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With friends like these, who needs enemies?
Ironically enough, the WHOIS record points to CISA – the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Very confidence-building.
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/06/nx-s1-5288883/cisa-staffers-d...
if you think you own everything then there are no external threats
And internal threats, well, you just have to deal with those, no matter the cost!
Guys, ALL .gov records point to CISA. That’s one of the requirements for getting a .gov domain in the US. This is standard practice.
https://archive.ph/wy1Wt
Lots of government websites are vulnerable early on.
Hope they used good proxies, because this seems like a felony.
Oof, not something to put in your article.
"Able to" and "Did" are two very different things.
All you had to do was actually read the article; it’s the very next paragraph from the one I quoted.
Apologies. Missed that line, you are quite correct.
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.
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.
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?
Those DOGE 10Xers are so efficient they're outsourcing website content to the general public.
Ofcourse, democracy applies to HTML as well. Truly a noble deed.
Move fast and break things, government edition.
ow, put it back
Fail Fasterer™
For a while the /join page was blocked by cloudflare WAF yesterday - I wonder if this is why.
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.
[0]: https://archive.md/XzvTY
[1]: https://archive.md/cMeco
I still see them live.
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.
Excuse me if you think I referred to Elon Musk as a hacker. He's a marketer. I meant the nazi kids he hired.
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.
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.
The motive of people to cheer any team on is, generally, tribalism.
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.
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.
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.
I think the cheering is more a told-you-so cheer from people who suspected that Musk and his team aren't as compotent as they claim.
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.
I would make a stronger claim: ignorance + power + conviction is exactly equal to evil.
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.
Delusion + power + conviction doesn't always equal evil, so there has to be something missing in that equation. I'd wager it's evil.
Though this doesn't really answer the question of motivation. Few people aim to do something that they regard to be bad. (It's possible, mind you.)
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.
Hitler cared about the outcome a lot. That's why he killed so many people. So your analysis has a pretty big flaw there.
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
Give me a counter example.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43047395
Ah, I was thinking of an example where you have evil without those things.
Ah, I was thinking of an example where you have evil without those things.
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)
In fact it covers it 100%. Examples:
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.
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.
I do think 9/11 was more a response to brutal colonial warfare and three letter agency shenanigans going back many years and less about religion..
A lot of people think that. Just a tiiiiny problem: the hijackers didn't think that. They were jihadis.
And the reason for anti-American jihad?
...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.
People are arguing that right here in this thread - that Musks vandalism represents the will of the majority of America.
A highly suspicious opinion since he is unelected.
The People for the New American Century or the off script timezone goof by the BBC?
Or maybe the Gelatin art crew?
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.
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.
But 9/11 Never Forget!
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.
America has objectively lost every war since WW2. (Ok maybe not the invasion of Granada)
Can't believe Iraq still occupies Kuwait!
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.
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?
Yes.
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.
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.
Congress approves the annual budget for each department, it's not micromanaging how it's spent
It had approved the budget for USAID which was slashed wholesale.
What exactly do you think a budget is?
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.
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.
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?
Pardon?
And that’s why we’re talking about “authoritarianism”
Congress is deadlocked, by design.
Republicans who work on bipartisan platforms are punished and primaried.
That's not true. At all.
FYI, the Marines have passed two audits so far: https://www.marines.mil/News/Press-Releases/Press-Release-Di...
They were even able to account for all their crayons! PT belts on the other hand...
Crayons were accounted as food supplies? /s
It was a line item under "consumables".
Color me surprised. But good on them!
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.)
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.
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?
It's not 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.
The protection against that brain drain is to have a country worth staying in.
That is an excellent response. If you're afraid educating your citizens will cause them to realize their country is crap, then your country is crap.
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.
This reminds me of an apocryphal business story: a bunch of managers were sitting around discussing a request to give more training to employees.
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?”
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.
Running away without paying the loan is a way better solution.
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 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.
There are a non-trivial numbers of absconders hiding in the US and the UK. The most famous example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vijay_Mallya?useskin=vector
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".
From Reuters:
"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...
Writing the post mortem for a two year project after a few weeks seems unserious.
Tackling the “budget” by having an llm screen NSF grants for the word “bias” IS unserious.
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.
Lottery for national park access seems like a great idea, way better than putting a price on it.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e55Z9bBDG9Y
If it was broken before, it's about to be a lot more broken.
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".
Yeah that's not going to happen. Lower government spending wont lower taxes. That's not what taxes are for.
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.
Or cutting the budget for cgi roadsters in orbit.
The current GOP plans for the budget and tax cut will increase the deficit by 4T.
No one is serious about “saving money”. It’s just to justify the corporate tax cut.
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.
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.
This is the classic 3 step plan.
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 1. Destroy the government
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
What makes you think that step 4 will ever occur?
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.
So at least we're not invading Iraq?
They're talking about invading Canada.
And Greenland.
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.
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.
Fuck, that sounds familiar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Olds
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
That's what happened to Vivek.
Vivek quit DOGE voluntarily when he realized that Musk was completely off his rocker and wanted no part of it.
I was mostly just joking about him going off and running for Ohio governor. It does give "send the defeated noble to the frontier" vibes.
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.
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.
There's no reason to believe anything they say. Believe only what they do.
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!!
"The media" Give me a break. Who is this 'media' you speak of? Your local newspapers? CNN? Fox News? Joe Rogan? Who is to blame?
NYTimes was calling this "reshaping the federal government," as though it was just a slightly different set of policies.
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.
Exactly, those people are happy because "Musk will show them!". That is it.
Sadly we can explain most bad things that happen by understanding that most people are f*cking idiots.
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".
"Those guys stole a cookie from the cookie jar. Therefore I'm entitled to rob a bank."
"Those guys walked on the grass. Therefore I'm entitled to demolish the building."
No, I'm not making moral judgment here, I'm searching for explanation.
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.
"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..
I don't know every motive or even most motives for cheering it on. But I know my take on it: I'm an anti authoritarian.
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.
As they say power corrupts - true for most people.
One lesson I've learned in my life is that evil is just another word for extreme selfishness.
You have no problems with wasteful spending of tax payers money?
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.
Hamas. But what a typo!
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 mean the motive of the masses who cheer this on. Is it just to own the libs?
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 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.
Can someone help me with what roro means?
I think they meant "ruh roh" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3SaxRRfJ4E
It's common to sign your handle to exploit/pwn'ed messages.
I'd wager the person who did the edit goes by the name "roro".
Scooby dooby Doo...
oh good i hope someone other than China can now access all the natsec data
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.
Tinfoil hat mode: "What if" this results from a foreign influence?
But I guess that you don't need to find answers externally when stupidity is a much simpler reason
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?
Sometimes the tool doesn't have to know he's a tool. The Russians use the term "useful idiot".
They've created the back doors, I'm sure that the Russians and the Chinese are now in the systems the DOGE people broke.
foreign influence like a South African blood diamond heir?
That accusation is wildly off base. He's a blood emerald heir.
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.
no they are uploading loads of raw data to some LLM somewhere. Bestcase no history, worse case its hosted by a hostile actor
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
I don't even think half of them are getting paid. They're doing it gratis.
Oh, they're getting paid, all right. Who's doing the paying is the question.
Is there a source for the vacation days thing? That's the kind of story that has an apocryphal vibe to it like the Pentagon Domino's Pizza meter has.
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.
You can't cancel them if they don't have them.
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?
Separate thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43052432
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!
Why is this not a joke?
Edit: Rethorical question.
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.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/doge-website-posts-classified-inf...
They got it long ago, don't kid yourself.
Or they could just, like, call Tulsi Gabbard.
Unfortunately she is too busy for that.
She'll just invite her friend Bashar al-Assad to assist.
I have read on the news he recently became #opentowork.
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the situation, but isn't this similar to Hillary’s E-Mail?[1]
[1]: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/02/doge-as-a-nat...
Is there any evidence that the contents of the database are accessible? The linked article doesn't make these claims.
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 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.
I was replying to what was written. I read this as implying that sensitive (or any) data was available.
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.
Well it was probably faithfully outsourced to people with correct documentation and certificates with their weight in gold then...
That would be very inefficient spending.
They hired some cheap Upwork freelancers instead.
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.)
This is about the level of Musk's understanding of tech: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12519729
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.
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.
The "games programmers are best programmers, in all senses" thing is a very, very common point of layperson confusion; not totally sure why.
(As someone who has worked in both the games industry and Big Tech(tm), yeah, no.)
Because a game looks hard. Forms look easy. Website? Even a phone can run a website, but a game requires that beefy big box!
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.
Game companies need developers that extract as much performance of the machine as possible.
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.
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.
I doubt it. Game companies need guys willing to sign their life away, months at a time. I worked in EDA, now storage. TONS of very talented people.
He sounds like Dilbert's boss...
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-prev...
Yeah, I mean that archetype exists for a reason.
Better link: <https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/1995-11-17>
He's deeply autistic. It's a thing they tend to do.
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.
Developer tools, along with availability of developers, was probably the number one reason to have chosen a Microsoft stack around the year 2000.
The annoyances of IIS were borne by sysadmins, but your developers were probably able to be more productive.
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.
They're promising to deliver security next quarter.
You mean Full Self Security?
Full SS by 2028 :(
I thought this was a feature to make it easier to leech information ?
Elon Musk needs it most of all, he’s the most insecure human in existence.
If I click Join I am immediately redirected to a "Sorry, you have been blocked You are unable to access doge.gov" CloudFlare page. That's odd.
same, i'm assuming they've set up a firewall rule on the cloudflare dashboard to block non-internal ips for certain routes
It's a block for non-US IPs, I think. The page is an application form for joining them, and it only accepts US citizens.
I think this is it, in eu i get blocked but if I access it via VPN I can open the page
US citizens have to pay federal taxes abroad but now can't view federal websites.
Yup, that checks out
That's been the case for a long time. I made a big stink about not being able to fill out my census survey to my congresswomen. It got nowhere.
Transparency maximum.
I am shocked, SHOCKED! that this Elon Musk thing staffed by a bunch of weirdos he found wherever isn't very competent.
loyalty >> competence
Does anyone want to talk about the hack itself? Can anyone give more details than "left their database open"? I came to this site hoping for a real discussion about that and didn't see it here yet...
My bet is on SQL injection
In the year of our lord 2025? I doubt it. I'd put money on "some third party cloud service was configured in a silly way".
But, I would love to see details.
They used one of those databases which are easy to connect directly to the internet, it's the same thing as about 90% of modern data breaches.
Every generation we make things much easier, lower the bar, and are rewarded when amateurs make amateur mistakes like this.
We made it so easy to program that any idiot could do it. So they do.
I found my new signature quote.
No way this is real.
Not enough detail to say for sure; could be SQL injection, could be credentials exposed in the frontend.
...or endpoints not requiring any credentials at all.
… Oh, yes. After reading more carefully I see it, er, IS that. Where the hell did Musk find these people? 1996?
I'm not too sure about this theory; just went on the DOGE site and the API endpoints don't allow for POST requests, and I can't find anything that allows me to upload
According to a source of mine, there were unsecured API endpoints for modification
Someone unminified the js, and it turned out that a bunch of the rest endpoints it knew about were just unverified crud endpoints for the site.
https://archive.ph/2025.02.14-132833/https://www.404media.co...
Smells exactly like llm created solution.
Or just what happens when you hire a bunch of 20 year olds and let them loose.
That's currently how I model my usage of LLMs in code. A smart veeeery junior engineer that needs to be kept on a veeeeery short leash.
Yes. LLMs are very much like a smart intern you hired with no real experience who is very eager to please you.
IMO, they're worse than that. You can teach an intern things, correct their mistakes, help them become better and your investment will lead to them performing better.
LLMs are an eternal intern that can only repeat what it's gleaned from some articles it skimmed last year or whatever. If your expected response isn't in its corpus, or isn't in it frequently enough, and it can't just regurgitate an amalgamation of the top N articles you'd find on Google anyway, tough luck.
The Age of the Eternal Intern
And the content online is now written by Fully Automated Eternal September
LLMs are to interns what house cats are to babies. They seem more self sufficient at first, but soon the toddler grows up and you're stuck with an animal who will forever need you to scoop its poops.
You can't do the same way you do with a human developer, but you can do a somewhat effective form of it through things like .cursorrules files and the like.
One who thinks "open source" means blindly copy/pasting code snippets found online.
Even at 20 years old I would not have done this.
The difference is that today's digital natives regard computers as magic and most don't know what's really happening when their framework du jour spits out some "unreadable" text.
So much this, I was interning at a government entity at 20 and I already knew you needed credentials to do shit. Most frameworks have this by default for free, we're so incredibly screwed with these folks running rampant and destroying the government.
It's definitely both. A bunch of 20 year olds were let loose to be "super efficient." So, to be efficient they use LLMs to implement what should be a major government oversight webpage. Even after the fix the list is a few half-baked partial document excerpts with a few sentences saying, "look how great we are!" It's embarrassing.
Maybe doge should have used an LLM to generate defenses
They did, and this is what they got.
My first guess is that this is an unauthenticated server action.[0]
0 - https://blog.arcjet.com/next-js-server-action-security/
Does it? At least my experience is that ChatGPT goes super hard on security, heavily promoting the use of best practices.
Maybe they used Grok ;P
Not my experience at all. Every LLM produces lots of trivial SQLI/XSS/other-injection vulnerabilities. Worse they seem to completely authorization business logic, error handling, and logging even when prompted to do so.
Post-edit window, the above should read “…completely skip authorization…”
Does it, though? The saying says we shouldn't mistake incompetence for malice, but that requires more than usual for Musk's retinue.
Smells like getting a backdoor in early.
Apparently they get backdoors in as incompetently as they create efficiency.
Good thing we have the best and brightest at DOGE!
well they pay for a blue checkmark, they _must_ be the cleverest we have
It's been a while since I last saw a CMS pulling data from a database... It's a miracle the website didn't crumble under the load.
Put a CMS behind a well-configured CDN and it's essentially a static site generator. If you have cache invalidation figured out, you get all the speed and scalability benefits of a static site without ever having to regenerate your content.
I’m guessing it didn’t have much in front of it because the management endpoints were accessible from the public Internet. I think you mentioning the “well configured CDN” is key here. If there was a CDN in front of it, it wasn’t well configured.
BTW, I spent a lot of my career configuring load balancing, caches, proxies, sharding, and CDNs for Plone (a CMS that’s popular with governments) websites.
