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The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE

wired.com

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Re: The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE

#691

Post by talldayo »

pessimizer wrote: post #468

There doesn't seem to be anything interesting in this article, it's simply a Red Channels style blacklist against young people who are auditing a government program. The only reason this was published is because Wired is an intelligence outlet (and has always been.) Otherwise, the publishing of random government auditors' uninteresting resumes would obviously be considered harassment (if not doxxing, like Musk barked…

> if you are an auditor for the commission appointed by the president, we will make sure that this comes up in an aggressively negative way when somebody who you want to work for googles you.

You just archeologically unearthed the dictionary definition of accountability. If the people doing the auditing are a goon squad from corporate, what reasonable person should accept their results?

Re: The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE

#692

Post by kragen »

markus_zhang wrote: post #260

Well from a foreigner's perspective, US is finally getting its own version of Cultural Revolution.

We'll see.

They were tearing down statues and demanding public self-criticism a few years ago, but that was actually the other side.

Shutting down the universities and firing any professor who isn't politically correct is a couple of years in the future; Trump probably has to replace the accreditation system for the universities first. There isn't currently a mechanism for "sending down" suspected subversive thinkers except for deportation.

The Red Guards haven't been formed yet, though commuting the sentences of the ringleaders of the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys is a start. (You may not be aware of this, but the Red Guards were over 10 million people.)

The news media are still independent, for all that matters.

So are almost all of the police, although Trump has said he wants to bring them under his command.

So I don't think we're likely to see that kind of widespread mass killing in the next two or three years. The organizational infrastructure for doing it the traditional way, using hand tools, can't be built overnight. Vance's ally Anduril might be able to automate the process with AI-powered surveillance drones, but they won't have enough production capacity for at least three years.

Re: The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE

#693

Post by CaptainFever »

vermilingua wrote: post #306
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?

I expect we’ll see more Italian plumbers coming out of the woodwork before 4 years is up.

[flagged]

Re: The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE

#694

Post by johnnyanmac »

alfalfasprout wrote: post #526
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.

How exactly is this doxxing? When you're backchanneling cabinet-level access to a sizable chunk of the country's personal data (and a nontrivial amount of classified information to boot) you're now essentially operating as a public figure. This is reporting in the public interest. Nothing they revealed isn't available already as verifiable public information.

It's still doxxing because these are not elected officials.

But then again... these are people outright breaking the law and I sure do want to know who's potentially tampering with my data. If the courts won't do it, someone has to put names and faces to this.

Re: The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE

#695

Post by eru »

alfalfasprout wrote: post #526
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.

How exactly is this doxxing? When you're backchanneling cabinet-level access to a sizable chunk of the country's personal data (and a nontrivial amount of classified information to boot) you're now essentially operating as a public figure. This is reporting in the public interest. Nothing they revealed isn't available already as verifiable public information.

> This is reporting in the public interest.

This might be true, however...

> Nothing they revealed isn't available already as verifiable public information.

... collating publicly available information and publishing it in one place would still meet my definition of doxxing.

(In this case, the doxxing _might_ be entirely justified and be in the public interest. I don't know.)

Re: The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE

#696

Post by kragen »

yongjik wrote: post #529
iAm25626 wrote: post #411

History doesn't repeat itself but it rhymes. Komsomol/Soviet, Red guards/China. Ideology fan the flame of youth into fanatic. Who/what is providing the necessary guardrail? God speed America. Future belong to the young. Make good/long term decision.

The similarity with Red Guards is too uncanny to ignore. I guess we should be thankful that the new Red Guards aren't beating federal employees to death. Yet.

The Trump-supporting Red Guards might be the Michigan Militia? Or the marchers at the disastrous "Unite the Right" rally? Those are tiny fringe groups orders of magnitude too weak to carry out a Cultural Revolution. Maybe the 1500 people who got pardoned for the January 6 riot?

You may not be aware of this, but the Red Guards were over 10 million people.

Re: The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE

#697

Post by ctrlp »

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…

Have to take out the enemy machine gun nests first before you take the citadel. Goodbye USAID/CIA.

Re: The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE

#698

Post by scottoreily »

alfalfasprout wrote: post #526
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.

How exactly is this doxxing? When you're backchanneling cabinet-level access to a sizable chunk of the country's personal data (and a nontrivial amount of classified information to boot) you're now essentially operating as a public figure. This is reporting in the public interest. Nothing they revealed isn't available already as verifiable public information.

[dead]

Re: The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE

#699

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

zasz wrote: post #497
niceice wrote: post #440

Average age of engineers and scientists in the Manhattan Project was 25. Our current gerontocracy is ahistorical. Perhaps one reason startups work so well is they are one of the few places that still let young people exert agency. The average age of NASA’s mission control team during the Apollo era was 27— they put humans on the moon. Young people bring a force of curiosity and creativity that can disrupt the status…

That's false, the average age was 29.4: https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/L... Here are the ages of the senior scientists: Oppenheimer: 38 Teller: 34 Lawrence: 41 Rabi: 44 Szilard: 44 Ulam: 33 Bethe: 36 Fuchs: 31 von Neumann: 39 So the younger people would have had plenty of supervision.

That's incredibly young for senior scientists! 31 years old? Nobody over 45, let alone 50?

Re: The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE

#700

Post by darthrupert »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #686
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.

I mean "mr free speech absolutist" has already tweeted that anyone complaining about the government would have their account suspended. Kind of on brand for a nazi.

Suspending an account on a single service has absolutely nothing to do with fascism.
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