatemala (or whatever the example was).
But, this is what people voted for. It sucks that you don't like it, but that's democracy.
Elon's companies are great beneficiaries of government funding. Yesterday the federal government decided to acquire $400 million in armored Teslas. I have no idea what opera in Guatemala you're describing. That sounds like something you would learn on social media. Not very concrete.
Trump was in debt prior to the 2016 election. Had hundreds of millions in debt that he could never pay. Now he's rich and still scamming because ??? I think it's because he's been so criminal he has no choice.
I don't consider it democracy. Democracy has been co-opted through mass manipulation and mind control with social media. Donald Trump and now Elon Musk have found a way to defeat reality.
I'm not a partisan or member of any party. I am American and concerned for our country. The guy who won tried to other throw democracy and hasn't ever admit defeat. I strongly believe there's a good chance Trump or JD Vance will be the last American president.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager
Well the elections weren't free and fair in 2020 either, with COVID being used as an excuse.
And let's not forget Hillary claiming she lost in 2016 due to Russia. Sounds like election denialism.
Did Trumps tax cuts put money if your pocket? They didn’t put money in mine (but Biden’s tax policies - child tax credits - did, ironically).
Yes, the standard deduction effectively doubled. That helped lower my federal income tax, and probably the taxes of anyone who didn't own multiple properties. I'm not a fan of Trump at all, but he did cut income taxes in his first term.
Here's a summary of the impact[0]
> The average tax refund was $90 higher in 2018 than 2017, according to 2019 IRS data. (This statistic covers tax filers who used a version of Form 1040.) However, more detailed IRS data, released February 2020, shows that the refunds were not equally distributed across the population.
> Taxpayers with an AGI of less than $10,000 received 11.5% fewer refunds in 2018 than 2017, and the total value of their refunds was 17% less. (A 2018 analysis from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found single filers who earned minimum wage and had no children were least likely to save on their income taxes in 2018.) Across tax returns with an AGI between $1 and $50,000, taxpayers received 4.5% fewer refunds in 2018 and their refunds were worth 2.7% less.
> Taxpayers with AGI between $50,000 and $100,000 received 2.5% more refunds but those refunds were worth 1.8% less than in 2017. Those with an AGI of more than $200,000 received 45% more refunds in 2018 and the value of those refunds was 203.4% higher. Taxpayers with an AGI of $1 million or more received 216% more refunds than in 2017 and those refunds were worth 394.3% more.
[0] https://www.policygenius.com/taxes/who-benefited-most-from-t...
This old video from rap news still ring very true. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpMPu5p_QXU
Completely - it's again propaganda vs reality. They keep showing exactly what they believe by their actions, but from.what I see people on the right keep believing their words/propaganda. There is such and echo chamber on the contermporary right it's incredible. No matter how much tangible, see-it-with-your-own-eyes evidence of something is presented, as long as there is a cover story given that denies it people seem to keep believing the story. And then afterwards when it becomes clear that reality was the case and not the story it all swaps over to rationalizations and the cycle begins again with a new topic.
I remember when it was "there is no way this candidate really will do the extreme things he claims. He's just saying them for effect." To "he doesn't really mean he'll work to be a dictator from day one when he says it" "he doesn't really mean vote for him and you'll never need to vote again".
Then when he starts doing it but gives a different cover story it: "Yah he's not really doing that, he's just cutting waste", to what will be "he's not really doing that he's just fixing unfair election procedures" and so on.
Then finally it will be again "yes he actually did those things but here's why its ok and it doesn't change my mind".
Extremely prominent SV backers in the VP side of the administration have said/implied multiple times if it's democracy or their world views, they choose instituting their world views - and somehow people are still making justifications saying "they don't really mean that, they won't really do that." Even with the clear evidence of what's happening now.
Why do people refuse to believe people when they are explicitly stating their intentions?
Sidestepping any specific political topic, this new view of "I'm against the other party's political touch point item that I'd rather throw out 250 years of democracy" is really wild to witness.
This has been the status quo for a long time, rather than pay taxes and get it all back in controversial and bloated government contracts (which is what gives the appearance of government spending working) it's better to stay lean and just have them not pay, as this removes the middlemen.
Let a company do it's job and you get people crying about them raping the planet and exploiting workers
Stick a company with red tape, tax them a billion, give them (and yourself) a billion to complete a political project that goes nowhere and it's labeled a great success with people cheering in the street and using it as an example of socialist success for the next 60 years.
The issue Americans have is that they can't really afford non-discretionary welfare spending.