Yeah sorry, I didn't mean to imply these folks have any clue what they're doing. I misread your comment as "it's been a while since I saw a CMS-based site, big sites are all static now" instead of "it's been a while since I saw a CMS rawdogging it."
Just checked the DOGE website; I'm not too sure about this theory given that POST requests are blocked and the only APIs you can find (ie. /api/offices) only supports GET requests and if the UUID doesn't match, it 404s.
I don't see any CRUD endpoints for modifying the database
DOGE noticed. They might have "fixed" the vulnerability by now
https://doge.gov/workforce?orgId=69ee18bc-9ac8-467e-84b0-106... is what's linked to by the "Workforce" header, and it now looks different than the screenshots
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=woPff-Tpkns&pp=ygUSdW5kZXJ0YWx...
I mean the article is paywalled but it sounds like this is isolated to their site-displayed twitter feed; basically the site was hosted by cloudflare and you could insert your own fake tweets into what was recorded on the site (but not on the actual DOGE twitter feed). I don't think any data was actually compromised
Yeah, it's just tremendously embarrassing. These are supposed to be the tech geniuses who can parse 50 years of accumulated legacy code and find all the government waste? In 3 weeks?
Data science and websites are different beasts.
Some of the "data science" people I've met certainly believed that they could architect entire software systems just because they understood how to structure data in databases.
Surely technical competence is strongly correlated across the two beasts.
I'm not yet sure whether they are even doing data science.
Anecdote time (pinch of salt required):
A relative of mine studying accounting went to the Doge site to see the "audit" and "analytics" records that some acquaintance arguing with her said "see the doge site!" for the proof.
What she found when visiting the site was no "audit" at all, but instead a word count of how often objectional terms appear in legislation or government sites. (DEI? Trans? LGBTQ?).
Being in the analytics/data engineering space myself, I was pretty amused to hear that was the quality of "analytics" being done.
Wasn't "word count" the "hello world" example for Hadoop big data back in 2013?
I can't speak to any data that may or may not be compromised, but this isn't about inserting fake tweets. Anything in their "government org chart" can be edited unauthenticated.
Well, it seems to be working fine now.
It's still working today.
Is it me or mods are actively hiding everything that is critical of the current admin? This post is 6 hours late, 308 points and at the bottom of the 3rd page. This is not the first post that is either flagged or just made invisible. Is HN still a place we can trust?
I trust dang.
I also believe there are a bunch of Musk fanboys on this site that would flag this. Or people who don’t want to understand the implications of what’s going on and avoid anything that’s “political”.
Knowing how petty Elon is with Diablo and PoE, I do not at all put it past him to have some bots/cheap labor just flag anything about him.
I also trust dang
Don't know how to square these thing either, though
It's not bots flagging these things, it's regular users. Unless the regular users are bots, which seems unlikely.
When there's a major ongoing topic like this one, especially when it's divisive, the flags tend to come from a combination of (1) users who flag one-sidedly for what appear to be political reasons, and (2) users who don't think the story is on-topic for HN, whether because it's too sensational / flame-prone, too repetitive, or both. The first is a bad reason to flag and the second is a good reason. When we notice users flagging repeatedly for bad reasons, we take their flagging privileges away.
Hey dang, thanks for the reply.
I didn't know you take the flagging away. That's not a bad idea.
I've been seeing you defend yourself all over the place these days. Sorry to make you feel like you had to do that here too.
My comment was more one of confusion, to clarify. Reading your comments these last few weeks, I trust in your decisions and those of the rest of the mods. HN is a really good place because of you all.
But I also know Elon is super petty/crazy and doing some monkey business is not above him. And yes, I know that sounds very conspiracy theory of me based on your comment here.
Suffice to say, maybe I'm just reacting to the sea change in HN participation and doing some 'self protection'. I like HN and then I recognize this flagging behavior on mostly just two men. Is there more flagging? Yes, but that's 'background' to me. These things don't square to my mind, so I go off to conspiracy land. Either way, my lizard brain is triggered and whether I like it or not, I can't help feeling 'bad/danger'. Maybe some self-work is needed.
Still, thanks a ton for all the time and the effort yo and the rest of the mod team put in here. I really appreciate it.
I agree with your moderation style generally, but
Why do you believe it’s unlikely? Are these regular users whose activity predates GPT3? Personally, since LLMs became commercially available I’ve just assumed that at least 50% of comments on the internet are bots.
Yes, many have been around for years and years.
I also trust dang, but the “Elon has built cool companies so I’m going to set aside what critical thinking skills I have and put my trust in him and Trump and forget that Trump Is an inveterate liar and Elon has been saying shit for a long time now” is really getting to me. I expect that from Reddit or Fox News watchers. I expect higher order thinking from HN and it’s pretty disappointing.
Uh, don't. HN doesn't block dumb people from joining the site and commenting.
Yes, they're all being hidden. I've yet to see a good reason why.
Please see my response to parent
(copied from an earlier comment)
There are at least 60 recent DOGE stories on HN with comments on. I guess people get a bit DOGEd out. It's probably part of the Trump/Musk strategy. 'Flood the zone' with so many things people can't follow it.
(on zone flooding https://youtu.be/iTSgL_R1CC4)
I see you are new here. It's not about being political or not, it's about whether this is going to end up in a flamewar or not.
Here are the guidelines : https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Moderation is decentralized, downvoted comments tend to disappear. Flagging is a power people who have a lot of karma have, if you think are one of them you can vouch (unflag) for a comment. There is one mod, dang Here are the moderator last comments so you can have idea of the work he is doing: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang
It would be so uncivil to have a conversation about how the US govt is being carelessly lit on fire because it might lead to a flamewar.
If you're going to have emotions we'll have to ask you to leave
There is no conversation here. There's one thread near the top that tries to talk about the actual vulnerability, the rest is knee-jerk snark.
I totally understand why people are knee-jerking, but it's not a conversation and it doesn't belong on HN. We have other forums for knee-jerk snark. I'll be happy to see another DOGE post here the next time there's a topic that has enough meat for a useful conversation to come out of it.
In the meantime, I suspect that dang just left this here to avoid the appearance of silencing the topic. I hope that people who see this come away better understanding why so many of these threads get flagged to death.
I wonder if site being hacked belongs to hacker news.
Whether something belongs on Hacker News doesn't really depend on the news item so much as on what kind of discussion comes off of it. Some of the most insignificant stories are great Hacker News topics because they spawn amazing discussions.
This thread on the other hand? There's one comment near the top that mentioned some interesting facts about the U.S. Digital Service, and a second comment that's third from the top that tries with limited success to get people to talk about the hack.
The rest of this thread is just mindless snark. That's fair, DOGE is stupid and deserves snark, but it's a waste of space on the HN front page.
A decent metric for whether something belongs on HN is: is the conversation more interesting than the Reddit equivalent would be? The answer here is pretty clearly an emphatic "no", so I think that this belongs on Reddit instead.
I've suspected the same when people are critical of AI.
It’s not mods. Dang and his team are phenomenally fair. It’s users flagging it because we’re massively tired of this content and if I want to read it and hear endless thoughtless comments, I’ll go to Reddit.
I've been answering this a lot lately. Here are some links:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43019507
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43003751
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978572
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978389 (<-- principles listed here)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911011
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42979382
If you take a look at those and still have a question that isn't answered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
Trust as you please, but we're moderating HN the same way we always have.
Edit: Actually we wouldn't expect or ask anyone to trust in the first place. I do think it's reasonable to ask regular users to familiarize themselves with the principles by which we moderate the site. Then if you see something that doesn't fit those principles, or if you want to make a case for different principles, we have something to discuss.
These principles go back a long time and have held up well in terms of preserving HN for its intended purpose over the years. If you (or anyone) want to familiarize yourself with them, see the link I marked above. It contains a partial list, and pointers to lots of past explanations.
Going to defend dang here.
These posts have a high political index, which given America's current culture wars tends to bring out the kind of behavior which none of us want on HN.
It's a damn tough balancing act.
Also, look at my post history, I'm pretty strongly anti-DOGE. I'm defending Dang because I love HN and appreciate what he is doing under extremely tough conditions.
A group of users flags it all but dang has done a good job of overriding it lately.
I'd still like if threads indicated whether or not flags were turned off. Dang must be tired of answering these questions
Those post are flagged because many of us do not want to see ANYTHING about US politics in here, no matter if it’s dressed up as a technical article
why don't you click "hide"?
This post now appears on page 5 of HN despite being number 1 at /active
:<
TIL about /active.
There have been so many of these types posts that have been hidden from the front page.
https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#flame-...
/active shows the threads that are accumulating comments most quickly. If we ranked the frontpage that way, then HN would be a flamewar site. Therefore we don't rank the frontpage that way.
fair enough; thanks for the explain. I do appreciate that HN doesn't turn into a flamewar while allowing discussions and not flagging everything just because it's controversial, especially with all the impactful stuff going on. kudos on the moderating and threading that needle; tough job
so most people here are salty about Doge actually delivering on transparency, albeit imperfectly, vs promises and SLS style multi billion "effort" unable to deliver for decades?
mind you, it's totally legit to ridicule the noob security lapses, but the rest of the sentiment here seems a bit meh
I agree the website itself is fine -- not that the information wasn't publicly available before, but having it consolidated is nice.
But as for transparency, DOGE isn't at all being transparent about what it is doing. I'd give them an F so far on that.
I'm generally trying to keep away from the whole political madness going on, but when I do follow a story, Iat least try to verify what I am seeing. This requires a fair bit of mental energy, intelligence and frustration tolerance, and is frankly impossible to do for more than a fraction of what is going on.
For example, the recent headlines of the state department trying to buy $400m worth of armored Tesla vehicles was obviously a Democrat plant. It was done under the Biden administration in December, with no chance of fulfilling before the handover. Some.one thought it would be a simple way of making the Trump admin look bad.
You have to always be wary of being misled by the media in today's age. That said, the shit-slinging coming out of Doge has been largely false and illegal. If Congress assigns money to fund impressionist dancers in Pakistan, then that's what it has to be spent on. The real issue here is that to get a bill passed in the US a lot of fluff has to get attached to it. Doge can't unilaterally cancel payments without breaking the law.
Even in the cases I looked at were real corruption is plausible, ie. the money given to the Clinton Foundation, Doge just straight up lied about the amounts and purpose.
Outside of corruption, there is no good reason to move this fast and reckless. At least no good reason for the American people. They are moving this fast because they know what they do is illegal and idiotic and false, and they are trying to drown us in bullshit.
Musk gets a nice kickback for every single link going back to his own website (that is actually corruption), but more importantly, they are building up outrage fatigue for normal people and a frenzy for their fanatics. This is all about paving the way to paint legality as corruption so that they can justify ignoring the courts and Congress going forward.
Most people here on HN are idiot savants - little to no experiences that expose them to govt bureaucracy and corruption (example:taxes beyond simple salaried income tax, buying/selling property,run a business,run a payroll, investing, inflation etc. )
Maybe they should fire these kids and replace them with REAL engineers.
And I know some of those kids probably read Hackernews, so here’s the advice: put away ChatGPT and learn what the fuck you’re doing.
The one good thing about them all being so young is it explains why I never got an interview; at 28 I was too old to ever get a job there
Yup. At 28 you’re going to have way more things in your life distracting you from the job, you’re probably prioritizing work life balance which is a red flag.
Why would you apply to work in this debacle. Ever.
To move slow and break DOGE?
You can criticize it all you want but I'd be working directly for the President and the richest man alive, doing incredible LLM-powered work that's basically never been done before. Not only would all the work be innovative (and thus fun), but it would look incredible on a resume
working at doge? your resume would be straight in the trash if i came across it.
50% of the country might support this. The software industry, especially the lower levels like engineers and managers, leans left politically.
Even putting the politics aside, a DOGE engineer experience on a resume would send me the message that you're the type of person who is too cowardly or corrupt to stand up against unethical and illegal assignments. Perhaps that's a good fit for some hiring managers, but it's potentially a big red flag for many others.
“Incredible” is far from a given. If DOGE doesn’t provide enough benefits to cancel out the billions if dollars of economic disruption it’s causing, or if the purported savings turn out to be misrepresentation instead of real, you look like a political hatchet man instead of an engineer. A reputation for making mistakes (like making your web site world-writable) and jumping to conclusions probably isn’t what you want.
Take it easy, he was just following orders.
But if it does, people involved will be the part of unique historical turnaround of a falling empire, and their names will be written in gold.
"Falling" according to a literal shit posing car salesman
I mean if DOGE was closed up tomorrow it would still be incredible resume candy. The fact you know multiple billionaires and a president means any VC fund would give you money to do anything, and you could get interviews at pretty much any startup. While I’m sure an insurance software salesman won’t be as impressed, it would look good for any fun job, and you’d have a set of skills nobody else has. You could probably make a living consulting, using AI to find corporate waste.
It might give you some contacts, but that’s far from a given. Just because Musk found you useful doesn’t mean he’s going to show loyalty to you, and that’s especially true if the venture blows up politically and you are one of the scapegoats. People don’t get to be billionaires by giving away money to everyone they meet.
The point of DOGE is the disruption. It's a propaganda and political orthodoxy operation under a paper thin pretext of efficiency.
I agree, but I was pointing out that the promised benefits of working there were not a given but rather highly contingent on delivering serious savings. If that fails or turns out to be a pretext they never planned to deliver, the engineer who thought they were doing something good is going to be left with all of the blame and none of the money the billionaires in the room seek to gain.
I really hope this is an outlier and the median smart guy like you has a bit more of a moral compass and doesn't seem to willing to sell their own country for a cool line on a CV.
Those Doge kids are likely going to be scapegoated and sent to prison in a few years.
Nah, they'll want reasonable pay, reasonable hours, and won't confuse their boss for a living god. They may even have some self-confidence and morals, which would be a total deal breaker.
Sadly you're both right.
Most importantly, they will refuse to participate in the administration's regular human centipede rituals.
Did you mean to say humancentiPad?
These are ideologues, not earnest professionals.
You need someone who is
1. Good experienced engineer
2. Without ethics
3. Happy to be paid below market rate of a good experienced engineer without ethics.
Not just below market rate… my understanding is a number of DOGE “employees” are actually volunteers.
It would be interesting if government moved toward some kind of open source contributor model where any engineer could just pick up some issue and solve it.
The Constitution as a wiki?
I guess DOGE lives up to "Vox Populi, Vox Dei" even better than Twitter.
