Live data from Hacker News

DOGE overstated savings, government watchdog says

politico.com

61–70 of 75 posts

Re: DOGE overstated savings, government watchdog says

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like the Confederacy? Wait, bad example.

just wondering, do you want the US to be hated "forever"? or what is it that you are arguing for? i thought it was a fairly obvious statement that over the thousands of years of history, many bad things have been done, but after several generations, we are able to heal. if you think that in the year 2200, the world will still hate the US because of today, i disagree. the year 2500? i doubt the people of that time, ex…

You don't get to decide how you're hated is the point.

Re: DOGE overstated savings, government watchdog says

#63
post #12

You mean they didn't save 25 trillion dollars a year from the 7 trillion annual spend? I cant believe they would lie about this ... i am sure that this is a totally isolated case and they have been straight forward and honest about everything else. The DOGE refund cheque is due to arrive any day now.

Who ever claimed these numbers? Wtf.

Re: DOGE overstated savings, government watchdog says

#64
post #2

The amount of damage inflicted by this admin will take over a generation to assess, if circumstances are stable enough to do so.

As if Trump was the first to print trillions and start a new war. Americans are so enchanted by their 2 party duopoly, it's not even funny. Bizarre how people view reality.

Re: DOGE overstated savings, government watchdog says

#66
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just wondering, do you want the US to be hated "forever"? or what is it that you are arguing for? i thought it was a fairly obvious statement that over the thousands of years of history, many bad things have been done, but after several generations, we are able to heal. if you think that in the year 2200, the world will still hate the US because of today, i disagree. the year 2500? i doubt the people of that time, ex…

You don't get to decide how you're hated is the point.

[deleted]

Re: DOGE overstated savings, government watchdog says

#67
post #2

The amount of damage inflicted by this admin will take over a generation to assess, if circumstances are stable enough to do so.

If the rest of the world stayed still, that's a hard "maybe". Since the rest of the world isn't, what we're actually watching is the "Western Flavor" of the Soviet collapse. The fact that these destructive policies are being repeatedly selected - over and over and over again - means that the collapse is systemic; indeed, this could even be seen as a part of a larger "End of the West" which kicked off with World War 1 and then the utter self-immolation of the secular colonial period in WW2.

Future historians, with the benefit of hindsight, will probably date the beginnings of the collapse[1] to 9/11, with the actual ceasing of the functional economic system somewhere around the 2008 econopalypse. COVID was something like our Chernobyl. I think Trump is, quite honestly, our version of Yeltsin: the buffoon who ends everyone's faith in "the system".

Americans should mentally prepare for an equivalent collapse in, well, everything, from public health to aviation safety. Of course, by the numbers, "you're already soaking in it".

[1] The American side of it, anyway. The larger end of the West, World War 1 is a logical place to draw the line, but honestly it started when Europe ran out of profitable/exploitive space on the map.

Re: DOGE overstated savings, government watchdog says

#68
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even worse, way too many people are still actively supporting this. That can even been seen in the HN commenting crowd

> the HN commenting crowd That set also contains elements who will swear that LLMs are conscious, so it does not mean as much as we might want it to.

Fair. Though that’s likely a reflection of the general population

Re: DOGE overstated savings, government watchdog says

#69
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The right's platform has devolved into, essentially, "whatever owns the libs"

Eh, I'm not going to dispute the validity of Cleek's Law, but ~everything Trump, et al, are doing has been an extremely popular idea with different segments of the right for thirty, forty years. That goes for DOGE, both the idea of "drowning the government in a bathtub" and the specific cuts they made (eg, wrecking foreign aid), that goes for ICE, even the Iran War, which is widely regarded as the unpopular thing tha…

But they didn't drown the government in a bathtub. They cut a bunch of tiny programs that they were ideologically opposed to, at a savings amounting to a rounding error. All of the things that could be counted as "big government" were left untouched, or expanded.

They didn't even pretend to reduce the size of government. They just engaged in some petty grudges.

Which is, as you say, exactly what his voters want. They just pretend that it's "small government", but it absolutely is not.

Re: DOGE overstated savings, government watchdog says

#70
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the HN commenting crowd That set also contains elements who will swear that LLMs are conscious, so it does not mean as much as we might want it to.

Fair. Though that’s likely a reflection of the general population

Or at least, the tech-bro subset of the general population. It's possible that they're disproportionately vocal on HN, but I think overall it's a reasonably accurate presentation of that (narrow but powerful) demographic.
Post reply on HN