I’d be happy if they actually saved real money by cutting the military budget in half, but that’s not going to happen because the US is an industrial-military based economy.
How much did Trump’s 2017 tax cuts lower your tax bills? They didn’t lower mine. I benefited more from Biden’s tax policies (child tax credits) than Trump’s. Even taking it from the point of view of “fuck the gov, fuck climate change and our future, I want what’s mine, now” Trump did nothing for me in his 4 years on power and is doing nothing for me now - gutting a bunch of gov agencies doesn’t put money in my pocket.
You're either so dumb you believe every piece of propaganda you are shown, and never notice the harm being done, or you are fully aware of what's happening and you're cheering on the chaos and suffering.
The toil and confusion and nastiness of everyday life under capitalism is not as fun and exciting as an imminent invasion at the southern border or the coming rise of the God Emperor or the final solution to groceries being expensive. Running a soup kitchen and washing clothes for the homeless just hasn't the same attraction as doing nothing by chasing the next Q-drop.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1889062581848944961?mx=2
I thought that after 2016, I no longer do. It's the reverse. Maybe "evil" is a strong word but they are definitely what I would consider "bad people" based on their extreme selfishness. Most pretend to be ignorant, or "low information" in person but they follow news very closely.
As for 'juniors', it's not like we've seen this sort of thing before such as those here happy to propel the opinions of so-called 'climate expert / activist' (Greta Thunberg) who didn't finish school and was used by the media as the face of 'saving the planet' and throwing unfounded claims of disaster by 2023, despite a significant lack of understanding of climate change and what she was talking about.
But then again, I have not heard back from Netflix's elite team for a postmortem of that live-streaming disaster which there were no juniors to blame this time despite being inexperienced in delivering live-streaming on their platform reliably.
The odds of a junkie recognizing good or bad spending is very low.
Yes, in many respects. See this paper for a good model of the basic behavior: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1600451
You're surely being obtuse. I'm a progressive independent and even I understand why they are doing it, even if I'm not convinced this is the correct way to do it.
This is why they are doing it: https://www.usdebtclock.org/
It's just their idea of austerity.
I'd wager the person who did the edit goes by the name "roro".
Having a front row seat to the fall of the biggest empire in history is certainly something.
But I guess that you don't need to find answers externally when stupidity is a much simpler reason
They've created the back doors, I'm sure that the Russians and the Chinese are now in the systems the DOGE people broke.
Is the newly created user with name "bigballs" who downloads whole government databases a foreign TA or just DOGE? Who knows. Who cares, certainly not the Government.
The data and access gained currently by China, Russia, NK and SA will continue to be useful until and way after the next war.
the payments data would tell a lot about intelligence networks for example or about various Pentagon contractors.
Remember Assange? He did a decade under house arrest for a leak paling in comparison to what happens today. How times have changed.
He spent a decade hiding in an embassy to avoid extradition to Sweden for unrelated crimes, ostensably for fear of what ended up happening in the UK where he was apparently happy to stay while insisting Sweden wasn't safe.
and the people in prison can leave anytime they want - it is just prison guards outside who would shoot them.
> to Sweden for unrelated crimes
And what happened to those crimes in Sweden once he resolved his US issues?
By that standard, given what the guards would do, you would need to also claim that "prison is a death sentence".
He wasn't under house arrest — he went there against the desires of the police force outside who stationed officers there to perform an arrest for skipping bail.
Calling this "house arrest" is akin to calling voluntarily serving on a submarine "drowning" or working in the antarctic "hypothermia": he chose to go there, and to keep staying there. More than that, he chose to commit a new and easy to prove crime by going there.
His argument against going to Sweden, *after having been arrested for the Swedish extradition hearing in the UK*, was a fear of a thing the UK ended up doing, and which it should have been obvious the UK would do willingly whenever the US asked for it. The US has no need to make things more complicated by asking for Swedish involvement given how friendly the UK government is.
The UK is infamous for doing whatever the US tells it to, so if you're afraid of US prosecutorial/extradition overreach, the UK is one of many countries where you don't want to be. Sweden, not so much.
If the US wanted him back in 2010, they could have had him directly from the UK with full support of the UK government, without any of the convoluted extra steps in this conspiracy theory that makes the Swedish judicial system into patsies.
> And what happened to those crimes in Sweden once he resolved his US issues?
The statute of limitations happened. Bits were already timing out even before he overstayed his welcome by Ecuador.
Nevertheless the prosecutors did try to reopen that prosecution and to get the UK to extradite to Sweden first over the US, only to be told no by the judge because the evidence was too old to secure a conviction.
