Federal data is disappearing. On Thursday, meet the teams working to rescue it • Hacker News Board

Re: Federal data is disappearing. On Thursday, meet the teams working to rescue it

#111

Post by fzeroracer » Fri, Feb 14, 2025, 2:15 AM UTC

zmgsabst wrote: post #109

fzeroracer wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're avoiding the point. These are individuals that have otherwise already passed military training and fitness tests to determine whether or not they are able to participate and function as soldiers. They are actively a part of our military and being thrown out.

I can’t find anything to support that. The order as quoted refers to new joins: > “Effective immediately, all new accessions for individuals with a history of gender dysphoria are paused,” Hegseth said in a memo dated Feb. 7 and filed on Monday with the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. Which is consistent with Trump’s order from his first term that allowed transgender troops already serving to remain. The only…

Yes. That was part of one of the recent executive orders he signed [1] which was dictating not only that care for transgender individuals in the military should cease but also that expressing a different gender identity was not compatible with being in the military. It's not even particularly vague about it. The military issued guidance against the executive order to not take adverse action, essentially only adopting the bathroom bill portion of it [2].

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/prio...

[2] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.276...

Re: Federal data is disappearing. On Thursday, meet the teams working to rescue it

#112

Post by somenameforme » Fri, Feb 14, 2025, 3:39 AM UTC

bloomingkales wrote: post #69

somenameforme wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether this is a great or awful example probably depends on one's views of USAID. They were associated with the Red Cross there in the high profile failure that managed to spend more than $1.5 billion to ultimately build a total of 6 permanent housing units. [1] While that was definitely more Red Cross than USAID, the video also makes no secret of what one of the major issues with USAID is. It uses the pretext of ai…

You can’t just walk into a third world country and expect the candidate pool to be a bunch of noble laureates (we barely have such a candidate pool in the West). Logistically, I would try organize via the government too for maximum effect. Nonetheless, your investigation is important. We need way more testimonials to get to the bottom of these things. Are programs like USAID a grift, or are the people cancelling it t…

I somehow don't get the impression that his opponent, an older lady and the widow of a former president, was exactly into gangs, drugs, and the like. And similarly, I find it difficult to imagine that we couldn't vet the USAID candidate, a musician, to find his ties to such. Wiki apparently states he was well known for "cursing on stage, cross-dressing as well as using homophobic slurs." What a great guy to spend US taxpayer funds to promote. But the reality is that it's not about finding a good person, but about finding a person who will fulfill US interests.

By the way the same thing was true, to a smaller degree, of the Marshall Plan. 5% of all its funding went straight to CIA front organizations [1] helping to ensure Europe developed in the "right" way. The same thing continues today where USAID was doing all it could to try to undermine Hungary. It's like all this rhetoric about democracy being about the will of the people suddenly becomes meaningless when the will of the people is not equivalent to the will of the US. And I don't think this is conducive to a stable world order, to say the least.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan#Funding_for_CIA_...

Re: Federal data is disappearing. On Thursday, meet the teams working to rescue it

#113

Post by mschuster91 » Fri, Feb 14, 2025, 3:00 PM UTC

CamperBob2 wrote: post #108

mschuster91 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was due to the loss of the war and the followup economic devastation brought by the reparation payments that caused a lot of issues in the economy at large, followed by the 1918 flu pandemic that also caused serious issues (and with 25M dead, even more death than WW1 itself!). One might be tempted to again draw parallels to today's situation in the US, with the US having lost the war in Afghanistan as well as ev…

One might be tempted to again draw parallels to today's situation in the US, with the US having lost the war in Afghanistan as well as everyone having suffered through years of Covid. Not disputing your point, but what blows me away is just how unapt your comparison is. We didn't 'lose' the war in Afghanistan. We chose not to fight it aggressively and eventually got bored with it, and then Biden let himself get rope-…

> And COVID was nothing like losing a world war.

I compared Covid with the 1918 Spanish Flu, and that comparison is fair to make - if not by the death count, at the very least by the economic consequences. In fact the economic consequences of Covid are worse than those of the 1918 flu because the world is far more interconnected now than it was back then.

> What would things be like in America now if we actually had faced a genuine crisis like Germany's post-WWI downfall? My guess is, we're about to find out... because that's what we just voted for.

The thing with inflation is, of course the pre-WW2 inflation was ridiculously higher in numbers. But the consequences in the life of the wide masses - struggling to survive every day or at least every payday - are pretty similar. And that's why people don't necessarily vote "for the 47th", they vote "against who is in power currently" - a pattern we see across the Western world, with some countries falling to the far-right, while in others like Poland or the UK the far-right actually loses.

The key thing that makes the US and to a degree the UK unique is that both countries only have a two-party system. The UK got lucky, they got the authoritarians in power while the crisis was ongoing so they elected a democratic alternative, the US got the shorter end of the stick and now has to suffer through the 47th's period instead of having an actually social-democrat, Green or even a moderate Conservative third option.