Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data

theatlantic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

961–970 of 1001 posts

Re: DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data

#961

Post by guax »

ganoushoreilly wrote: post #668
arrosenberg wrote: post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They aren’t auditing or thoroughly reviewing shit. They're stealing the data and then waving their hands about non-existent crimes and nickel and dime levels of misappropriated or weird spending.

I understand you're frustrated because of who and what. Do you have any direct evidence they are stealing data? I see a lot of these responses that are emotional but at a factual basis it doesn't appear that way. Just as raw un restricted read/write access is constantly alleged, but we have in turn found out that isn't the case. I really think we're getting to a point where people are too hyper emotional and sensatio…

Sunlight is publish the findings and take action after.

They're firing people's, seeing the repercussion and the publishing a list of program names. Not evaluations, not analysis. Nothing substantial, just gotcha out of context strings.

Do you think the entirety of USAID was "fraud" and waste? What about the US park service?

I am not American and the only time I saw my country do this kind of action in this manner was during its military government.

Re: DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data

#962

Post by Vilian »

swat535 wrote: post #587

Setting politics aside for a moment, I find it fascinating that an audit of this scale is taking place within the government. Has there ever been a historical precedent where an external agency thoroughly reviewed all departments, published its findings for the public, and then based decisions on that analysis? Is it really possible to root out governmental fraud using this approach? Fraud and theft exist at every le…

>Has there ever been a historical precedent where an external agency thoroughly reviewed all departments, published its findings for the public, and then based decisions on that analysis?

They are 't reviewing and publishing shit, it yes there is historical moments when those types of things happened, usually after coup, dictatorship, or just any authoritarian government everyday dismantling everything, that's why everyone looking outside of USA with a bit of history knowledge see as a very bad precedent

Re: DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data

#963

Post by jjav »

agumonkey wrote: post #477
bdd8f1df777b wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bureaucracy is always risk averse. Without outside intervention, they will always try to operate as before.

Every human knows that governments and bureaucracies are inefficient in some way. It's been mocked since the dawn of times. The issue is that you don't toy around with big legacy systems like you do with twitter. To satisfy their little immaturity and get political points on their fans they start ripping off everything without enough time. If they started real medium term efforts to analyze, organize and then migrate…

> governments and bureaucracies are inefficient in some way

Also, what's important to understand is that inefficiency in a corporation is a bug, but inefficiency in government is a feature.

Government needs to have checks and balances at every stage, which by definition is inefficient. Which in the case of government is a wonderful thing.

There is a word for a perfectly efficient government: dictatorship

Re: DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data

#964

Post by sebastianconcpt »

eecc wrote: post #201

IMHO it's a bit of a shame that the productivity and efficiency gains that computing and cybernetics can bring to complex systems -- including government -- are always tainted and currently championed by anti-social elites that use them to break apart these collective machines. Bureaucracies are a common good, and it should be in everyone's interest to apply state-of-the-art system engineering to make them as valuabl…

Bureoucracies are invariably the most efficient way to concentrate corruption efforts. There is no better spot to corrupt and make elite unelected decisions. Revolutionaries love to infiltrate these because they can covertly use their profession to move promote designs and budget flows that exlusively forward their mission hidden in complexity.

Is a system and everyone here knows what Moore's Law is.

Re: DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data

#965

Post by nyeah »

ToValueFunfetti wrote: post #691
nerdponx wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "I don't mind, I have nothing to hide" people are cheering this on. They don't know or care about any of the things you just said.

Do you have cause to believe "nothing to hide" is a partisan position? I'd expect that half of such people are on the left and are critical by default of the new administration. Seems to be supported by the second chart here: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2023/10/18/how-american...

In real life, I hear people of all political stripes embracing positions between "nothing to hide" and "the govt can find out my personal info anyway, so why not email it directly to nameless scammers overseas?"

Online it works like most things. Everybody pretends it's a partisan food fight, even if they have to lie.

Re: DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data

#967

Post by thunky »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #959
thunky wrote: post #731

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? You could remove the "to put up with shit like this" part and the answer would still be "nobody". You have to remove the "who have good prospects elsewhere" part for it to make sense.

well, there are people with good prospects elsewhere who take gov positions out of civic duty and also because it is typically longer term and you're less likely to get laid off for no reason

I agree with everything you said, but it's also not impossible to be laid off by the govt for no reason so there may have been a false sense of security:

https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/npr/library/nprrpt/annrpt/vp...

Re: DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data

#968

Post by tekknik »

jajko wrote: post #842
insane_dreamer wrote: post #638

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-…

This is basic dictatorshipping, I think US folks need to refresh skills so common in rest of the world. You want obedient lackeys as #1 rule, it means reasonably little threat and no resistance to molding from above. Competences are sometimes even frowned upon. Look at how potus literally demands that others lick his boots to keep it polite. This is how russians run their dictatorships for example, including those th…

This comment said nothing.

Re: DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data

#969

Post by tekknik »

mempko wrote: post #832
1970-01-01 wrote: post #625

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.

This is news to me that “accounting 101” demands you spend more than you bring in. Any reasonable person would realize you can only do this for so long. Can you explain this in great detail?

Re: DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data

#970

Post by beretguy »

kridsdale1 wrote: post #854
duped wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Such as your genetic ancestry

Or if you are a trump follower or not.
Post reply on HN