The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE

Post by Phelinofist » Tue, Feb 04, 2025, 7:37 AM UTC

mrkeen wrote: post #393

troelsSteegin wrote: post #16

https://doge.gov does not say anything about what the DOGE plan is, and https://www.usds.gov/ is not apparently up to date wrt DOGE. Is there something other than the Executive Order [0] that lays out concretely what DOGE intends to do? This group of engineers is doubtless skilled, but I don't seem them as the decision makers and planners here. [0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/esta...

[ https://doge.gov/ ] Sorry, you have been blocked You are unable to access doge.gov Feels like the Twitter transition again. Hey remember when there was concern that he might not have time to effectively run Tesla and SpaceX. And then Twitter. And 12 kids. Or popping ketamine and playing Diablo 4 all night. I guess he's got time to run the country too.

Post by jorvi » Tue, Feb 04, 2025, 7:39 AM UTC

turbojet1321 wrote: post #715

jimmydoe wrote: post #714

One thing CCP did masterfully is sending very young grads, who are newly admitted to the party, to go to different local communities and evaluate the outcome government project like poverty reduction there (because obviously Xi don’t trust local officials and party members). These young people have a lot of energy to make some impact, also too young to lie or corrupt. The result turned out to be actually effective. T…

> too young to lie or corrupt In my experience, youth has little to do with honesty or corruptibility.

Post by crabmusket » Tue, Feb 04, 2025, 7:49 AM UTC

crabmusket wrote: post #683

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…

Great recent article which explores how to actually cut $2T of federal expenses (though if course a tally doing so very quickly would cause a recession): https://prospect.org/economy/2025-01-27-we-found-the-2-trill... Most of what's been discussed so far is culture war dog whistling which won't save any money- or just cutting entitlements and hang the consequences.

Post by jimkleiber » Tue, Feb 04, 2025, 7:50 AM UTC

nomel wrote: post #135

xnx wrote: post #73

Are such drastic action appropriate given the current state of the US? The US probably hasn't been this economically dominant since after WWII. Feels like Chesterton fences are getting torn up left and right by people too young and incurious to possibly understand why those fences might be there.

> Are such drastic action appropriate given the current state of the US? With the debt ceiling ever increasing, approaching a trillion dollars in interest per year, nearing $6k/year per working individual, I would say the correct time to put any effort, whatsoever, into reducing spending, was 20 years ago. I think the fundamental problem is we lack adversarial systems within the government: it doesn't like to hurt it…

Post by cheesemonster » Tue, Feb 04, 2025, 7:52 AM UTC

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…