Please stop sharing paywall content. We are not paying subscriptions because some headline.
Idiocracy in full effect!
Just wait until we have a huge outbreak of Measles or are prescribed essential oils for cancer...
Too late. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/12/science/measles-vaccinati...
Not a good look, when you're doing a blitz of obviously criminally -- treasonously -- reckless things.
It's harder for supporters to even pretend that you're even minimally competent.
I'm not sure you've actually heard from their supporters - they have proven again and again that there is literally nothing they won't excuse or handwave away.
Many of their supporters wouldn't know a webpage from a database schema and once thought Bill Gates would send him $$ for forwarding emails. Like my 60+ BIL.
Sure, because half of the country is stupid (that’s the only explanation!) unlike you oh, enlightened one
Worth noting that the U.S. Digital Service (USDS, i.e the org that DOGE has now subsumed) has for a long while been experts at building and deploying static websites for the federal government. And doing it completely in the open. Within minutes you can literally clone and re-deploy all of httsp://usds.gov — 150MB of 2,700 assets and documents, built on Jekyll — locally or on S3. They've even written out the complete deployment instructions:
https://github.com/usds/website
But that’s only useful if the incoming people in charge don’t have any contempt towards existing employees and want to leverage best practices instead of pretending that they know better. Twitter had the same problem after Elon took over.
You mean the next incoming people
Yea so far DOGE doesn't seem like they take any time to ask questions or research before doing anything.
Move fast and break things is what built Silicon Valley and the modern world. It works, demonstrably.
The way the government has been run the past decades doesn't work, demonstrably. Every important metric has worsened.
It works? Are you sure?
Sure, it works great. And if the federal government fails, just call your favorite VC buddies and start a new federal government. Maybe one without one of those pesky constitutions. Why has nobody thought of this?
The VCs trying to build a new federal government is ironically what we're seeing here.
It works as long as you have investors shoving millions or billions into your behind so you can fix the fuckups
then they are in luck, they have the worlds largest investor behind them (US, Not Musk)
Doesn't work in what sense though?
This is a thing someone says if they think Silicon Valley was built in 2005. Semiconductor development built Silicon Valley, and it was not by my relatively limited understanding a "move fast and break things" process.
with a not-unsubstantial amount of federal (and CA state) money...
The U.S. government is a service with 330 million people who are both users and legal stakeholders, mandated to provide and maintain a variety of services and databases that predate the Internet and personal computing by several decades, and run by a publicly elected executive who is term limited to 8 years. Which Silicon Valley entity do you think comes close to the scope and continuity of service of the U.S. government?
Oligarchs don't want "government by the people, for the people". They want to own the government and rent it back to the people for massive profits.
err, Silicon Valley hates to admit it but the Federal government built Silicon Valley...and Tesla.
Yeah. This is the worst example of a lack of self awareness.
Move fast and break things started in 2005 which was exactly when Silicon Valley stopped producing companies that could make a profit and instead relied on endless fire hoses of investor cash
What's especially unfortunate is that experienced USDS employees had already achieved the one software engineering task that is basically impossible for a 19-year-old (or a newly hired USDS employee of any age): convincing a federal department manager that using a static website is a great solution — nevermind also publishing all of its source code and documents on a public github.
USDS really did represent the best of the federal government. They modernized hundreds of websites, brought accessibility and mobile access to the forefront, improved usability, and a lot of that work is invisible, slow, internal politics/battles.
Understandably everyone is upset about what "DOGE" is doing. But on top of those harms, the killing of USDS (or at least ending its core mission) is also a real harm.
I'm not a federal contractor nor employee, and I am a die-hard Pivotal zealot, so absolutely take the following with a grain of pink Himalayan rock salt:
Although overshadowed by Kubernetes elsewhere in the industry, I suspect that Pivotal's Cloud Foundry Platform as a Service (PaaS)--which the US General Services Administration's (GSA) internal digital transformation consultancy, 18F, adopted[0] in 2015 significantly influenced the software delivery philosophy of the federal government by making trivial heretofore disastrously cumbersome provisioning, staging, and deployment processes. The step away from hand-provisioned virtual machines to elastic, accommodating environments may have made agile development possible in federal offices, bringing our government into the 21st century, only fifteen years late.
I distinctly remember the switch from "here's your VM" to "here's my code," and--as an application developer--I never want to go back.
0. See: https://cloud.gov
To me, that's the most important goal of devops tools teams in practice:
"Internal team, what's your current greatest pain point?" -> Make that easier / faster / better
Move fast and break things.
Where have we heard this before?
They even broke the USGS earthquake maps. Yesterday morning you could check the site for new quakes anywhere on earth and end up with a really good idea where it was on earth because there were several map styles available as overlays - Terrain, gray scale, street, ocean, etc.
Yesterday afternoon the only map layer available was an ocean layer showing continents, islands, seafloor profiles etc with no place names available at all.
Late yesterday night or early this morning they added another layer, USGS topo, that has generalized landforms and cultural stuff like roads, with enough detail that you can zoom in and find your town here in the USA. The problem is that this layer is totally broken outside the US.
If you are like me and you're monitoring new activity in the Aegean Sea that topo layer is completely broken. If you zoom to a level where you would expect to see individual towns, etc you will find the Aegean Sea labeled as being in the Pacific Ocean and all the coastline and landform data completely broken so that it isn't possible to identify any of the islands that could be affected in the region.
If you look at all the seas in the Mediterranean you will find it labeled as the Pacific Ocean and that label persists all the way across the Atlantic at that zoom level until Bermuda where you can see the Atlantic Ocean label.
Frankly, whoever did this probably has a good start on eating a giant bag of dicks.
This stuff was incredibly valuable when my SO and I were on vacation overseas. Also, I'm sure there are a ton of consular and embassy employees around the world that rely on USGS data. It's just an accident that it's also exporting the work product of the US government overseas.
Is this DOGE's doing?
Yes.
It is happening contemporaneously with all the other bullshittery so I think it is a reasonable conclusion that DoGE personnel directed by someone likely unelected and so far unaccountable are the parties responsible.
I'm not sure why someone would intentionally destroy the utility of a site that has been extremely useful, not only for Americans but for people anywhere who needed to understand earthquakes and their local historical seismicity.
Probably broke when changing the Gulf of Mexico name.
I agree. That would explain all the place names for water features being broken.
I don't know. Stuff breaks all the time for other more mundane reasons too. I thought you had some inside info about it.
I'm not an insider. I'm a geophysicist. The USGS earthquake site is one of the sites that I cycle through multiple times a day if I get the opportunity.
I can't remember at time in at least the last 15 years when the site has not worked flawlessly serving data about new and historical seismicity from all over the globe in a way that allowed the user to customize the view to fit their own needs.
I agree with a couple of posters that think this may be an effort to rename the GoM to the GoA since all the place names are missing from the Ocean map and the places names that are present on the USGS topo map are full of stupid errors that suggest that they modified naming of water features and it broke something for their map layer.
As an oil and gas industry person I have to chuckle to think about all the things that have to happen for that industry to ever come into compliance with this bullshit renaming. There are thousands of wells in databases globally named with a Gulf of Mexico nomenclature. That's just the wells. Each of them likely has multiple dozen products with a GoM tag to identify the well it belongs to. There are probably millions of line miles of seismic data from dozens of large and small seismic data acquisition projects, all of which use GoM nomenclature since the standard nomenclature in the industry relates things to a Client, Line, Area, Survey or similar parameters so that if it happened in the Gulf it will have GoM in the name somewhere and in the metadata associated with the project since that is how you geolocate things in the industry. You reference it to an actual physical location known to less than a cm in many cases.
Sounds like a lot of busy work for anyone in the industry and possibly an opportunity for a consultant to step in and handle all the renaming that will need to happen if there is any effort to comply. They'll need to know multiple databases upside down and sideways since each operator manages things their own way. And they'll need to be comfortable sitting idle while the IT guys sort out access permissions for every legacy file and folder once they discover where the data management division has them stored. You'll also be the fall guy if some of the data gets corrupted but, shit happens. Sounds like a sweet gig.
Maybe it has to do with feature remaining. Maybe it's an upstream problem from a vendor dealing with the renaming. Either way it may or may not be DOGE specifically.
I believe they deleted all of the map layers because they couldn't figure out how to write "Gulf of America" on them instead of "Gulf of Mexico".
The most likely reason since it broke so many water features.
Pretty obvious that they aren't sending their best to do their dirty work. These DoGE guys are ultimately expendable and if things go south for the current administration the DoGE guys will need to be absorbent enough to handle all the blame that will fall on them when people begin to be held accountable. They need to be multi-layered Downy guys. The men at the top will slick themselves down with lawyers so it all slides downhill and hang everyone else out to dry once they are past their usefulness date.
That's what you get when you only have a handful of complete juniors reporting directly to a capricious CEO. There needs to be adults in the room.
This is so clearly not the case of an underexperienced team trying to accomplish something complicated and failing at it. The goal is to dismantle the government and that's exactly what they're doing.
There is no problem from their point of view, they are succeeding from their perspective, and musk's, and trump's and every other anti-america neo nazi shitlicker who got them there.
Exactly. All of this was stated in advance, in Project 2025 and in tech bro interviews about how much democracy sucks. These people are not subtle, smart, or original; however, they are completely amoral sociopaths who think they can destroy the US and own/control what’s left. I don’t think it’s going to work out as well for them as they think, but in the short and medium term Elon and his shitheels will do a lot of damage, and cause a lot of pain and death.
Oh, I am certain they are trying to destroy things on purpose, but I also think they are terrible at it. For example, watch the scramble as they try to rehire those safe guarding the nuclear arsenal[1]. It's a mess and someone competent could be doing it far better. I don't know if that's a small mercy or not.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/thousands-fired-trump-musk-...
They are just henchmen following whatever playbook was developed by some reactionary jerks. That’s why Elon and co look for dysfunctional personalities that are easy to control.
I see recent changes being made, are the prior timestamps available for archiving?
If you’ve checked out the git repo, you can go back to any point in the history and build that revision.
That is, until DOGE decides to rewrite (git) history.
Is that possible? Every commit id includes the hash of the parent commit forming a chain.
Yes, you modify the history uodating every commit after the changed one and then force push. Git has built in ommands to help. Anyone who has the repository cloned can tell if that happened because all the hashes will be different.
As long as your git hasn't garbage collected the old commits you can still them back. you can just create a branch pointing to the previous HEAD and the whole history will still be there.
Are they just running shell scripts off the public web for deploying federal gov sites that are targeted by nation states?
From the docker file:
A vein pops out in my forehead every time I see a shell script echoed from the internet into a prompt.
It's much better when it's done importing javascript snippets ...
Based on the heavy downvoting of my comment, I guess it's considered a good practice by folks now. shrug
It could be pulling these resources over http ;)
Edit: Whoops sorry, morning fog
[flagged]
What's moral about it?
The mistake is to assume our concept of morality is shared by the oligarchs.
The possible moral argument, is the government is funding a service that costs businesses revenue.
However it would be pretty insane to argue that a citizen of a country should need to pay money for someone to fill out a basic tax return to pay taxes…
I've had someone on this site say to me that it's because America embraces the free market, as well as it being the only country to have granular enough taxes to require a third party to handle it. It's incredibly hard because you can point to any other country to show examples of good (not perfect) implementations but then American exceptionalism takes over and they simply dismiss any advice.
It sounds like that particular someone might have had a vested interest in maintaining the current (terrible) status quo around filing taxes in America.
The rest of us hate it.
The one thing I've discovered as I’ve got older is that most people don’t have some insidious vested interest.
Complex political issues sometimes just come down to "I want my side to look good and I want the other side to look bad". In a system that treats Silicon Valley billionaires very differently to someone selling lumber in rural Ohio, sometimes that naked tribalism is the only thing that truly unites people in political parties.
Some people hate the IRS self-filing system because it works, and because the "other side" is taking credit for it.
The other thing I dicovered as I‘ve gotten even older than you is that some people absolutely do have insidious vested interests.
It’s just a demonstration that people are capable firmly believing any type of nonsense. Nobody who isn’t being fed a bunch of propaganda is concerned about the freedom to fill out forms.
Morals are a collection of ethics. Their ethics are that people who aren't billionaires are parasites, and that rape and overthrowing the country and murdering politics are acceptable, it's what everyone voted for. The guy in charge of the military has white nationalist tattoos and an unelected foreigner gave white power salutes behind the presidential seal, get used to it.
"Moral" can mean "of or relating to morality", not necessarily "exhibiting goodness".
American conservatives view governments as inherently evil: if the government can make it more convenient for people to pay tax, people might be willing to pay more tax (or at least object less to tax), allowing the government to spend more money, and since the government is inherently evil, it allows for more evil.
On the other hand, creating an office whose sole objective is to destroy other functioning parts of the government and make it less useful to people? Totally moral.
Don't ask me, I'm not a conservative.
You're arguing in the right direction, but you have the wrong basis.
American Conservatives don't believe the government is evil, they believe that not having control over the government is evil. The slash and burning of agencies and departments isn't just due to a deep seated hatred, it's a need for control. And in order to have control you need consolidation.
American Conservatives have no problems with state governments vastly overreaching their authority or punishing cities. They have no issue with potentially taxing workers more to issue tax breaks for corporations. And they have no issue using the government to punish, stalk or harass dissidents.
Governments don't have a particularly good track record, so why give them the benefit of the doubt? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democide
According to Rummel, democide surpassed war as the leading cause of non-natural death in the 20th century.
A government that is as weak as possible at least possesses less organizational capacity for murdering you when things inevitably go off the rails.
this obsession with government tyranny in the US is bonkers. Why is your default assumption that government will "go off the rails"?
Why is your starting point not the default for most reasonable people - that the government is literally people from that society trying to manage their own affairs and to help each other when possible?
while i get your point and agree over all
It kind of is right now...
Yeah I never understood the position of "Mind you, the government will go off the rails, elect me and I'll prove it to you!" and people who vote for that ...
... but then again, I'm not a conservative ...
Doesn't seem particularly hard to justify that assumption right about now.
Because the government (at both state and federal levels) has been not this for several decades now. Legislative capture is wild stuff.
I guess so but only if the weakness is in their ability to murder you.
This take should lead to less government POWER and involvement in individual lives though and doesn't match with policy that empowers an astronomically sized "defense" budget, lawmakers deciding how every woman everywhere should deal with pregnancy and health issues that affect pregnancy, or giving unbridled, unreviewed access to every citizens personal and financial data to unelected, unaccountable oligarchs.
