GSA Eliminates 18F • Hacker News Board

Re: GSA Eliminates 18F

#441

Post by mistrial9 » Sun, Mar 02, 2025, 5:37 PM UTC

refurb wrote: post #322

hayst4ck wrote: post #238

Everyone should watch the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, speak on government workers: We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because the…

Uhhh is there a full clip because 18 seconds of what looks like a speech seems like cherry picking.

California here - completely agree that one-sided media clips are a universal occurrence in the modern US media; secondly, completely agree that full speeches, primary sources and thinking for yourself are first-order ingredients in forming real insights and opinions.

Re: GSA Eliminates 18F

#442

Post by vvpan » Sun, Mar 02, 2025, 5:43 PM UTC

khazhoux wrote: post #381

sangnoir wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The NYT had 3 straight weeks of breathless Biden is too old front-page headlines based on speculation and tenuous connections. Trumps equivalent actions/incoherence which could be interpreted in as an age-related decline were being continually "sanewashed". Further, all concerns about an old president suddenly vanished when Biden dropped out, even though Trump will be older than Biden was by the end of Trump's term.

Biden was too old. And the problem with his age was not the number , it was that he was visibly very, very old. 10 years ago, Biden was fit, spry, and sharp. He rode his bicycle with ease, and was quick-witted with journalists. In the last year+, Biden became frail and tottering, and his words slurred at times almost to incomprehension (I once rewound a clip 10 times to figure out what he said, and never untangled th…

It did not matter how old or sick each one is it mattered how each one is perceived. After the first debate a lot of Democratic voters felt like Biden was doing very poor and he was, numbers show it.

But really Democrats keep providing one unpopular boomer candidate after another, so when it is NYT or anybody upset - I am not surprised.

EDIT: actually I meant to reply to the person you are replying to, heh.

Re: GSA Eliminates 18F

#443

Post by saltcured » Sun, Mar 02, 2025, 5:52 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #373

rqtwteye wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just insane. Totally destructive. Checks and balances are gone.

Explain what you think “checks and balances” are, please.

Well, Checks come from the Check Republic. A region and culture that has had its own trials and tribulations in the past century, getting over taken and reformed a few times.

Balances, on the other hand, were from old lost Balancing Empire. This was really just a stubborn remnant of the Roman Empire that didn't want to admit the party was over.

Together, the refrain "Checks and Balances" is normally to remind us of our ambiguous and ephemeral place in history. Are we hardy folk like the Checks who will remain even as the political landscape changes? Or are we Balances left twisting in the wind?

Then, I think the earlier poster was expressing his own sense of loss in proclaiming there aren't even Checks anymore. It's no longer ambiguous, we are un-Checked and out of Balance.

Re: GSA Eliminates 18F

#444

Post by tac19 » Sun, Mar 02, 2025, 5:53 PM UTC

lovelearning wrote: post #327

tac19 wrote: post #242

[flagged]

A challenging hypothesis that made me think deeply. My perspectives as a non-American who follows their lib / left publications and SM... Founded on stolen land is historically accurate AFAIK. Slavery was practised in some regions but I don't remember being told that the US was founded on it. I have been told that some sections are racist and sexist, especially in so-called "red" states. These beliefs seem to be whit…

> The phenomenon was irrational brainwashing using euphemisms and disinfo to whitewash unethical ideas, done by the US rightwing media and its corporate backers.

How exactly did a country that elected Obama twice fall to this brainwashing? How exactly did the liberal media fail to counterbalance the brainwashing? Perhaps you could excuse it for the first Trump presidency, but how exactly did all the smart, well-intentioned liberals fail to address the problem and stop it from happening again?

They failed to offer any hope to the people who were seduced by the dark side. Liberals failed. And to keep characterizing this failure as simply a "successful brainwashing by the other side" you completely remove any responsibility from the "good guys". And even worse, you completely remove any opportunity to learn from the situation so that the "good guys" can do something different next time. You've turned the entire left-wing political and media apparatus into hapless innocent victims of an evil empire, who were faultless in the face of an all-powerful right-wing brainwashing regime that had absolute power and was impossible to defeat. That's the most childish of assessments possible.

Re: GSA Eliminates 18F

#445

Post by araes » Sun, Mar 02, 2025, 6:03 PM UTC

buran77 wrote: post #109

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The goal is to make government as dysfunctional as possible (beside the part that enforces corruption [for your side]), so people want it to get smaller and smaller (except for the corrupt parts that benefit exclusively them), so that it costs less, so that they pay less taxes, so that they have even more money (that they don't need). They definitely do not care if this "makes things worse". Often, it's intended.

> The goal is to make government as dysfunctional as possible ...So it's easier to justify to the people when they tear it down completely and then "rescue" the country by replacing it with a true corpocracy.