That pre-existing cancellation was why the British didn't feel the need to bother telling Sweden when his asylum was cancelled and he was arrested, much to the annoyance of the Swedish prosecutors: https://www.courthousenews.com/%EF%BB%BFsweden-tells-uk-it-t...
And only after all that had already happened, did the US issues get fully resolved.
>is akin to calling voluntarily serving on a submarine
> he chose to go there, and to keep staying there.
it isn't called "voluntary"/"choosing" if the alternative to the "voluntarily"/"choosing" is a police force desire of putting you into Gitmo (or SuperMax if you're lucky) for life or even capital punishment to politically prosecute you. (Assange's actions weren't criminal at the jurisdiction where he performed his actions. US prosecution of him was pure political and a pure projection of US force beyond US jurisdiction. Crowds of people in US collect classified info from other countries, and US doesn't extradite those people into those other countries. Because jurisdiction matters for determining whether actions constitute a crime. I for example say a a lot of things which are crime in Russia - like calling the Ukraine war a war - which aren't crime in US. Should i be extradited to Russia and face the "legal process" there? And if i caught in a Russia friendly country and hide from extradition in a UK or US embassy it wouldn't be a voluntary choosing to visit the embassy, it would be a "voluntary choice" to stay in the embassy instead of getting treason conviction and 20 years in GULAG - such "voluntarily chosen" stay at the embassy is a de-facto house arrest.)
>The statute of limitations happened.
No. You're again inventing things. Like with your invented definition of the "voluntary choosing" above.
No, he did a most of a decade hiding out in an diplomatic enclave to avoid legal process, and three years in jail fighting extradition; he spent no time under house arrest.
Someone willing to work without morals for money can just be bought by the next highest bidder. Anything they touch should be treated as compromised.
> Is there a source for the vacation days thing?
The "vacation days" line seems to be a jokingly hyperbolic prediction. China might have directed more resources (including hackers) toward collecting the data exposed by DOGE and Elon Musk's actions (and might try to widen the crack), but is unlikely to have literally cancelled all vacation days for said hackers.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43052432
Why is this not a joke?
Edit: Rethorical question.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/doge-website-posts-classified-inf...
She'll just invite her friend Bashar al-Assad to assist.
I have read on the news he recently became #opentowork.
>Over at OPM, reports indicate that individuals associated with DOGE connected an unauthorized server into the network.
[1]: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/02/doge-as-a-nat...
Is there any evidence that the database for this microblog of a cloud flare hosted website has anything of importance in it?
Are you also (alone) suggesting there's a tunnel from cloud flare (where this is hosted) to some larger government database?
You may want to RTFA: https://archive.ph/wy1Wt
I was replying to what was written. I read this as implying that sensitive (or any) data was available.
> and access data from
Again, is there any evidence that any data was accessible, beyond what is visible on the webpage? If you read the article, the flaw was that anything could be pushed. Could you link a source that says extra data was accessible? Your claim is not made in the above article, and I can't find anything mentioning data access, with a quick search.
They hired some cheap Upwork freelancers instead.
(The way Trump's election directly led to "retard" being a common pejorative again hasn't been discussed enough. Just awful.)
Games are written for Windows, therefore webapps should be written with "Microsoft C++" (presumably meaning Visual C++, though I suppose there's an outside chance that he means "Microsoft C/C++", from the early 90s).
He's not new to being... bad at this.
(As someone who has worked in both the games industry and Big Tech(tm), yeah, no.)
But having done both, making any game beyond the absolute most basic game in Unity is harder than what 95% of web developers do day to day.
I’m currently in web dev because it pays so much better, but game dev really is more technically challenging than most web dev.
It’s hard to compare average skill levels between the 2 because so many people are drawn to games because they love them and to the web because of the pay. But if I had to guess, I’d put my money on there being a significantly higher floor for game dev.
[0] Which Musk maybe have heard of given he has a bit of experience lurking around automotive tech.
There are some incredible programmers in both big tech and game dev, but big tech has vastly more developers with less pressure to have top-tier talent.
Median developer at both probably represents the same skill because of normal distributions.
Other companies need developers that make applications not anyone can push updates to. Those are also good developers.
There is no single metric for "good" in a field as vast as programming.
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-prev...
The annoyances of IIS were borne by sysadmins, but your developers were probably able to be more productive.
Granted: Google was not so dumb to imagine deploying on NT / IIS. And their reasons for doing C++ were nothing like what Musk is blathering about here.
The biggest issue here isn't even about the technology. It's Musk as management stepping outside of his domain trying to tell the professionals working under him exactly what to do... because he's an egomaniac narcissist.