I actually agree with your take - I have a lot of conservative views like you described about how government is inherently hard and flawed and risky so we should use it sparingly.
We've seen so much flying in the face of this recently that I make a point of not calling republicans conservative anymore, not to be pithy but just to try to bring some grounding to these culture war arguments.
Government is the best method we've found yet for dealing with the problem of other individuals and groups of people killing and exploiting you.
The state does not have an actual monopoly on violence, and never has. It merely provides a threat of organized, systematic retribution to try to prevent private-party violence. But that illegal violence still happens. Just at a lower rate than it would otherwise.
Remember that the alternative is not paradise, it is not a system that is "on the rails", it's everybody trying to murder you to get ahead. And in that world having a gun doesn't protect you - guns favor the one who shoots first. Does a tiny village from the past where everybody knows everybody and depends on everybody have that problem to a high degree, or need a large government? No. But that's not the world we live in.
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oh how i wish more people would avoid becoming lost in the details and see this system for what it very simply is
Time for my favorite intersection of critical theory[1] and systems theory: "The purpose of a system is what it does[0]"
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
[1] Ok, I admit, nobody but me has actually made the intersection between the two yet.
This was too deep for me. Pretend we have a system that works differently than intended. I could say it does not meet its purpose. This quote means something else. Am I wrong?
You say, “The system does not meet its purpose.” They respond, “The purpose of the system is what it does.”
In other words, there’s no point in arguing about the purpose. If you want the system to do something else, you have to change the system.
Ignore what anyone says the intent or purpose is/was. Is anyone motivated to change the system?
For a more traditional phrasing: "actions speak louder than words."
It's "revealed preference". The people at the controls don't want to change the dysfunctional system because it serves them personally.
Don’t think of it as a tautology, think of it as a heuristic
Let me give it a try. Is the purpose of USAID to promote the liberal world view and fund its political allies? From what we’ve learned, that’s what the system does.
Consider vaccines, crops, and disaster recovery and their Soviet alternatives, Comecon and GKES. I feel both sides saw an advantage in offering that through a bureaucracy rather than transactionally. The development shortfalls didn’t go away with the Soviet collapse, so whether that’s liberal I don’t know. But any such bureaucracy threatens uncovering the endemic corruption among transactional operators.
I see your point about it being a way to disperse carrots for political leverage. But it also looks a a lot like a Cold War version of teaching Afghans about the American constitution.
But the projects that are being funded today don’t resemble the ones in the 60s-80s. And thats not to suggest it previously was unbiased and now is politicized, but the parties and their values have changed. So that old bureaucratic organization has a new mission
Giving out crops promoted the idea that market capitalism brought prosperity. That isn’t enough for liberalism which has moved up Maslows hierarchy to meaning and purpose. Physical aid is merely a means for bringing the true goods - social justice, equity, inclusion, education, etc.
Out of curiosity, have you checked out these other works?
Design for Prevention (2010) ISBN 978-0-937063-05-7
Friends in High Places (1990) ISBN 937063-06-1
Have Fun at Work (1988) ISBN 0-937063-05-3
The New Plague (1986) ISBN 0-937063-03-7
POSIWID is mentioned in the first three works; engineer William L. Livingston authored the latter three.
If you think money is the motivation you just don’t understand politics. Money is a means, and the weakest form of power.
it’s both. money buys government which then makes you richer.
Kompromat buys it for free.
Why not just call it blackmail? Is there any evidence that Putin has more influence over our government than, say, Bibi does? That seems extremely difficult to believe. This feels a lot like centrist qanon.
What would $100 billion more do for them?
line goes up?
seems to be some sort of pathology
Part of this is a crusade though. There's very much a desire to rip out anything that is considered "woke" or "DEI". But the rest of it is just burning things down for the sake of burning things down.
I think the ripping out of woke stuff is mostly marketing for the political base. Sure, Trump and Musk have some personal stake in it too, but it's not the point.
I wouldn't say they're "burning things down for the sake of burning things down", though. The truth is somewhere between what you and gp are contending. There's no moral framework, but there is a framework. They're burning things down so that "the free market" can replace the things they burn down and capture the money that used to go towards doing those things for the public good, and instead do those things for a private profit.
Yeah, it is like the so called "Shock therapy" imposed on failing countries (like Russia in 1991 and some South american countries in the 2000s). The goal is to break down institutions so that more can be privatized.
Yeah and these guys are actually friends with Jeffery Sachs, who was the economist pushing for shock therapy in Russia in the 90s.
I strongly feel like these guys see what happened in Russia and see it as a success: the "weak" soviet union was replaced by a "strong" Putin-controlled Russia. The collapse in living standards, lawlessness, etc, was acceptable collateral damage.
It might actually be so bad that the last bad effects mentioned are part of the goal this time.
It is kind of funny that the people who complain about the "deep state" with some kind of goal actually create something similar with an actual goal.
They're getting rid of things that stand in Elon's way. CFPB was actively investigating complaints about Tesla and financing, for instance. It was also reportedly seen as a roadblock to turning Twitter into a payments platform.
I think it's more Libertarian extremists feeding the public an excuse to execute the Libertarian dream of minimal government oversight
That's yet to be seen. Going for a limited government would require closing a lot of these agencies down, that requires congress.
If the fear of fascism raised by some is accurate, it seems more likely we'll see these agencies gutted and rebuilt as whatever the Trump administration wants them to be instead. No smaller government, just a different one.
"No smaller government, just a different one"
I live in D.C. and many of my neighbors are non-political civil servants of all kinds. All signs point to a dramatically smaller and weaker federal government without congressional action.
Whether these agencies that congress created and funded for decades will continue to exist in any meaningful way is de facto getting decided by congress right now.
The Vought/Musk group has fired 200,000 employees already, and is offloading real-estate as quickly as possible. That action is consistent with gutting, but not rebuilding, these agencies.
So congress either has to exercise its power over the executive to prevent this in the next few weeks, or the loss of capacity will have occurred and rebuilding will take many years and be dramatically more costly than maintenance would have been.
Were those full-time employees or contractors of some type?
Normally I would just look this up myself, but things have been moving so quickly that the info I find is all over the place and I haven't found a short list of sources to trust.
My understanding was that they "offered" early retirement, not sure how much of an option it was versus a demand. I had also heard they cancelled a lot of contract work, I wouldn't consider that being fired but yeah it does still impact people similarly.
Elon is literally closing agencies like the CFPB and USAID down, in defiance of congress and the law. They are working under a legal theory that the president can do that, and are expecting their stacked supreme court to agree with them.
Is he? I mean this as an honest question, things have moved quickly enough that its hard to keep up.
My understanding that they have been temporarily closing offices or stopping work. I wouldn't consider that as "literally closing agencies" though, at least for me that reads as closing them down permanently rather than temporarily closing the doors.
I don't ask this to defend what they're doing at all. I think we could be much worse off if they're only gutting the agencies without closing them completely.
The executive branch has been given an immense amount of authority over the last half century or so, if that is used to rebuild different agencies technically still fulfilling congressional mandates for USAID or CFPB we could be in for a rude awakening.
Authority is fine when you agree with it, but as soon as the wrong person has that same power you may find you wish it was never granted in the first place.
Congress will only shut down these services if they don't perform. Musk is making sure they don't perform.
That wouldn't necessarily be true. Congress could better, more clearly define what they require of these departments and services.
Most of them were pretty weakly defined and they were given legal precedent to define what their own authority was (unless specifically defined by Congress). The departments could be kept with more clear definitions of what they need to do and what success looks like.
I don't see why the supreme court couldn't rule a lot of these departments unconstitutional. The justification for many of them is flimsy at best, and seems to be to be in direct contradiction to the "only those rights specifically enumerated" deal.
I wouldn't hold my breath for SCOTUS overturning precedence regarding the interstate commerce clause.
I don't actually think the question is whether a strong argument could be made there. There's no political will to challenge it.
"I don't see why the supreme court couldn't rule a lot of these departments unconstitutional."
Because they are, in fact, obviously constitutional. The mechanism for eliminating them contemplated by the constitution is for congress to pass a law eliminating them.
If you disagree with my view on this, perhaps you'll be persuaded by voluminous case law over decades upholding the constitutionality of all of these Federal government agencies in face of challenges of precisely the kind you're motioning toward.
Musk is such a tumour of a human that I think “it’s just money” is such a sloppy abdication of analyzing the situation.
How does deleting 18F translate into rich people taking money?
Let’s pretend to think that through a bit as an exercise. While it might not be Musk himself, who could possibly benefit from firing all the people who developed direct file?
Follow the money.
Why make it easy for people to submit their tax return - when the government already has the bulk of that info since their employer, their banks, etc, already reported it - when INSTEAD you can let rich people hawk their paid products to get money from people for it instead? While still requiring more effort.
The corruption era is very simple: the government won't be allowed to directly provide a service that someone else could make $$$$ by being a middleman for.
It's somewhat ludicrous to have to "file taxes" in the computer era in the first place, but there's a large ideological resistance to both taxes and the government that in some of the more paranoid wings of the country that is well-exploited by the rent-seekers here.
A failing/failed state leads to more corporate power and control. I think it’s that simple.
They only just launched Direct File after years of lobbying to prevent such a system by a consortium of accounting software companies[0]. If it falls apart people will continue to be forced to pay money to these companies just to file their tax.
As a comparison, in my country you could submit your own tax return using government supplied desktop software since 1999, and in 2015 that software was replaced with a web product. 1 in 3 people submit their own tax returns using this product.
[0] https://thisisunpacked.substack.com/p/irs-direct-tax-filing-...
In what way is it rich people taking money?
Time will tell but there's evidence that some government staff grew inexplicably wealthy while in office which would suggest corruption. Corruption in government is terrible for the average citizen, ask anyone from a country that suffers from a lot of it.
I really fail to see why auditing government spending is a bad thing?
What evidence?
I agree that in principle, it's great that spending is being checked and payments "audited" (I have no clue if thats actually what is happening, I assume it's no KPMNG audit). However, are they really being audited? Is this the manner in which this should be done?
I am not a Trump voter. I agree with the outcome they have stated - reduce stupid spending - but I have no idea thats the true motivation, the true goal and I disagree with the manner in which they are doing it. Just because you agree with the dictator doesn't make it right?
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/11/us/politics/trump-orders-...
Not to mention the whole Eric Adams quid pro quo. 7 prosecutors resigned when ordered to sign the dismissal! 7! Including people who were put in their jobs during the first Trump admin! It was finally signed by...a new DoJ appointee who was most recently employed as one of Trump's own lawyers. Holy shit!
It's barely started and the corruption is everywhere. It's blatant and out in the open, and it's disgusting.
I'm going to a protest today. I encourage others to do the same.
This is not an audit and this is not how you audit. Just about anyone could support doing an actual audit.
But you know what? All of these agencies are regularly audited. Every year, reports are all published. This is how it works https://www.fiscal.treasury.gov/reports-statements/financial...
Elon is operating an ideological mission conducted unprofessionally and with complete contempt for any public oversight.
One could argue the Audits were not very effective
Proof?
One could, but nobody is doing so
Those are a bunch of weasel words. You're giving a certain impression yet being vague enough that it's impossible to assess, argue or discuss the validity of that claim.
What evidence? Who are those 'some' staff? What's inexplicably wealthy?
There's a vast difference between government high-ups getting paid well and making money (as high-ups in any large organization might) and government organizations and their leadership and staff being generally corrupt.
Of course corruption is never impossible, partially because it can take forms that may be difficult to discern as such. But it's again impossible to assess that claim without substance.
They have money. What they’re getting is political power.
I agree, as you said in another comment, money is a form of power. The current actions seem to distribute the power amongst wealthy people through money and weakening the government instead of direct power like threatening congress or something like that. But the means don't really matter to me or to them so that is splitting hairs to me.
I'm just saying it's not that deep. There is not a meaning or moral that needs to be understood, there is no reasoning that could make them change their ways.
Let me put it one other way. Is the goal here for them to secure material comfort and luxury for them and their family? I don’t think it is.
This is it. What we're seeing is a Bourgeois coup: The silicon valley PayPal guys have become the wealthiest people in the country. Now they are trying to use that wealth to usurp political power.
I believe the old-money establishment countered the Occupy Wall Street movement by pushing wokism as a divide-and-conquer strategy. For about a decade, they had support from most of Silicon Valley, but this alliance weakened as global events forced some to reconsider how a divided America could face the challenges ahead.
Following Trump’s second term, the fresh-money establishment saw an opportunity to challenge the old guard. Setting aside their differences, they chose to unite.
https://www.businessinsider.com/silicon-valley-defense-contr...
They were soon joined by other tech moguls—Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Gates—who once opposed Trump but now see AI as their chance to wrest power from the old establishment.
The difference between sports and politics is that sports are always a duel, while politics, despite appearances, is always a three-player game.
there is no crusade or moral framework.
If you go to the doge website right now, there's a Libs of TikTok tweet shown on the main page. It reads:
The US government only recognizes two sexes: Male and Female. This needs to be changed immediately
There is absolutely a crusade going on, but I certainly wouldn't call it moral.
No, it is something more sinister than that. Trump is a puppet and his statements are flat out fabrications. Musk and DOGE do outrageous things which just happen to benefit foreign superpowers. Everything the two co-presidents do openly is a red herring meant to mislead and waste time.
Who in their right mind opens up RDP and Citrix servers to public internet in DoE and nuclear research laboratory networks?
Time is running very short. Foreign powers must be assumed to already hold all possible information about the US government, including nuclear secrets, warfare capabilities, emergency plans, and kompromat of all personnel and political oversight.
It won’t be long before the US nuclear arsenal mysteriously disappears.
Can you link to some sources / information here because I have no idea what you're talking about
https://cyberintel.substack.com/p/doge-exposes-once-secret-g...
You can use Shodan yourself to verify.
The servers were added to Shodan starting from Jan 14. Trump took over on Jan 20.
Doubtful. You have to squint your eyes really hard to see this "foreign agent" conncetion. Most likely, there are just greedy idiots at work here.
It's like pulling a heist 101. The best way to steal something is to create a distraction (like taking away people's rights and creating government chaos), and while everyone's paying attention to that, you run in the back a grab what you want. I don't know about giving it away, but taking it for one's own personal gain could be a very attractive proposition, stealing what you can't buy. Just some additional (scary) food for thought.