Thanks, term I'd never heard of. Usually think of that in terms of an "oligarchy" or "plutocracy".

And as an added benefit it sounds a lot like "corpsocracy" with the "corp" and a country that's a "corpse" animated by "corps." That uses their military "corps" to exert control. Insurance company with a military.

Re: GSA Eliminates 18F

#446

Post by twoodfin » Sun, Mar 02, 2025, 6:14 PM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #130

Reason077 wrote: post #41

Amazing how the idea of being able to file tax returns online, without paying for a commercial service to do it, is considered far-left extremism in the US. You’d think that simplifying tax returns and reducing costs in the taxation system would be something the right could get behind?

They claim that if the government could calculate taxes for you, then it would be too easy for the left to add new taxes that you wouldn't notice. The real kicker of course is that if you don't file your taxes, they actually do calculate your taxes for you, and send you a bill. It just includes the non-payment penalty and doesn't include donations.

There’s no way the IRS can track and calculate many large, important features of the tax code.

EITC eligibility, for example, depends on the aggregate employment and spending patterns of your household. The IRS does not (and shouldn’t) track when you moved in with your boyfriend.

The home mortgage interest deduction depends on your primary residence; if you have more than one, that means tracking how much time you spend at each.

Re: GSA Eliminates 18F

#447

Post by araes » Sun, Mar 02, 2025, 6:29 PM UTC

Spooky23 wrote: post #334

ethbr1 wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most important task now is for every civil servant and citizen to maintain a paper trail on what they can. So that when this gets litigated, everyone who broke the law is convicted.

Bro, it isn't 1975, it's 2025. The president has immunity like some South American dictator. His agents will be pardoned as long as they stay in favor. The civil servant should collect his pay as long as possible and do as little as possible.

People kept tossing around the term "banana republic" over on other websites. Wasn't sure what it really meant other than plantations, so I looked it up the other day to see what actually qualified. Kind of surreal how many boxes America seems to check lately.

Not quite "oligarchy that abets and supports, for kickbacks, the exploitation of large-scale plantation agriculture." Yet quite a few of the others.

- stratified social classes; impoverished working class [1]; ruling class plutocracy, composed of the business, political, and military elites; economy of state capitalism operated for the exclusive profit of the ruling class; collusion between the state and favored monopolies; profit is private property, while debts are the responsibility of the public treasury.

Maybe it's cynicism like noted in other commments, yet the linked chart from the NYT would say "it wasn't always this way" and its not my imagination that the situation has changed over the last 40 years.

[1] NYT, "Our Broken Economy", https://archive.is/ZFnAT

Re: GSA Eliminates 18F

#448

Post by Ancapistani » Sun, Mar 02, 2025, 6:35 PM UTC

bongodongobob wrote: post #126

jazzyjackson wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the removal of existing power structures within the government that support left-wing causes. Whoa, I thought DOGE was just trying to root out waste and corruption to save America from its deficit, but now you tell me it's to cement right wing loyalty in the deep state?!

Lol yeah he said the quiet part out loud. Whoopsie.

Not sure why that’s a “whoopsie” - I’m intentionally describing both the stated purpose of USDS and what I believe to be the implicit purpose to be of the Trump administration’s actions.

Those are two different things, at two different levels of abstraction. One of them is written in relatively plain language while the other is based off my own perceptions.

Re: GSA Eliminates 18F

#449

Post by Ancapistani » Sun, Mar 02, 2025, 6:39 PM UTC

miltonlost wrote: post #51

Ancapistani wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

You support DOGE's mission, but not a fan of this decision? Destroying 18F entirely consistent with DOGE's mission and Trump's goals. Why this decision then and not all their other ones? You wrote a lot of words saying very little.

I support DOGE’s stated mission - the elimination of redundancy and reform with an eye toward efficiency in general.

Eliminating 18F does not fit into either of those categories.

I believe it was eliminated because it was staffed with people who almost exclusively opposed the current administration’s agenda. This as a political decision.

I’m trying to say that when I put myself in the position of Trump and his administration, I understand why 18F was cut, while simultaneously stating that my belief that 18F did good work and we’ll be worse off without them.

Re: GSA Eliminates 18F

#450

Post by monetus » Sun, Mar 02, 2025, 6:40 PM UTC

verall wrote: post #417

rights_reminder wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of my comment was that, in the US, the government has to create an elaborate body of law to trick people into thinking the law says something which it does not say. If we did not have limitations on the taxing power of congress, they could just write a simple law that says "There is hereby imposed on all labor of every person working in the 50 states a tax equal to..." The fact that there is no such sentenc…

This is very interesting. Do you just not pay your income taxes?

To be clear for others, the sibling comment is incorrect and I think is an idea coming from the sovereign citizen movement. You have to pay income tax generally.