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DOGE employees ordered to stop using Slack

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Re: DOGE employees ordered to stop using Slack

#401
post #397
post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aside from the fact that I'm sure you can find such crimes ... Prosecutors have the power to ask 2 years incarceration for jaywalking, without proof, 10 years for ignoring a stop sign and having not paying because the state has a wrong address for them and can let someone who empties a machine gun into a kindergarten walk free. But why go so far as to actually convict them of anything? An IRS agent (and every state h…

I think the fact that this is possible in the US is proof positive that your state needs exactly the sort of radical downsizing that Musk and Trump are trying to achieve.

I think you'll find neither Musk nor Trump nor republicans will change this. In fact, expect the opposite. They will do nothing that threatens or weakens state power, now that they control that power.

Re: DOGE employees ordered to stop using Slack

#402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't even know if Politico Pro does that kind of reporting lol, so you don't know what Politico Pro does, but you know it was worthless, and it doesn't matter because the propaganda points have already been scored and the news cycle has turned over. This is the world you want to be cheerleading for? Really?

Not sure how much more clear I can be, you appear to be arguing with a strawman. I think if Politico Pro was some sort of critical infrastructure that the United States Government needed to operate we would've all heard of it before this. Politico would've advertised it as such.

I don't think you understand how much contracting and paperwork goes into any kind of government purchase.

I've flirted with government contracts before, and I've worked with large information-as-a-service providers before. So I understand the value of niche information providers. I'm not a policy guy, so I don't know what kind of information a policy-heavy government group needs, but it sounds like a completely plausible service to me.

Given the Occam's Razor between "government bureaucracy-levels of contracting and oversight required to do any purchase still resulted in a corrupt money-handoff" and "Elon's got a tendancy towards theatrics and smearing the political opposition, so he's using this to tickle people's amygdala and move on before people look too closely at it", I'm going with the latter.

Prove to me that the niche job functions of the people who purchased this didn't actually require any of this information using the mounds of contracting paperwork that surely exist, or just admit that proving it was never the point and it was all about outrage theatrics before people bothered to do the actual work of looking into this.

Re: DOGE employees ordered to stop using Slack

#403

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The state dept issued an evacuation order for all USAID staff overseas. How will they accomplish their mission? This includes medical care and distribution of HIV medication to up to 20 million people.

Why are American taxpayers paying for medical care and HIV medication for 20 million people? Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't those people foreign nationals as well?

Unrelated: The hakenkreuz (swastika) was used by German nationalists and "Aryan" supremacists as early as the late 1800s, and was quite popular, even used by the Wandervogel. The swastika officially became the emblem for the Nazi Party on August, 7, 1920, so your quilt is almost certainly an Aryan quilt, and possibly an official Nazi one.

Re: DOGE employees ordered to stop using Slack

#404

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This grant [1]. "SUPPORT SEXUAL AND REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH (SRH) CARE CLOSE TO THE DISPLACED POPULATIONS. [...] Place Of Performance //XGZ GAZA STRIP GAZA STRIP". Though I don't think that it will be used exclusively for condoms, the one paragraph description doesn't give much details about how exactly the 45 million dollars will be spent. [1] https://www.usaspending.gov/award/ASST_NON_SPRMCO24VC0339_19...

It also shows that zero dollars has been outlaid for the grant over the last 5 months. It's entirely possible that none of the money would have been used by the expiration of the grant. That said, I wish these were required to be a lot more verbose. I can envision a program with that description I would totally approve of, and I can imagine programs with that description that I wouldn't think are useful. Being more t…

I dont think “but it hasn’t been outlayed yet” is an appropriate critique of something so fishy.

Whether the funds were used for condom balloons or lifesaving hospital deliveries of babies, the complaint from the masses should be “give us more information for exactly what this money is obligated to accomplish.”

Especially when the federal government is eager send me demands for additional backup and information on money I earned 3 years ago, after it had previously signed off on documentation presented.

Re: DOGE employees ordered to stop using Slack

#405
post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Large projects and companies are making dumb decisions all the time.

How is this dumb idea when Discord is top1 communicator except maybe for search, but it isnt that terrible

Because Discord is designed around near real-time communication, it simply doesn't work as a knowledge database. Unless, of course, you want to deal with the same questions again, and again, and again. In which case, sure, use whatever you want.

Re: DOGE employees ordered to stop using Slack

#406
post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest problem with the USA is people look at the current state of the government and somehow don't see pre Nazi Germany. If the percentage of these sympathizers is large enough then there is no course correction that will be possible in two years.

Perhaps review “The Poverty of Historicism,” which if read carefully, is similar to being slapped with a fish.

Perhaps review "Dialectics of the Concrete," which if read carefully, might ameliorate your smug demeanor.

By the way, you failed to address his main point that the US is taking a turn towards authoritarianism, and instead chose to critique a secondary part of his claim. Why is that?

Re: DOGE employees ordered to stop using Slack

#407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is in the same way you would assume an existing admin role to perform the highly privileged actions you want to take vs attempting to bootstrap access from scratch.

Does anyone else notice how similar that is in spirit to what a malicious actor would look to do after gaining access to your network?

Or how a malicious actor inside your network would follow exactly this plan to do malicious things without your knowledge...

Re: DOGE employees ordered to stop using Slack

#408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are also tweeting 'findings' to create a narrative. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1885964969335808217

It's weird seeing America going so hellbent against Wikileaks (Hillary jokingly saying "can't we just drone him") vs now where the top brass are live tweeting leaks

Maybe we should look a little bit closer at who was hellbent against Wikileaks, and whether or not they're the same people "live tweeting leaks".

I have a feeling it's not the ethics of the actions that have changed, but the goals for doing so. In both cases it was about controlling a narrative.

Re: DOGE employees ordered to stop using Slack

#409
post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are going to quote X, then at least find another source, one that is legit. The truth is that LSS got grants to pay for the resettlement of legal immigrants. LSS was NOT "facilitating mass migration." LSS has a long tradition of this work and from what I know of their work in Washington, DC (the city, not the cap), it was exemplary.

“Legal migration” as in the CBP One app? The US government ran ads in Haiti and other nations in French teaching people how to apply to come to America as asylum seekers. The US government flew huge numbers of these people into the US and also paid organizations like LSS to “resettle” them. This is mass migration and ALL of this was done using taxpayer money. Nobody voted for this, this is pure corruption. It is so w…

You do realize the guy you're talking about "dismantling and exposing" these immigration systems is the same one that wants to replace tech workers with H-1B visa?

Maybe ask yourself why you/they are against immigration of low-income workers but don't have a problem bringing in as many higher-income workers as they can(at lower salaries than they would have to pay non-immigrants).

I don't want to be working at McDonalds while companies like Tesla, Google, Amazon, etc. are importing labour for the higher-paying jobs in the country, but that seems to be the future a lot of people are excitedly running towards by supporting Musk.

Re: DOGE employees ordered to stop using Slack

#410

DOGE is obviously a completely illegal operation, and I really do hope it will be get reined in before they can cause an issue so big that _even trump's croniest cronies_ have to admit what is going on. For someone who claims to love freedom of speech, Elon is pretty quick to determine who can say what, and how much access to _his_ data people have.

Unfortunately we're well past "legal" and "illegal" when it comes to the federal government. The last 4 presidents have pushed things through without the proper procedures. DOGE is just the one you're noticing.
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