It's not a moral crusade, it's just a kleptocracy that uses a moral crusade as a fig leaf.
Two things:
1. To people saying that the government should have a direct way to file taxes. This is an outdated way of thinking. Most ordinary people shouldn't have to file taxes at all. Withholding is sufficient for income taxes and taxes on liquid investments.
2. 18F was an openly partisan organisation. They were likely disbanded not to kill the products they produced, but rather for their inability to remain politically neutral.
I, too, was born yesterday.
What do you mean?
It’s normal in many countries to not have to file until your tax situation becomes more complicated.
For most people, your employer handles your income tax on your behalf, your stock broker handles your capital gains tax etc.
It’s an XY problem, and direct file is like the faster horse.
I think the reply was to point #2
Please tell me how 18F is openly partisan. Also explain how most of Trump's hires are NOT openly partisan?
There's nothing moral about it. The profitability of the tax prep industry depends on taxes being hard to file. Lack of official free e-file is regulatory capture. Any associated blather about making taxes cumbersome to keep people mistrustful of taxes is a fig leaf, as is this case with most "conservative" viewpoints.
Without evidence that the Trump administration cares about protecting the tax prep industry, this is just a conspiracy theory.
Heck, the Trump admin wants to get rid of income tax entirely, so they're hardly the natural allies of the tax prep industry.
They are because they have an interest in keeping tax filing difficult and unapproachable, to keep public animus against taxes at its maximum. Coincidentally this is 100% in alignment with the tax prep industry whose entire existence is based on products which solve and handle the complicated tax situation.
As he said, conspiracy theory
You're wrong:
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1888326592096547245
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1886092387098796499
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1858872775395426553
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1873796626223161603
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1861824194113343870
Reforming the tax code and eliminating loopholes is orthogonal to making it easier to file. Closing loopholes doesn't hurt Intuit and H&R Block.
Simplifying the tax code makes it easier to file.
None of those tweets are about tax prep. They are about him personally wanting to pay less taxes.
If Elon wanted he could fund an opensouce alternative to Turbotax.
I am willing to bet 1k that Intuit's 2024 TurboTax Online and other Consumer Group revenue of $4.4 billion will remain above 4B in 2025.
Simplifying the tax code is about tax prep. The simpler the tax code, the simpler to file. Though what you say about him wanting to lower taxes is possibly true, none of those posts are about that.
I’m not and these tweets aren’t relevant to what I wrote.
Not relevant because you exclude Elon Musk from the "they" who "have interest in keeping tax filing difficult and unapproachable"? Because he is clearly not one of them: "Simplifying the tax code will increase productivity", "Crazy idea: let’s simplify the tax code", "The tax code needs drastic simplification!", etc. And he seems to have quite a bit of influence in the Trump administration.
The balance of actions taken by the Trump administration suggests it generally is in favor of doing whatever people who suck up enough and donate enough money want.
The history of lobbying on behalf of the tax prep industry is easy enough to find.
Is drawing a line through Trump's well-professed love of sycophants and people who make him money and that lobbying and motivation, to their current actions, so far fetched to you?
I think taking a wait-and-see approach to things like "Trump wants to get rid of income tax entirely" would be wise until we see where the implementation ends up. In the meantime lets talk about what has actually been done to date.
The fact that you need to pay to file taxes it's so distopic that only USA could have invented it
All this good work by 18f destroyed by this maniac.
I've learned about the USDS in the past on hackernews and was always impressed. If someone wanted to really make a "DOGE" in good-faith (i.e. improve efficiency of government instead of just destroying everything), I think it would look like expanding the power and scope of things like USDS.
I agree. Have always felt that USDS/18F are best in class examples of tech innovation being brought to perhaps slightly tech-backwards areas of government, and doing the interpersonal work to bring other agencies along as well.
The UK’s Government Digital Service is similar. They’ve got some good examples of doing unglamorous but impactful work -e.g. replacing dozens of different payment processing systems with one quality one, the same thing for sending physical letters, etc.
Are you sure this isn’t bias from your personal interest? Is IT and bad websites the problem with the government?
I also don’t buy Elon’s messaging that a database upgrade will save social security, or whatever.
Bad websites make the times we interact with the government much less efficient than it otherwise would be, especially if a artifice has no reasonable online alternative and instead required in person appointments, costing you time, requiring additional staff, and requiring office space.
One of the best examples of this is passport renewal. In the US until very recently you were unable to do this online, either having to print and mail in a form or go in person to an office.
Another example is the work of 18F to allow Americans easy direct filing of their taxes without the need (or cost) of a third party.
It is and was a pretty significant one, now less important compared to a literal seig-heiling nazi running the government.
Last time literal seig-heiling nazis ran a government, it wasn't great.
This is not what Elon is saying or doing or planning to do.
A SOP for static content, it feels great.
I use many SOPs daily. The principle is that if you can forget everything about it but the name, obtain the documentation, and relearn it, you should do about the same thing as without.
Though you can find SOPs similar to modern from 1950s USSR docs, the U.S. Navy ones like folding SOP or military shower SOP are especially pragmatic.
There's always a relevant XKCD.
https://xkcd.com/932/
Classical snake oil sales
Everyone knows investing in cybersecurity is just wasteful spending!
Is that really a surprise to anyone. DOGE is theater, a stage show.
They are doing tremendous damage for something that is supposed to be a stage show. Among everything they've done over the past three weeks, HUD is being gutted as we speak and the company a friend works at lost $100 million in contracts practically overnight.
I agree. My apologies. I didn't mean to diminish the damage they are doing.
$100 million to do what?
HUD is Housing and urban development. So probably something to do with building low income housing and other kinds of city planning.
I saw low income becsuse 100m is pennies for housing. You'll probably get a few neighborhoods if it's brand new housing.
Its an inverse Robin Hood attack. Take from the poor to give to the rich. The middle class is about to get moved from business class to coach. https://www.rawstory.com/gop-budget-2671154997/
YOU HAVE COMMITTED AN ACTUAL CRIME
The real damage that has already been done is almost certainly incalculable. As just a very small taste:
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/02/doge-as-a-nat...
The real question is when does something break that causes near-universal outrage. Unless something breaks in the near-term that most people care about, nothing will change.
And if it causes near-universal outrage, what then?
Near universal outrage is arguably part of what saved the ACA in 2017, though obviously infighting and incompetence by the GOP leadership was big piece as well— then again, outraged constituents jamming phone lines helps stoke those fires, particularly when it's card-carrying party members who are saying "yeah we'll vote GOP again next time, but not for you; fix this or you're getting primaried."
The real trick is that the outrage has to be enough to break through the right wing media smokescreen that's currently gaslighting half the country with "yeah well everything is about to get more expensive, but you actually want this, it's patriotic to be excited about higher household prices because it's all in service of making America great again, whatever that now means!"
And critically, it's not just Fox/OAN/Newsmax that are the problem, it's also the army of thousands of podcasters and influencers who repeat these talking points. Many of Joe Rogan's 11M listeners likely trust what he tells them considerably more than they trust what a talking head on cable says.
The flip side is that if dismantling a federal agency doesn’t break anything, and doesn’t cause near universal outrage, perhaps the federal agency can/should be dismantled at least temporarily?
Obviously a dangerous game to play, but it’s always safer to do nothing and sink slowly than to start ripping apart the hull at sea in order to fix the leaks. Both strategies have nonzero danger.
It's like removing smoke detectors in a house. Or stopping home inspections entirely.
It won't really cause problems. Heck, it will improve the economy in the short term.
Heh yeah to be clear I'm not saying the consequences won't be catastrophic. I'm saying that the gambit does have a success criteria: If we nuke half the federal government and there are no noticeable differences, then the premise that it was all waste is vindicated. A high risk gambit, to be sure.
I think you would need to wait tens of years to notice the effects of the US becoming unimportant, and China and Putin taking its place, as possible effects of removing USAID
That would be a noticeable difference!
DOGE is a complete farce, but I think there's an important to not just write this off as a stage show and the people buying into it as idiots. There are a lot of people who feel that government isn't working for them and so when they see things like "8 million dollars spent on condoms for Palestinians" they're already primed to get angry about it. Musk/DOGE's actions may all be for spectacle, but he's tapping into some very real emotions that he wouldn't be able to tap into if people felt the government was working for them. DOGE is a symptom of a larger problem. Even if Musk and DOGE are completely discredited, if we don't figure out a way to make it so the average citizen feels like they're getting their money's worth from the government, it's just a matter of time until someone else steps in to exploit that feeling for their own gain.
"... it's just a matter of time until someone else steps in to exploit that feeling for their own gain." Someone just did ...
The idea being that if common sense prevails and folks realize what a shit show/farce this DOGE thing is.... the underlying issues that allowed DOGE to exist in the first place will be unsolved.
Exactly. That's one thing that disappointed me about the US Democratic party after the first Trump election -- a complete lack of curiosity into why people voted for him.
Maybe people were voting for him because they were dumb? Or they were lied to?
But neither of those change the importance of understanding what those people wanted.
You can't win elections without understanding what most people actually want.
I think maybe 1 in 20 people I know have any clue about government waste, but they all have a "feeling" it's happening and it's the worst it's ever been. It takes very little these days for people to catch these vibes, and even littler to associate it with Democrats who are for social security.
This despite the fact that Musk is mostly firing investigators who were seeing if his company's were a budget waste. I guess we just have to assume agencies that say "black" are bad and what we really need to spend money on is luxury EV vehicles that can play angry birds. Surely not a conflict of interest.
There is no arguing with people who don't know what they want. This is all propaganda fueled hysteria.
I cant tell if this is intentional irony or poe’s law.
When democrats that are curious about why people vote for Trump, conclude that the voters are dumb or naive, it’s kind of an unintentional demonstration of the kind of thinking that turns people away from the Democratic Party.
My point was that if they conclude that Trump voters are dumb or naive (i.e. the most dismissive judgement), even that still doesn't remove the need for Democrats to understand what those same people want.
The smug "some people are dumb, so I'm going to ignore them instead of being curious" elitism has lost the Democratic party two recent elections.
My hot take is, social media alongside with TikTok showed the world to some people who usually wouldn’t venture out of their small bubbles. Eventually they see significant positive things about other countries, and a lot of negative about theirs. This subconsciously brings up “we have it worse for sure!” emotions in some people, that later translated into whatever it is right now when some people started targeting and exploiting these feelings.
I have no source, no data, nor examples to defend my point, it’s just the vibes.
TikTok, Twitter etc show extremely distorted views of the world, just other bubbles.
And that's just enough to feel shitty about your direct environment.
Re: this report that USAID was sending condoms to Gaza, that was actually in Gaza, Mozambique (which has one of the world’s highest rates of HIV/AIDS), not Palestine. Maybe they knew, maybe not. Anyway, I know many people who have been parroting that stat, so it was effective propaganda.
This is straight from Elon's playbook at Twitter. Cherry-pick some things that sounds bad, find a few real bad things, mix those all together and pretend they are equal, then dribble that out to people while feigning outrage/shock.
And remove any suggestion that there was forethought. It's pure, unfettered trolling. He's desperate for attention from anyone.
Fascinating—if unfortunate—to see the world's 2 most powerful men basically functioning as walking test cases for classic outcomes when a child is not given appropriate attention/affection and also zero boundaries for socially-appropriate behavior.
It reminds me of the "treadmills for shrimp" thing that people used to say that research money was being wasted on about 14 years ago. Every intellectually lazy politician acted like we were spending all our research money on making sure that shrimp were exercising.
The "treadmills" were used to measure the effects of bacteria on shrimp metabolism. Understanding how bacteria affects metabolism, at least to me, sounds like a perfectly valid thing to research. Most people, if they knew the context around that would probably agree, but people are extremely lazy with this stuff, and are really susceptible to stupid catchphrases, so people thought it was a huge waste of money.
ETA:
https://www.npr.org/2011/08/23/139852035/shrimp-on-a-treadmi...
I'm pretty convinced that he's running a SQL query like `select * from transactions where recipient like '%gaza%'`, grabbing the first item that looks suspicious, doing absolutely no research on what that item actually was, and then typing out the first thoughts he could about it on twitter.
Frankly, something DOGE has shown me is how lazy Musk is. I know he's the CEO of like twenty companies, but if what he's doing with DOGE is any indication, he has absolutely no attention to detail and is completely averse to actually learning or understanding what he's talking about. Like, every effort in DOGE is coming off as decidedly half-assed.
It makes me glad I don't own a Tesla, because I would be terrified to see what kind of corners they cut, and how much of it would end up being completely half-baked and not ready to actually be used. I'm not completely convinced that NASA contracting out to SpaceX is a good idea anymore either.
Anyone on "the other side" (problems with that framing aside for now) who doesn't understand and accept this is only serving to make the problem worse. This is the result of people's disillusionment with government from both sides of the aisle reaching a boiling point. Anyone could have seen it coming, and anyone who wants to fix it needs to understand where the other side is coming from, and not just paint them as evil stupid idiots.
Compromise. It's essential to peaceful co-existence of a group of humans of any size. At some point along the line, America seems to have lost that quality.
I think not only compromise, but more importantly communication. Like it or not, the other half of the country is also part of the country, and you cannot claim to be in support of the public without covering half of the public. The first line should be consensus, and when consensus isn't possible a carefully balanced compromise should be attempted.
If the left or the right disagree on even language and core cultural issues, they both need to find ways to communicate and evolve that allows for a peaceful coexistence. The notion the other party is a stupid or evil adversary incapable of enlightenment is poisonous, it forbids communication. Even if your adversary is indeed stupid and/or evil, it is far better to talk to them and if not change their mind, explain yourself in a language they understand (that includes a language they don't find outrageous or absurd!), leaving open the door to seeing your point of view. Even if they want to destroy you, it is a much better strategy to show you're not all that bad than escalating or just giving up. Of course, there are always voices that profit from discord, and human nature is perhaps attracted to antagonism. But we shouldn't let that go out of control, for the benefit of everyone.
If we're wrong about something, it's to our profit to learn from an adversary. This is the main lesson I think we should be taking -- even if being wrong is painful or sometimes isolating. Also logically, don't isolate those who think a little differently from your cultural heterodoxy, for the case they might have good reasons you just don't understand yet.
I think the old customs of being, and of course appearing, respectful were in part norms created for this. By behaving respectfully you're showing a willingness to learn and be wrong. By shouting, offending and imposing your opinion you're demonstrating you might be closed to other possibilities even if they are wrong, sometimes for very misguided reasons like ego, pride, or power. It's clearly then particularly important to act respectfully with those who are your adversaries or with whom you disagree (since perhaps you'll be more inclined to hear those who you already mostly agree with).
