261–270 of 317 posts
> DOGE is also working with a FEMA IT Specialist and a grant director, according to Drop Site’s reporting. “Everyone is complying. Everyone is afraid to lose their jobs,” sources within FEMA told Drop Site. They describe the situation as FEMA employees following a “chain of command and that leads to DOGE even though they’re not part of it.” This is how a democracy slowly falls into fascism. Not because it's a overnig…
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> Is there anything we can do? Keep durable notes and share them with your electeds. Particularly at the state level. These kids won’t be prosecuted immediately, possibly never federally. But their actions will need to be systematically undone at the federal level and individually prosecuted at the state and/or local levels. This is going to be a massive bureaucratic and legal undertaking, and we’ll need record prese…
Keep in mind that the ruling party has massively powerful surveillance systems at their fingertips. It's hard to say how things will unfold, but being a dissident may not be in one's best interest.
Larry is the 4th richest person, worth more than the GDP of Ukraine.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/16/oracle-ceo-larry-ellison-s...
https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
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A lot of rightwing stuff that circulates is disinformation -- there are plenty of examples of it. Trump is an inveterate liar about almost everything (this is easily fact-checked), and his followers have adopted the same strategy (lies are powerful because they are usually more shocking and travel faster than a boring fact-check). Not to say that other politicians don't lie or distort the truth, but Trump has taken t…
The issue isn't whether that's true or not (personally, I think you're 80-90% correct). If private citizens, or organisations, want to get together and develop political counter-narratives that's fine -- entirely within the constitution, and always a good idea. The issue here is the top-down astroturfing from state-sponsored orgs whose boards are the last x heads of the CIA/etc. At the moment there is no strong firew…
It did not exonerate him, quite explicitly. [1] The report found a lot of evidence of trump team making contact with Russians. You say yourself that the investigation was obstructed.
There was also this indictment on co-ordinated Russian funded interference in NA pundit/social media space. [2] Not to mention similar groups (I'm not sure about the status of the investigation in [2] at this point) have already been dismissed [3].
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-49100778
[2] https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/two-rt-employees-ind...
[3] https://www.npr.org/2025/02/11/nx-s1-5293521/foreign-influen...
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The US fell in a month much deeper than the EU in a decade. Like I said the EU falls slower.
It may fall slower but it also keeps falling... US' GDP is now 80% higher than EU's. The usual retort is that Europeans are not chasing money and prefer to have good quality of life, healthcare, etc. but this misses the key thing that if your income falls behind little by little at some point you will no longer be able to afford those things... we're already seeing it.
We're watching the ultimate destructive expression of the comp sci "oh, we can just automate that" hubris.
Thought process: “In theory auditing a government agency is simple. I can write assembly for a computer with millions of moving parts. How hard could it be to debug an organization with twenty thousand employees that need support to configure their own email? I spent literally two weeks watching accounting channels on YouTube, so with my mighty developer ultrabrain, this should be a snap. If only developers had time…
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Isn't this what you guys have the second amendment for? To secure a free state?
There's a word for people who start shooting when they don't like the outcome of an election: insurrectionists.
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I am absolutely gobsmacked that the markets simply don't care about any of this.
They muscled through COVID, they're gonna try and muscle through this. It's in essentially every person with power's benefit for the number to go up, so everyone ensures the number goes up. See also: Bitcoin pricing.
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> There have been no AI drones in that war. Drones are reigning free because nobody established air superiority. This hasn't been true since last year, when automated targeting systems began entering the battlefield. They still are not as widely deployed as personnel controlled drones, but over time it appears to be shifting towards battlefield autonomy. Nuclear weapons are a cudgel, automated human-free weapons are…
> hasn't been true since last year, when automated targeting systems began entering the battlefield By this measure we’ve had hypersonic AI “drones” in air-to-air combat since the 70s.
And ... there we go - flagged by Musk's tech bros again. HN is starting to feel like X -- I've deleted my X account, and might have to do the same here. I've now switched my primary HN link from the home page to /active, where, thankfully, flagged posts still show up.
I’ve generally been praiseful of HN ’s moderation. But given the leadership of YC’s political views, it’s disappointing to see politics called on MAGA criticism but not on similar critiques of San Francisco and New York politics.
> DOGE claims to be auditing FEMA. But sources within FEMA report that the DOGE employees are primarily “computer science guys” and do not understand the basics of financial management. In one instance, a coder brought in by DOGE confronted a FEMA staffer about mismanagement of funds. The FEMA staffer clarified that no funds were allocated during the time period in question and that the DOGE representative simply mis…
That sounds thoroughly unremarkable by itself. A staffer asked for an explanation of something he was seeing and got one (he was incorrect about the data). This interaction repeats a zillion times per day for any consultancy project.