851–860 of 1001 posts
What is the point of all of this? Reducing federal income taxes? It seems to me that these people are pushing a rope if that's the goal. For example, USAID is 1% of federal spending, but buys the US a disproportionate amount of soft power and good will for that investment. Also, why 20-year olds? You'd think a person as resourced as Musk would have access to more capable people. When I was 20 years old I didn't know…
Because there are bigger fish to fry, I think people don’t appreciate the sheer cost of the system rebuild that will be required for security reasons later. There’s absolutely no telling what additional software has been installed alongside existing, or which systems have been modified that would require audit. Purging this will be an absolute fucking nightmare to the American taxpayer. This may turn into one of the…
The system was almost certainly already so-accessible.
Doesn't everyone at work, any $WORK, do this? I do! I even type my thoughts "aloud" so to speak in order to help anyone viewing my sessions on replay.
Perhaps the whole situation will finally convince the "I don't mind, I have nothing to hide" crowd about the need to scrutinize & limit as much as reasonably possible the personal data collection and retention by government and other entities. What good are rules, statutes, checks & balances, passwords and ACLs, if at some point someone you don't like or trust can just come in "as a root" and circumvent everything?
The "I don't have anything to hide" argument usually misses that you can't know today what you should be hiding from the government tomorrow. You have everything to hide by default and the onus is on every actor to prove why they need information and how it's isolated from other information.
At my first gig, I had "god" level access to our production database. All I learned is that nobody should have this level of access unless it is some sort of temporary break glass situation. It is extremely dangerous and even experienced engineers can cause irreparable data loss or some other bad outcome. In our case, some engineer accidentally sent around 10,000 invoices to customers that shouldn't have gotten them.…
I'm not make a value judgement on this, it's just how it is. At a startup, the founder ultimately has root access to the database, no matter what the technical controls.
Now, maybe it's stupid, and maybe it should be some other way, but to my mind the other way is that Congress gets together and writes a law saying "the executive cannot get root access to X, Y, Z". In absence of that law, the executive can do whatever they want.
Not to be THAT GUY, but "an append-only database which cannot be modified by anyone" is something HN has spent the past 10 years saying is completely useless...
The president should obviously have this level of access.
Another very negative long-term effect of all of this is how is the government going to recruit talent in the future? How many people, who have good prospects elsewhere, are going to work for a government agency -- usually a lower pay -- to put up with shit like this that doesn't even happen in industry? Would you? Sure there are sometimes mass layoffs that are handled pretty badly in industry, but not these Gestapo-…
I think that is part of the point. "As hire As. Bs hire Cs." A-tier folks want to work with the best, B-tier folks want to work with lackeys that will do their bidding. It's pretty clear there's no A-tier folks in charge at the moment.
eyeroll
Another very negative long-term effect of all of this is how is the government going to recruit talent in the future? How many people, who have good prospects elsewhere, are going to work for a government agency -- usually a lower pay -- to put up with shit like this that doesn't even happen in industry? Would you? Sure there are sometimes mass layoffs that are handled pretty badly in industry, but not these Gestapo-…
What should happen, and nobody is talking about this, is the USA is severely downgraded in its overall credit rating due to an unhinged and ongoing "fire, aim, ready" self-audit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_governme...
The deficit hawks don't understand how money works. Everything about DOGE and their mission has a fundamental deep misunderstanding of why governments with their own currency must have deficits. Literal accounting 101. Unfortunately Elon has an economics degree, which means he is completely uneducated in accounting.