In summary: communication, compromise and respect.
Remember when there was a bipartisan bill to fix immigration that had a good deal of compromise in it, and it was all set to pass until Trump told the republicans to tank it so that Biden wouldn’t get credit for it?
It would be a lot easier if they weren't so god-dammned stupid and plausibly evil.
I do not feel the need to compromise with "White Power" or "We need to find a way to safely inject bleach".
That isn't what I'm suggesting, and the fact you jump to that conclusion is precisely what I'm referring to...
How would you compromise with "white power"?
Y'all really doubling down on this whole "77 million people are white supremacists" huh?
You understand this means that the other 75 million people are actually looking to mutilate children, destroy the concepts of sex and gender, abolish all of the police, and are aggressively racist against white people, right?
They voted for people that are working to reinstitute Jim Crow apartheid, are pushing for ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the hostile annexation of Canada, canceled federal celebrations of MLK Jr. Day, put tattooed white supremacists in charge of the US Military apparatus, think "there are good people" on both sides of a white supremacist terror attack on Americans, turned Guantanamo Bay into a concentration camp while furiously deporting immigrants of color yet opening the door to white people aggrieved by the aftermath of the fall of South African Apartheid, and constantly boost/reply/repost white supremacist propaganda including normalizing white replacement theory. Just a short list of real things off the top of my head.
It's possible that their perspective on the outgroup is not entirely "fair and balanced."
As a white American the concept of "racist against white people" is laughable. The right's obsessive persecution complex while enjoying the bounties of the greatest empire of human history is childish in the extreme. Like toddlers, but with the power to destroy all of human civilization.
75 million people don't care that the person they voted for attempted a coup by trying to have the results of an election overturned. They may not all be white supremacists, but they sure don't support democracy. And that's dangerous.
Because I'm annoyed when people get it wrong
- Children aren't being mutilated and anyone who believes this is a willing mark or has a toddlers understanding of science
- the concept of "Gender" is actually very important to a lot of trans folks, as it turns out. My "Sex" is about as relevant to my day to day as my blood type, and I think people who obsess about my chromosomes are fucking weird
- We should abolish all the police - got me there.
- White people don't exist as a racial category with any meaningful definition except as a catch-all for groups meant to exclude. It's not a race, it's a country club with a pantone guide.
Hope that helps, and I hope you find whatever it is you are looking for.
This is fake news that one search will clear up for you. Please stop repeating it.
To read this in any other way than "The president suggested we blast people with UV rays or inject them with disinfectant - such as bleach, the disinfectant he just mentioned as being effective" feels like a tremendous amount of mental gymnastics, bordering on willful ignorance. Cross your eyes and maybe I'm being flippant about "bleach", wherein he only merely suggested injecting "disinfectant", which renders him a genius, I imagine?
He ranted about two common disinfectant strategies for inorganic materials and suggested they use them on people, because he's not particularly bright.
Edit: Also worth mentioning that the following day when asked what he meant by that, he did not say "I did not ask about injecting bleach", he said "I asked about that sarcastically".
So it would appear not even Mr. Trump agrees with your statement.
I stand by my comment. Thank you for sharing the full quote.
Yes. Fact: trump did not say to inject bleach. He also did not tell the public to inject anything.
Sorry, let me spell it out for you;
I refer to this incident colloquially as "The time trump told us to inject bleach", which would be more accurately described as "The time the president of america was so balls-on stupid that he rambled for five minutes about doctors using bleach and UV disinfectant to fight Covid, a ramble so incoherent that the CDC had to issue a warning to ignore what it appeared he was suggesting."
I have no desire to treat the "intelligence" behind that statement - or those with full throated support of his incredible genius - with any authority.
The "White Power" was the evil (though, quite stupid in its own right) part. The "Bleach" was the "stupid" part of my comment, and I stand by it.
Communication is a two way street, and the fact that people heard “inject bleach” means that’s what Trump communicated. That we are arguing about this years later proves the point. You can say that’s not what he meant, but that’s what he communicated. He had experts there that day who are eloquent and have precise command over the science and the English language, unlike him. He chose to sideline them because his ego wanted attention, so he confused the nation at a time we were in need of clarity. He played no role except to make everything worse. His absence would have been the best thing he could have done for everyone that day. Failure of leadership at a critical juncture.
The problem is that the republican party has had a "no comprimise" policy for a while. It's like they put the party before the country.
… what?
The Republican Party was the one saying “either agree with us unconditionally or you are a Nazi” for the last 10 years?
The Republican Party was the one ignoring the many crimes of Biden’s son because it would hurt the party?
Ironically, this proves the parent comments point.
This is quite literally what is happening.
This strikes a chord with me, perhaps because I'm one of the people who "feel that government isn't working for them."
- government spending has been rampant and completely disconnected from available funds
- "shutdown" threats, typically a sign that a red line is being crossed, has been treated as political currency
- funds going from taxpayer (individual and corporations) to government, to be redistributed for an ever-increasing list of grants, programs, and studies
- locked-in mega spending areas of the budget showing plenty of warning signs of unsustainability, with nothing being done to address
Even if DOGE is "all for spectacle," I'm having trouble finding the downsides of DOGE's actions for generations coming after us. But maybe someone could help me understand why they feel differently?
I feel like what's happening right now is a double leg amputation while all you had to do was to treat the gangrenous toe. Or two parents discussing one's infidelity in front of their 7 years old kid.
Like sure it'll get you somewhere, but what will you break/lose in the process? And what will you gain?
It's not "all for show", I don't think Americans understand how they're unraveling decades of soft power, eroding the trust they were already losing on the international stage, &c.
It's not just spectacle. It's destroying government agencies with decades of institutional knowledge on how to run the richest and most powerful country in the world. None of us even know most of what these interconnected institutions do, a lot of which does affect our lives in a very real way.
Sure, a lot of these agencies are doing wasteful things and there is a lot of room for improvement. Meanwhile, it's a slow and humongous beast that's very difficult to reform.
However, thinking that these institutions have no value is a great mistake. So is thinking that a few teenagers can improve things by firing people and dissolving agencies in the course of a few weeks. Needless to say, there is no historical precedent for something like this working.
You can take the position that it will just get a lot worse before it gets better: "destroy everything and build it from scratch". It's often tempting but almost never a good idea, even for software will projects. On the level of a government, this idea is actually insane and I have no doubt that people will find out why, unless they stop breaking things.
The way DOGE is shutting down things is extraconstitutional. They are essentially saying they have the power to shut down Congressionally appointed agencies, which is explicitly against the Constitution. They are creating a situation where in future generations, whatever power comes in can change everything, creating immense instability. Congress is supposed to pass laws, and the Executive is supposed to implement them. They can't choose not to implement them, because it would allow them to declare a valid law null and void. This is known as "impoundment" and it was explicitly made illegal by Congress after Nixon, but the Constitution spells out why the idea is so absurd -- it's not a power the President has.
So what are the downsides of DOGE's actions? They are fully upending the Constitutional order of checks and balances. I personally thought it was an okay system, but really it seems like enough people are willing to ignore it, that the Constitution is effectively suspended.
I'm a bit mixed. Here's a smattering of thoughts:
I also think the government is inefficient. The median effective tax rate (sales, both halves of FICA, state income, federal income, unemployment, property, gas, "sin" taxes, ...) in the US is in the 40%-50% range, and that's apparently not close to enough to pay for everything. We market ourselves as being a low-tax country, but that's a higher percentage than a median Brit pays (35-45%) and not much lower than Germany (50-60%). France kind of sucks on that front (60-75%), but it's about the worst offender, and at least in those countries you have free healthcare (the cost of which bumps taxes+healthcare to be worse in the US than France even). The US is very expensive if you're not very well-off.
I get that it's more complicated than this, but we went to war back when taxes were 2%. How is it that after 250 years of technological innovation we suddenly need half of everybody's individual output just to keep the country running?
So, what changes has DOGE found? For a couple I agree with (one strongly, one with reservations), my back-of-the-envelope estimates suggest that the median American spends $0.50/yr on penny minting and $50/yr on the EPA. I certainly wouldn't mind $50.50/yr in my pocket (nearly double that in equivalent pre-tax wages).
Pennies do seem useless, and I wouldn't even mind going up to quarters or dollars as the minimum divisible currency unit.
The EPA is a tougher call (if the proposal were actually making it more efficient instead of just gutting it and letting corporations run rampant). On the one hand, I'd be willing to pay much more handsomly than that to actually have clean water, clean air, soil near my home without lead or other poisons, .... On the other hand, $10B+/yr is a lot of money for what the EPA does, and I'm still unable to even buy lead and cadmium free dog bowls and coffee mugs without trusting the manufacturer's pinky promise or testing it myself. Somehow, the "don't poison us with things we definitely know are very toxic" directive doesn't apply if you figure out a new shape to mould that poison into. To achieve the same real-world outcomes the EPA has over the last couple decades, you wouldn't need near that much cash.
Even if I agreed with those whole-heartedly though, and even if DOGE finds an extra $2.5k/yr of my taxes being used on things which don't benefit me at all and I'm callous enough to not care about that money's potential impact on others (which looks like a reasonable upper bound given that the strategy seems to be gutting every department that Trump or Musk doesn't like, and those are a drop in the bucket of the federal budget), I still think the cost of DOGE exceeds those gains. Somewhat equivalently, I'd happily pay $2.5k/yr to make a shitshow like this never happen again.
Why though?
The big one is that Musk and Trump have a history of fraud and abuse for personal gain, and their current actions look much more like a dictatorial power grab than evidence that they finally want to do the right thing. Some examples:
1. Which federal agents are being let go? The ones who investigated Trump after he broke countless laws. He's not trying to hide it; he's seeking revenge on people even tangentially related regardless of how much benefit they do or don't have for the country, when he's the one who broke that many bloody laws in the first place. That matches the hypothesis of "vindictive and power hungry" much better than the hypotheses of "making America great again" or "no worse than the status quo."
2. One of the first things Musk did was download the personal details of every US citizen and inject his own code into the treasury. They already (seemingly) have the power to shut down departments on a whim. What purpose does this extra power serve? It's worse than the status quo (explanation already beaten to death on HN here, I won't elaborate), and it doesn't help with the "making America great again" promise. It _does_ give Elon and any unscrupulus programmers (luckily everybody in DOGE passed their background checks with flying colors...) enormous power though.
2a. He's shipping that data off to MSFT to process it with AI. What in the ever living fuck is going on there? It's hard enough to get the DMV or a court to treat you like a person, and we want to throw current-gen AI into the mix? Have you seen Google's customer support? If I have to make a new gmail account and lose historical data then that's unfortunate. If I'm added to one of the list of real, US citizens ICE has "accidentally" deported because of some hairbrained idea to use more AI in the government....
3. Which departments are being shut down? If you need a hint, it's only departments that help ordinary people and hurt large corporations. Picking on the CFPB as an example, DOGE successfully saved the US $0.8B/yr (yayyy!!), a department which in a single maneuver saved US citizens $4B/yr (5 full years of funding, for reference). Is that making America great again? Maybe you like defrauding vulnerable people by adding overdrafts back to their previously non-overdraftable accounts just to fleece them for a few hundred dollars, but that doesn't look like it adheres to either Trump's or DOGE's stated visions. It, instead, looks like a transfer of power from the people to the newly elected Trump and unelected Musk.
4. Trump controls the house, senate, and supreme court right now. He could at least get off his arse and do that power grab the right way. Getting these changes signed into law would make it much harder for future presidents to revert them. That seems like a good thing if you're trying to make the country better (the stated purpose). A flurry of extra-constitutional executive orders, some of which will stick just because they have to work their way through the courts and because of the sheer volume, serves to increase personal power at the expense of the separation of powers in the government.
And so on. I can't point to a single thing being done and say it looks more like protecting the American people than it does creating a new dictatorship. Some of the actions might benefit me (e.g., I'm happy about the penny thing), but not enough by a long shot to overcome the downsides.
It’s also important to consider the upcoming tax cuts. Don’t assume the efficiency savings are to return $50.50 to your back pocket.
I think tearing down organizations and infrastructure that do actual good in order to stage this show is a huge downside. The US is going to lose an incredible amount of legitamcy and soft power around the globe.
The administration has presented no plan to meaningfully cut costs, it is just producing propaganda that people eat up without thinking.
It sure seems like a lot of folks want change. I just wish we had used that momentum to build consensus and empower experts to improve things. Instead, the trolls got the attention and are leading us on a snipe hunt while the rich get ready for another tax break.
Is going to?
It already has. America has in three short weeks burned bridges with multiple countries that will not be rebuilt
it's like saying "stop taking my taxes" and then later wondering why the roads are full of potholes, your tap water is no longer drinkable and your air quality sucks and your life expectancy is down.
oh, but maybe you don't care about any of that, for X reasons; those things may not be important to you, but other things are, like maybe not being swindled by your bank (CFPB) or being able to enjoy visiting a National Park. Or maybe there's nothing that you care about, but there are millions of other people who do care.
In what way is that? I feel that a lot of people who say things like that expect the impossible and don't actually realize how extremely privileged their lives are from all of what a modern society offers them.
Any time the government tries to do something for The People, the wealthy and their mouthpieces get a portion of the population to believe the much needed help is actually evil socialism/communism and will destroy their way of life.
America has been propagandized to by the wealthy for a century and this is the end result. The world's richest person reforming the government for profit.
It's vibes based FUD around medicine and government spending from people that have done nothing to look into it but talk in a bar with their friends about it. They have no idea how to articulate what is happening, where we're spending the money, how it scales with other things we spend money on. It's just headlines.
It is absolutely possible to have feelings and still be an idiot for acting on them in certain ways. Someone who "feels" that vaccines are a hoax and they should drink bleach instead is still an idiot despite that feeling. There is also a sort of gray area where a person may act irrationally due to intense feeling in a way that's perhaps excusable (e.g., someone's relative dies and they start smashing things in a fit of grief), but it's still a bad idea. We have to hope that more people are the latter category and will wake up and realize what a mess they've made.
if people felt the government was working for them
There's two things you need to make people feel the government is working for them:
* good social policies
* adequate education
One of the US parties has been working for decades to sabotage both, and with the help of the media they've successfully managed to deflect all the blame for it. So no, I don't agree that DOGE is a symptom of a larger problem -- unless you mean that the problem is 50 years of consistently undermining the government.
