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The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE

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Re: The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE

#351

Post by mike_hearn »

m463 wrote: post #122

Posts here talk about the legality of this, that what they are doing is not allowed, or that they're doing something naively without understanding. But what is the goal? Maybe what goal to they think they're pursuing? This is hacker news, so I'm asking for an answer without political rhetoric.

The right is at present a coalition of conservatives, nationalist patriot types and globalist libertarians. DOGE seems to be a mix of two goals:

1. They think that the civil service has become not just openly hostile but outright dangerous to any form of Republican government, and therefore that taking direct control of the civil service infrastructure at high speed is essential to avoid being kneecapped by rogue federal employees again. They think that this happened during Trump's first term, and that if they don't get this problem under control then America has effectively become a Democrat dictatorship that does whatever the left wants regardless of who wins elections. They have a good reasons to believe this is a real problem they need to solve and fast, see Sherk for some egregious examples [1] but there are many more you could cite.

2. A genuine belief that the government is very inefficient and in particular that a lot of the waste is basically just funding the Democrats via various 'laundered' routes like allied NGOs that pretend to be politically neutral charities but aren't. Doing something about that is a good way to get libertarians like Musk and his allies on board. Everyone is in favour of government efficiency in principle so letting the libertarian types go cut waste is an easy way to build that coalition even if the other parts don't care about fiscal efficiency much itself.

These two are interlocked. Poor performance and efficiency improvements are one of the legal justifications for laying off civil servants, so it's much easier to get the civil service under control if #resistance results in being one of the ones "optimized out" of a job. That's doubly true if the sort of NGOs that would hire them if they were fired are being defunded simultaneously.

[1] https://americafirstpolicy.com/assets/uploads/files/Tales_fr...

Re: The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE

#352

Post by solatic »

siliconc0w wrote: post #277

If DOGE wants to be effective it really should be going after the big ticket items like medicare or defense, some estimates have medicare at 40% fraud and waste and the DoD can't even pass an audit so no one really knows what %. And that is just getting what we've paid for, not even evaluating if what we've paid for is effective. Of course to do that would require actual coalition building, hard choices that upset vo…

Catching Medicare fraud likely requires a level of automatic data anomaly analysis that's simply beyond all the participants involved, both in terms of getting access to the actual databases and in getting the qualified manpower to build such a system.

If the DoD's auditors can't track down all the expenses, then why would DOGE be any more successful?

Running after bullshit is the low-hanging fruit.

Re: The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE

#353

Post by reaperducer »

indoordin0saur wrote: post #330
siliconc0w wrote: post #277

If DOGE wants to be effective it really should be going after the big ticket items like medicare or defense, some estimates have medicare at 40% fraud and waste and the DoD can't even pass an audit so no one really knows what %. And that is just getting what we've paid for, not even evaluating if what we've paid for is effective. Of course to do that would require actual coalition building, hard choices that upset vo…

[flagged]

they have evidence that there is fraud rings of people outside the US posing as citizens and collecting medicare and other welfare.

They'll release that evidence right about the same time they release all the "evidence" that Giuliani had about election fraud. Which they've promised to release hundreds of times before. But never have. Because it doesn't exist.

Are there people outside the U.S. gaming the system? Sure. Are they "rings" or "gangs" or whatever scary name they're using this week? Based on past performance, I have zero faith we'll see any evidence.

Re: The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE

#355

Post by mrkeen »

eutropia wrote: post #224

There are people in this thread claiming that Wired "doxxed" these engineers working for Musk dismantling things they don't understand; however didn't Musk publicly mock individual federal employees on his twitter account, drawing the eyes of millions onto random government functionaries for no other reason than to capriciously taunt them about being fired? I hope people condemning the former also condemn the latter.

Sources:

When Musk does it:

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1858916546338590740

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1858914228624924963

When others do it:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ParlerWatch/comments/1igw3cs/elon_m...

Re: The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE

#356

Post by rich_sasha »

user32489318 wrote: post #210

how is someone’s age relevant? Is a 55 y.o. Software engineer who spent 20 years in a bureaucratic wheel any better than a bright 20yo mind? They both suck in a different way! Writing an entire article with ageism as a center piece is truly pinnacle of American journalism

With age comes life experience and an appreciation that it's hard to make things better, and breaking them is rarely good.

Similarly, it is easier to convince an impressionable 19yo to do reckless and possibly illegal things.

It doesn't strike me as totally irrelevant.

Re: The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE

#357

Post by tines »

iamleppert wrote: post #274

The next four years are going to be a test of the US Constitution. But when they are up -- and they will be, and people are more angry at Trump than the last time around the pendulum swings wildly back again, as it always does, what is going to happen to Musk and the rest of them?

It's not a test of The Constitution, it's a test of our constitution, and we're being exposed as we speak.

Re: The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE

#358

Post by ranger207 »

m463 wrote: post #122

Posts here talk about the legality of this, that what they are doing is not allowed, or that they're doing something naively without understanding. But what is the goal? Maybe what goal to they think they're pursuing? This is hacker news, so I'm asking for an answer without political rhetoric.

There's two parts to it. First, there's the reasonable position that the government is inefficient or has too much bureaucracy or regulation. If that's the case, how do you improve that? Chesterton's Fence says that all those regulations are in place for a reason, but it's reasonably to believe that some of those reasons may not be relevant anymore, or could be better written to allow for more efficiency. However, sitting down to figure out why existing regulations exist and how to get rid of them without allowing whatever bad outcome they were created in response to is difficult. If you have the general feel that a regulation is bad, why not just get rid of it? Or an office you don't like, or a committee that likes to say you're doing things wrong? If you've got the vibe that "this thing is bad", why do you need to prove it before getting rid of it? So it's taking things that are legitimate problems and trying to fix them based on vibes rather than data. Which, if some of the problems you're annoyed with are "it takes too long to build a building because the EPA wants data to see if there's environmental impacts", is it really a surprise you'd want to take that out without data?

Second is the dismantling of the deep state. The deep state exists, but it's not a conscious effort in general. Instead, it's the typical aspects of institutional inertia, multiplied by the fact that the kinds of people wanting to work in government favor inertia more than in most private businesses. Of course the low level government bureaucrat at your local post office or whatever is going to want to slow-roll things and keep things from changing as much as possible; that's just the kind of person that typically looks for a government job and gets hired. Of course they're going to resist rapid changes from people that want things to be fixed yesterday. If your conception of the government is as an agent to execute orders, rather than as an agent to steadily administer regulations, then you're going to resent the people who don't respond instantly to the executive's desires

FWIW I voted for Kamela because I think that the process of governance is just as important as the governance itself, and did not want Trump to remove the existing processes in this way. I can definitely see why people would want to change processes, and given the historical ineffectual attempts at changed processes I can see why people would vote for someone who promised to tear it all down, but I don't think tearing it all down is the best option. Although, I didn't vote for Harris as much as I voted for the most effective way to prevent Trump, but given the American first-past-the-post voting system that was the best I could do. https://ncase.me/ballot/

Re: The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE

#360

Post by talldayo »

tines wrote: post #357
iamleppert wrote: post #274

The next four years are going to be a test of the US Constitution. But when they are up -- and they will be, and people are more angry at Trump than the last time around the pendulum swings wildly back again, as it always does, what is going to happen to Musk and the rest of them?

It's not a test of The Constitution, it's a test of our constitution, and we're being exposed as we speak.

[flagged]
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