Since 1993 there were 20 blue years and 12 red years.
Why wasn't it fixed?
Those were mostly purple years; the United States isn't—at least, when functioning approximately according the the Constitutional rules, which has suddenly become an important qualifier—a unitary executive dictatorship.
Because presidents didn't used to act like kings. It's extremely common for the House and/or Senate to swing opposite the President:
https://history.house.gov/Institution/Presidents-Coinciding/...
There's also the problem of Democrats being absolutely terrible at organizing and uniting.
it may be a stage show, but it has real consequences. A huge number of NIH grants awards have not gone out. Already, I am facing a 15% shortfall in my budget from a grant that was all set to be awarded. This is not tenable kind of behavior form a major institution, and DOGE dog and pony show disgusts me.
The numbers they claim to save are like trying to turn your household budget around by cutting out a weekly latte.
If you really want to make big financial changes, you need a lot more income, or cut serious costs - like a car payment or downsize your house. In the case of DOGE, I haven't seen them touch DoD or any of the massive medical programs, etc.
If they do cut $2T, there will be a huge recession — worldwide impact, but potentially has EU and China (and India?) all trading more with each other than at present, so plausibly results in China having a larger nominal GDP after the dust settles.
I kinda expect the senators to prevent it, but we will see.
The recent executive order for filling vacancies or whatever basically said doge can't touch dod or dohs.
Have you considered that they are going after the low-hanging fruit, getting in "reps & sets" before they attack programs that have vastly greater inertia and potentially bi-partisan support? DoD and healthcare cover a ton of jobs, and might actually trigger pushback from Congress, in ways that annihilating the CIA's propaganda arm (which is basically a handful of overpaid bougie Dem-leaning "journalists") doesn't.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/wikileaks-usaid-has-been...
If they are small and don’t matter than why will it bother anyone? Let them mess around with their ineffective side project?
The answer is it does matter because it’s funding things both parties have an interest in.
It took twelve hours to get one of the vandalized pages taken down.
https://bsky.app/profile/pxtl.ca/post/3li5vddrkw227
Only the most viral ones: https://bsky.app/profile/boehs.org/post/3li5m3cekec2s
They still have not successfully purged the database, though the endpoint has been secured.
Hah, that one's still up even now.
It seems Elon's DOGE boys aren't as tech-savvy as he made them out to be
Pretty par for the course for so called "10x Developers".
That's what happens when you believe the l337 hacker hype the script kiddie tells you about themselves.
It's just an information page about the cuts that have been made, 404 could have reported this to the admins first but needed the clicks...
Nah, this is an important story about how incompetent the developers are who have taken it upon themselves to dismantle the US federal government.
It's just an information page about spending cuts, everyone in the thread is overreacting and embellishing.
It's not an overreaction. It's a demonstration of how incompetent and lackadaisical the developers are that have been given totally free reign over government systems and data. If anything this thread is underreacting.
DOGE is an autocratic power grab, and there's immense risk of damage, whether intentionally or through incompetence.
Computer Fraud and Abuse Act makes altering a government database, even if left openly exposed, illegal.
That’s why we’re purging the folks who investigate and enforce the law.
The same dudes who stood up this page are now writing COBOL to determine what cuts to make. Sounds like a great outcome.
Minimizing government spending is a good thing. Bloated and inefficacious programs need to be scrapped. Optimistically, programs that do not enrich only the legislative class will spring forth due to the new demand for better audit trails/logs.
You don’t know that though.
I bet if you poke around nvidia.com you can find some bad Wordpress sites. Does that mean the GPU engineering is bad?
https://balajis.com/p/americas-175-trillion-problem
Might have something to do with all this.
After reading this line you can easily identify that author is either propagandist or moron.
This is how Russia "increased GDP":
And in process doubled mass of local currency in economy from 2022 from 65 trillion rubles to 117 trillions.
Economy is booming!
Your post is more a criticism of including military spending in GDP, not anything particular to Russia's GDP-PPP calculation.
I could be wrong, but my impression is that GDP is usually thought of (by non-economists) as a trailing index that has some sustainability baked in, by inertia if nothing else. Military spending would normally track reasonably well with that. What Russia is doing... doesn't sound sustainable.
1. The Russian economy is more robust than expected. I recommend RUSI's recent work on the subject: https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentar...
2. Russia only needs to sustain its current war effort longer than Ukraine can sustain its own war effort. Considering that Ukraine is heavily dependent on external aid just to maintain its current ability to lose slowly, and its single most important source of foreign aid is trying to drop it like a bad habit.....signs point to Russia's economy having enough runway to achieve some kind of victory, after which they can dial down the production levels and return labor to the civil sector.
This is a very late reply, but whatever. My point is what Mr. Bloody Dictator is doing is just plain dumb. Even for some super fans of Putin who completely ignore tens of thousands civillians Russia killed in Ukraine, millions of refugees, etc.
Russia demography was abysmal long before COVID due to pre-WW2 and WW2 ripple effects. And during this invasion country lost like ~500,000 man dead or severely crippled and probably twice that amount to migration.
Basically in a few years country efficiently lost like 3-5% of it's working populaton with another 5-10% moved to produce "munitions" or something that will rot till next big war. Anyone who try to sell this as economy growth is a moron.
And btw it's exactly Japan scenario except for different reasons:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Russia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Japan
It's not "dumb". The Russian National Security establishment considers a NATO-integrated Ukraine[1] as an Existential Threat. Their cost-benefit analysis is working with different criteria than what you are including in your value assessment.
Yeah, Russia's demographics are fucked and I don't think they are doing enough to fix that. But you are leaving out some relevant data: https://unric.org/en/ukraine-over-6-million-refugees-spread-... There's roughly 1 million Ukrainian refugees who relocated into Russia. I don't know the breakdown, how many of those are able-bodied working age men or fertile women, but the point is the math isn't as clear-cut negative as you are presenting.
Y = C + I + G is one of the most foundational equations in Introductory Macroeconomics. G = government spending...including stuff like bombs and tanks that sit in storage for decades. Arguing that military spending does not contribute to economic growth is just tilting at windmills.
Here's some reading to support this:
National Bureau of Economic Research: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w15496/w154... During World War II and the Korean War, real GDP grew by about half the amount of the increase in government purchases. With allowance for other factors holding back GDP growth during those wars, the multiplier linking government purchases to GDP may be in the range of 0.7 to 1.0
LeMonde: https://archive.is/UK1MM#selection-2013.256-2017.478 To pay bonuses and salaries, the state spends "between 1,500 and 2,000 billion rubles a year." As a result of the considerable sums spent on the war economy and the payment of contract workers, a largely consumption-led growth has emerged. Gross domestic product jumped 4% year-on-year in the second quarter, according to a preliminary estimate by Rosstat, the Federal Statistics Service, published on August 9. Unemployment is at an all-time low of 2.6%. Based on these macroeconomic parameters, the World Bank placed Russia on its list of "high-income" countries in July.
[1] https://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-president-signs-constitution...
It’s all bluffing and posturing and smoke and mirrors
Is that really how Elon became the President :)
Wonder if the pitchforks will come out this year or the next?
So many programs and jobs have been gutted so the orange man and his kleptocracy cabinet can get their $4.5T in tax cuts for the ultra wealthy [1]
I’m not impacted but this shit is really tiring. It’s painful to see American public be so ignorant and buy into the neoclassical economic lies.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/house-republicans-budget-blueprin...
Unauthorized access or modification of any government website, even if it is left openly accessible, is illegal under laws such as the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) in the U.S.
Thats lucky, only the US is able to access the internet
Hack the planet.
well then, good thing they're gutting the law enforcement agencies
The DOGE website currently does not have an acceptable use policy.
Modification of the site is as unauthorized as access to the site -- undefined.
The domain ends in dot gov
Russians, who happen to also have Internet access, are definitely afraid of violating CFAA.
Is it a government website?
Oh now you want laws
Trump/Elon fascism/heroism (depending on your point of view) aside, one thing that concerns me is how quickly is it possible to decide that 1000 employees at a place like the Department of Energy, including 300 at the National Nuclear Security Administration, can be dismissed without any impact on the effectiveness of these agencies.
Even if you do believe that these agencies are bloated with workers who are doing "unnecessary" work, which is possible, it seems very unprudent to make cuts so quickly. And who is qualified to make these decisions? Elon? Some Tesla or SpaceX engineer who wrote some code and put up a website? Come on. WTF do they know about how all these agencies operate and the downstream effects? You think they're taking the time to really think it through?
Now it's possible that prior to taking office, Trump had people with deep understanding of government operations go through everything, and really think things through, and prepare a list of jobs that could be cut without any impact, but if that is the case, it's never been said. Given who Trump has around him to lead these agencies (McMahon for Dept of Ed? An Oil and Gas Lobbyist for BLM? Really?) that doesn't seem likely.
Move fast and break things works fine for a start-up, and might even be fine for more cultural type stuff ("DEI"), but Dept of Energy?
It's like firing two-thirds of your sysadmins because "well, we haven't had any issues with our servers lately, and no breaches, so those people must not be needed".
I have been waiting 30 years for this to happen so I am excited while remaining optimistic.
If the systems and Nation is as fragile we have bigger problems than the Chaos Monkey unleashed at the Federal level.
Do people think Nuclear reactors will go unmanaged or Prisoners will go unfed? I suppose it is possible and time will tell.
We were lied to by the Government. The new administration may be lying as well. I think we will all learn a lot.
Considering the powers that be attempted to remove the current President through kinetic means I would imagine he is going to move as fast as possible.
The “powers that be tried to remove the current President” , not sure who those powers are (please spare me the “deep state” nonsense I expect higher order thinking here), but Trump attempted a violent overthrow of a democratic election. If you’re okay with that, then you and I have very different ideas of what democracy is. Coincidentally I’ve been hugely critical of the US government (regardless of party) most of my life, especially US foreign policy and military, and inherently like the idea of a shake up a la Young Turks style. But all that aside democratic ideals are the only thing that makes the US better than China or Russia, and Trump lost what little credibility he had left as someone who upholds democracy when he tried to stay in power 4 years ago and then doubled-down by pardoning the rioters. And that, my friend, trumps everything else.
No, the administration is lying. We Canadians were getting the blunt end of it.
I don't think it's been covered much in American media but President Trump is throwing threats of 25% tariffs on both Mexican and Canadian imports for the last month or so. First it was about how it would make manufacturing move back to the US. Then it was about how Canada is a national threat to the US because we're allowing fentanyl and illegal immigrants to cross in the US. Then it was about how the US was in terrible the trade deal with Canada and Mexico was (it was his deal, the USMCA that replaced NAFTA). Then it was how the US subsidizes Canada because Canada is a failing state and that the US was spending $200 billion a year propping up Canada. Then it was that Canada wasn't meeting it's NATO spending targets. Then it was that Canada is a failed state, and that everything would be better if Canada became the 51st state.
Every day it seemed like his narrative is changing. And when we had our retaliatory tariffs at the ready to cause harm to Republican states, you know what he did?
He blinked. The tariffs for Canada and Mexico were postponed until March. He's been consistent about telegraphing what his actions are going to be, but his justifications are so wildly all over the place that frankly it's probably safe to assume he's lying at least about his motivations.
And if he's willing to lie to one of the oldest allies to the United States, is it really that much of a stretch to think that he could be lying to Americans as well?
Canadians hurt by this will find sincerity and sympathy among the Americans who still have shame. But as a lens on Trump’s negotiating maneuvers, markets are starting to price in his impotence:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43057698
his justifications are so wildly all over the place that frankly it's probably safe to assume he's lying at least about his motivations.
This has been my assumption. Trump's superpower seems to be manipulating the media. He gets absurd headlines that take attention away from stories he doesn't want covered.
This whole annexation thing is bonkers. I've never in my life heard anyone suggest such a thing, except for around 1999/2000, when I visited Canada and local papers had editorials fretting that George W Bush's administration was going to annex Canada. I have no idea where they got that idea, since I never heard any American ever suggest such a thing.
very true; not only through distractions, but by a continual bombardment of outlier or outlandish comments (used to be Tweets back in his first term) that it sucks all the oxygen out of the room as the media can hardly keep up -- therefore every story, every front page, is always Trump
like the saying goes for show biz, Trump knows there is no such thing as bad publicity ; though what works for him doesn't work for other politicians because he has a cult-like base and they don't
Separate thread on DoE:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43055119
To my point, found this article linked to in another thread: [0]
Part of the strategy might be:
1. Fire large swaths of the government. Declare victory!!
2. Hire those people back because it turns out that they're actually needed (who would have thought?). But that doesn't get news.
So in the end, things remain the same, but Trump/Elon get the headlines and their followers think they've done an amazing job.
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/14/climate/nuclear-nnsa-firings-...
I wonder if Trump ordered all the F22s to be flown into the ground, the aircraft carriers to be run aground, would anyone do anything? What about blowing up all the government buildings?
How does Musk get to destroy millions of dollars of investment? These are all government assets. What the fuck is going on here?
What the fuck indeed. And where the fuck are the people who are supposed to stop this?
Which people? The paramount officers of the executive branch? They actively support it. They quasi-independent inspectors-general in the executive branch departments? Those in areas of concern have been (fairly blatantly illegally) fired, and in at least one case physically ejected by security personnel.
The majority of both houses of Congress? They at least tacitly support it out of partisan loyalty. The courts? They’be issued orders, but ultimately rely on executive compliance or a different part of the executive enforcing those orders, and see “the paramount officers of the executive branch...”, previously.
The electorate? They voted in the people supporting it in the executive and legislature. A sufficient number of safeguards have failed that there is likely no effective recourse within the system, and none of those failed safeguards are likely to reset into their functional state without some extreme force being applied to change their present direction.
Musk has said that he like Xavier Milei's way of "deleting" government departments without too much investigation of their importance because if they're important, you can always put them back. He's probably taking a similar approach with DOGE. Some researchers and aid organizations lose their funding today but if they really are important and not just grift, they or their successors will probably get it back later. This isn't like social welfare where people might starve if their regular payment is stopped. Nobody's going to starve if research funding is cut. Researchers might have to get another job but that's an expected and normal part of life, especially for academics.
Well, except for everyone on USAID food, NIH funded trials, god I can go on. Just because you don't know precisely what you're cutting doesn't mean it's not important.
You can't just turn people off and on again like computers and expect them to carry on as before.
You cut funding for cancer trials people are already enrolled in, people die.
You cut funding for HIV drugs, patients' viral loads go up. Even if you put the funding back before they die, their viruses have already evolved resistance to the drugs they used to be on.
You cut military aid to US allies, those countries learn the US isn't a reliable ally. Soft power centuries in the making evaporates, just like that.
Well, they did claim they were transparent. Transparently juvenile. Befits the plan.
I am wondering if it would have been more of an effect to instead of this add some DEI trolling ... April 1st level of foolery so people think it is real and then get Twitter riled up on it.
Sorry off topic, but isn't that x.com plastered on every single post not a flagrant conflict of interest? I mean other government sites subtly have a link to social media hidden somewhere and from multiple platforms basically x.com and Meta.
My thought exactly... When Musk was asked about potential conflict of interest he basically replied "Of course not, we're transparent and document everything on X"...
Oh, absolutely, but Republican legislators have decided that it's OK for the federal government to arbitrarily pick economic winners and losers now.
I'm on your side, but that's not a good argument. Nancy Pelosi openly stated she has a right to be financially entangled with the companies she regulates. At least 60% of the democratic party is firmly pro-oligarch, too. Just like 2 or 3 republicans get to performatively dissent on unpopular votes, Democrat resistance is largely performative, too. Those economic winners and losers are also campaign donors. Citizen's United, the ruling that made America structurally a plutocracy, happened under Obama.
I don't see how this undermines the argument. That's all bad too. It's consistent with the argument, not contradicting it.
It's an argument against the conclusion.
When everyone is yelling "don't let side Y do Z because that will allow W."
This is why. It's a logical fallacy until you're talking to a person who's argument didn't ever change.
Fair enough. But it is not hard to find people who think corruption is bad regardless of who is doing it.
Citizen's United [..] happened under Obama
I'm sorry, but WTF? What the hell did Obama have to do with that ruling, other than serving as a convenient scapegoat in your story? It was a Supreme Court ruling, and last I checked there was still a separation of powers between the Judicial and Executive. Obama publicly called it a devastating outcome.
The decision was completely partisan 5-4 with 5 Republican appointees voting in the majority, 4 Democrats in the minority. https://www.oyez.org/cases/2008/08-205
Obama appointed 1 of the 4 Democrats who voted in the minority, his only appointee up to that point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_Supreme_Court_can...
So he literally did all he could, subject to the constitution, to prevent this ruling. The logic of mentioning Citizen's United here is like people complaining that abortion rights were taken away during Biden's term. In other words, there is no logic other than a crude misdirect.
So, if he were to want the decision, but also wanted appearances, he could oppose it verbally knowing he could do nothing to impact the outcome anyway.
Not to say that actually happened. Just pointing it out.
Your comment is exactly why we are in the situation we are in now.
A ruling under an activist conservative supreme court that Obama opposed. One of Hillary's main credentials for a supreme court pick was that they'd vote to overturn Citizens United. It was a 5-4 court and Scalia had died. Citizens United decided 5-4. But America or at least the electoral college picked trump instead. So we got corruption pretending to be free speech and abortion bans instead.
Democrats could have picked a better candidate to fight Trump but they didn't.
“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
Time to lay off low performers!
So, responsible disclosure isn't a thing anymore?
Responsible disclosure is for researchers in it for more than the lulz. In practical terms, do you think there’s a nonzero chance Musk would give rewards or credit for the report?
I wouldn’t do that because I don’t want a felony. I could see some 16 year old working for their their chance at glory.
Responsible disclosure is not about rewards.
And I am not surprised some 16 years old doesn't care. I am more surprised HN ctowd doesn't seem to even mention it. 16 years old can learn, but only if there's a culture to teach them.
I think that’s confusing “is” with “ought”. We ought to teach the people around us to be responsible. If my team, or my kid, or my friends, or anyone else nearby told me they found something like this, I’d explain why they should report it through proper channels.
But I also understand why this would be an enormous temptation for mischief. Should they have reported it another way, ideally one that wouldn’t put them up for CFAA charges? Yeah! Am I the slightest bit surprised someone thought it’s be more fun to deface this one particular site with its especially crappy security? No, not at all!
(Also, “responsible disclosure” itself is hugely controversial. It’s most often used by corporations who’d prefer that the vuln is never, ever disclosed.)
Sure, there's temptation. Just as goods being laid out on shelves in the store is a big temptation to steal them and not pay. Am I surprised that some people shoplift? No, but that doesn't make their behavior correct or commendable. And the proper response to learning that somebody steals from shops is "this is bad, you should feel bad about this and should stop doing it immediately" not "stupid store, how dare they not to lock things up properly!". Yes, this does not and will not prevent 100% of theft, because some people are sociopathic enough to not care about (or even enjoy) social disapproval, but it will make a society where theft is not encouraged, and for people who are not thieves it's better to live in such a society. In the same manner, it's better to live in a society where responsible disclosure is a norm, and to create this norm, it must be culturally enforced. It will not prevent sociopaths from violating it from time to time, but having the norm is better than not having it.
It is sometimes used like that, but it is nowhere near "most often". Most often, the responsible disclosure results in exactly what it is meant for - fixing the vulnerability and improving security without harming anyone. And supporting this as cultural norm would make such cases even more frequent.
You're all overreacting. This is a poster for a government agency. https://xkcd.com/932/
Relative to the XKCD, this is like if someone found out you could vandalize hundreds of thousands of posters and publish it under a US federal government website using an REST API.
Feds getting DDOSed? Nothing new. Public read/write access to a government distributed resource? That needs to be taken offline as a matter of public security.
Does anyone else see what’s really going on here? Naming a “government agency” after a meme coin? Wearing a hat in the Oval Office while talking over the (literally) sitting president? Elon is attempting to telegraph that he has no respect for the institutions of our country. Why do you think Trump did something as petty as renaming the Gulf of Mexico? It’s a litmus test to see who will follow his most inane power plays. Today, it was put into action when they banned the AP from the Oval Office and AF1 for not bending the knee on this issue. This is far darker than Elon just running amok.
Correct. It is a fascist coup by neo-nazis.
I don't really disagree, but it's also becoming pointless to use these terms. Naming Trump/Musk as fascists is mostly correct but all this does is make his adherents question whether fascism is "really all that bad" (or reject with lines like "NAZIs were socialist [nonsense] and Trump isn't a socialist, ergo..."
It's not enough to point out that Trump is fascist and therefore bad. You need to go the next step and say why fascism is bad.
(Yes, we've gotten to this timeline, where we have to go back and actually describe why fascism is bad -- where the press is reporting on proposed ethnic cleansing in Gaza with statements like "outlandish plan" and "unrealistic" rather than naming it for what it is: a brutal and immoral plan to exterminate an entire people. Oh, and now we need to explain why that is actually a Really Awful Thing)
We have forgotten so much, and we're going to suffer incredibly for it.
https://archive.is/g6ElI
https://graphics.social/@metin/113865450624948092
Do you really have to explain to people why fascism is bad? Isn't that taught in highschool?
America's entrepreneurial spirits have worked up a persecution complex and want their revenge. They will implement protectionist policy, push on spending cuts before tax reforms ("look at what we saved!") and then expect the market to climb while they liquidate their hundred-billion dollar portfolios and move to an island to retire.
At least, that's the theory. I don't think America wants to admit that the CCP has their industrial capacity by the balls and can direct it with centralized planning to displace America's EV market or naval tonnage at will. There's an assumption that deregulation will finally be the panacea to America's issues, but we can't pursue that consistent with a policy of global trade. We can't sanction the ICC and demand other countries extradite their criminals to the US. We can't abandon the Human Rights Council and then demand other countries respect our moral authority.
It's going to be another 4 years of the civilized world proving they don't need America. And Trump is going to spend it flattering dictators abroad while everyone else taps their foot waiting for another primary. Stagnation is a best case scenario, a-la 2016 - our saving grace is that most of America's serious adversaries are also hurting quite a bit right now. Trump sitting in the Nixon or Regan seat would have been game-over for America.
What makes you think they’ll respect that law?
Assuming he makes it that long, he’ll have a third term. They’ll make some lunatic reading of the law to justify state legislatures selecting electors. The supine courts will rubber stamp anything.
Well he certainly made a big fuss the first time around, but it didn't stop him from losing. I can't predict the future but I also struggle to imagine how the "third term" scenario would even go. Trump's reelection issue is persistently that his policy-making is so poor that it basically advertises the opposition as soon as the primary starts. The DNC just has to pull back their radical candidates and push an affable nobody like Joe Biden and collect their free win.
The GOP's support isn't guaranteed throughout this administration, and they know a successor needs to be found. Amending the constitutional term limit would be a source of bipartisan outcry, because neither party would survive it.
Do you really have enough faith he won’t cook up some emergency, or start a war, to justify staying in the office just a little longer, and then a little longer, and who knows how the system works after that?
“Fuss” he tried to orchestrate a coup. The first term was almost accidental and we were fortunate in that there were a bunch of buffoons running the show.
This term is different.
I think that while Euro-American split was to be expected - we don't care about Pacific, they don't care about Russia - I think nobody expected USA to actually become hostile, and not just become neutral.
My European friend, just imagine us Canadians ... left behind in the water next to the sinking ship with the suicidal captain demanding you join him and clutching at your boat trying to bring you down...
Yeah... I can't even imagine how that feels right now for you Canadians. :| With Russian-like rhetoric on y'all. All I can hope for is that the administration won't be that insane to actually go with it.
This is so much worse than 9-11, so, so much worse. Maybe the first tower still has yet to fall, maybe the fireball has faded and the firefighter are climbing the stairs and you think they'll soon be able to rescue you, but the fire is burning white hot under the surface and the steel getting hotter and softer by the minute.
You do not need to look far at all to find tiny changes made by past administrations that have had massive unforeseen consequences. We are absolutely cooked.
Exactly, you make up nonsense, call it official, and when they won’t go along with it you ban them for spreading lies. Autocracy 101.
“So rather than having a physical server or even something like Amazon Web Services, they’re deploying using Cloudflare Pages which supports custom domains.”
So? Also, the distinction is moot.
They claimed the savings site would show receipts not later than Valentine's Day
https://www.doge.gov/savings
Now it says "Receipts coming over the weekend!"
Next time it's: The site is receipt-ready
Oh you mean like FSD and other Musk promises?
FSD is fantastic, not sure what the knock is here
The knock on "Full Self Driving" mode is it's not full self driving.
Looks like they started posting sole data - not sure what FPDS is but the documents all look rendered in OSX aqua theme lol.
A lot of cuts looks “sensical” at first, until you realize things like “cutting magazine subscriptions” are more like “cutting financial news sources off from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau” or “not renewing reputable news subscriptions for people who really need to understand current events”.
And then there’s a lot of DEI/diversity training cuts which feel targeted not at their war on Actually Being Nice to People, but at the groups those trainings help employees serve - cutting DEI for SNAP…so, there’s a reported (haven’t verified but allegedly from USDA data) 5 ethnic groups, as well as “race unknown”, that are enrolled in SNAP. Now imagine how you’d train people to understand, interact with, and help people in different ethnic backgrounds _who need this assistance_. I believe empathy and understanding are incredibly good skills to have in a role like this, and DEI helps train that - for all involved.
The going notion on the right is that DEI is racist, and against white people, but it leaves out the idea that anyone non-white might also need this training? Like, DEI is about understanding differences, and then the right reads it as “understanding non-whites” and get offended that they even have to think about other cultures.
And another cut funding for training on gender, and that training was for an office involved in tech and engineering…a professional field notoriously male-dominant for a long time. Again, it makes sense to me that this kind of training would be good, because I’ve heard the way people in tech talk and act towards women and queer folx, so yeah let’s have some training.
These kinds of programs aren’t meant to tell people what to think - if they can’t empathetically interact with the world, work training won’t change that - but it will tell them that in a professional capacity they need to know how to interact and be productive. In business this is so you make more money, in government it’s how you help more people - including your own employees and also the communities you serve.
So Trump is doing what he said, and the details are grim.
Not flagged? Amazing. Why not?
It is insane how tone deaf most of the comments are, jarring even. I forget how insular so much of the community is and I often make the mistake of equating intelligence, which exists here in spades, with critical thought.
Understand that most of the sentiment expressed here is identical to the pre-digested mass media pablum intended for 100 IQ consumers.
Think of mass media coverage of a subject you're an expert in and how horrifyingly wrong it typically is on so many levels, and try to rectify the two.
The doge.gov website is just amazing. You can browse through the entire org chart of a typical government, average age of employees, avg salary in that department and so on. I hope they upload this data on GitHub and open sources for the future keeping. I am becoming fairly certain that all these will be removed when ruling party changes. Doge guys truly rock for doing this.
And now, keep in mind that US govt is likely still way more "efficient" than most others on the planet.
I took a look at this (the "Workforce" section) and the "Regulations" section. A chill went down my spine. The first tool is purpose built for cutting jobs from areas that someone might consider "unprofitable".
For example, you (and by "you" I mean an external party holding a scalpel) can drill down into Executive Branch > Cabinet Level Agencies > Department of Education > Office of the Secretary > Office Of Civil Rights, and think, "Hey, why does the DoE need an office of civil rights? Does it need a 570 headcount? We can save $78M by cutting out that entire office".
I've seen this phenomenon in corporate, where cuts happen to areas that seem like they're not contributing to immediate profits, because their outcomes are long term, and there is enough organizational momentum to go forward for months, if not years, before their absence is noticed. For example, certain types of quality teams, technical/platform teams and employee safety/welfare related positions.
Meanwhile the second section seems to be a tool for dismantling the regulatory system of the US. It is disingenuously called the "Unconstitutionality Index" ignoring the fact that a country cannot be run by a legislature and its acts alone, let alone a constitution.
If the government has nothing to hide, it has nothing to fear.
Wondering why DOGE articles where we apparently are leaking classified info over the internet are being flagged.
This for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43051135
(EDIT: Looks like others are wondering too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43050833)
it's unfortunate to see negative posts about musk the nazi get flagged, while positive posts about musk the nazi get unflagged by mods
Who here has listened to Elon/Trump extensively (and not opinions by news outlets) and has concluded that they are doing net damage?
My opinion: Some mistakes will be made but remedied. But overall it's a net positive. As to how much of a positive it is, it need to be see. If the income tax, property tax (and other unavoidable taxes) are eliminated, I'd say America is greater again.