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Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

krebsonsecurity.com

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Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

#781

Post by TrackerFF »

jdross wrote: post #185

I realized I’m treading in extremely hostile waters here, but the stories I hear from folks working in DOGE are closer to “I spend 8am to 2am with the leaders of department X going through all contracts and outflows and identifying what is important versus wasteful given a target of saving $X million per day, and there are some great people in this department who really know what’s been going on and it’s been great t…

There are some real problems with this way of doing this.

First, if you go to any department and find N different leaders/managers/etc. and ask them to pick what projects to cut...you'll get a whole range of different answers. There's a lot of bias involved, and a lot of internal politics going on. There's always internal fights for the resources.

Second, if these kids are actually executing orders - meaning that they'll have the authority to do recommendations (based on their interviews with the people mentioned above), how would they even know if the recommendations are sound? It can take years for managers to become knowledgeable enough with the ongoing project and products.

If you were DOGE, and wanted to "game" this process, you could really just: Identify the most critical voices in some organization, preferably those on the way out, and ignore the rest. Then you give these 18-year olds the mandate to recommend cuts based on those talks. And tell them that the ones that can cut most "fat" wins.

Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

#782

Post by watwut »

WalterBright wrote: post #755

I was fascinated by electricity, chemistry, firecrackers, rockets and hotrods as a boy. It is a miracle I survived. My dad told me that God looks out for little boys, as otherwise they would not make it to adulthood.

When a girl does that, she is seen as irresponsible and stupid.

Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

#783

Post by watwut »

rob74 wrote: post #754
chonkerz wrote: post #740

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the difference is in the kind of positions the "second chance" people get hired to. They aren't put in positions where they could cause significant wide scale harm with no auditing or barriers. The debate isn't whether he should go to jail. The debate is whether he should get a clearance for some of the most powerful access someone can possibly get. He's not suitable. Why can't Musk replace him? He's just a k…

> Why can't Musk replace him? Because, like Trump, he values loyalty above all else? That's the reason why he reinstated that other guy who resigned after his extreme-right social media posts were unearthed ( https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/07/musk-doge-st... ). That's also the reason why Trump pardoned all January 6 rioters, even those convicted of violent crimes. If it's his people vs. some random cops…

I think that in the cases you mention, the extreme-right social media posts appealed to Musk and Trump actively wants people to do violent crimes on behalf of his coup.

Neither case was them valuing loyalty over something else. They rewarded people who did exactly what they wanted.

Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

#784

Post by TrackerFF »

default-kramer wrote: post #287
Aurornis wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much of it is! Journalists are already using it to debunk some of Elon’s claims like the one they only 10% of USAID reached intended targets (which appears to be based on his complete misreading of a breakdown) The real question now is where is DOGE’s evidence of all of this corruption? There are massive claims of rampant corruption, such as calling the USAID corrupt to their core, but literally zero evidenced has be…

> where is DOGE’s evidence of all of this corruption? Presumably this was published by DOGE: https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/02/at-usaid-wast... I encourage everyone to follow the links and determine the accuracy of the claims being made.

Who...who wrote that? I've seen local facebook crackpots with more rigorous use of citations / references.

This might be the worst I've ever seen, from officials. This is one step away from "trust me bro"

Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

#786

Post by bakuninsbart »

foxylad wrote: post #558
TacticalCoder wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The question no one asking is why Elon is sending a team of teenage programmers and not a team of financial auditors if he really wanted to cut government spending? If it's working, why would it matter? The most curious thing in all these discussions is that the elephant in the room is never addressed: they already found on hundreds of billions of pure fraud and funding for extremely dubious endeavors. But nobody t…

Your list of "already uncovered" fraud seems more like a list of RW hot-buttons: Clintons - check. Transgender - check. Various lame-stream media - check. Covid bats - check. Muslims - check. Incest movies - check. I'm just surprised they haven't turned up the payments for the NASA movie studio where they faked the moon landings. But not a single administrator skimming off their department's budgets, which I would im…

Googling the firs claim leads to a website absolutely teeming with ads, one of many being this gem:

> TRENDING! Trump’s Power Brew: The Coffee That Fuels His Peak Energy and Keeps Him Unstoppable! If You Want to Lose Weight and Have Maximum Energy 24/7, You Need to Try This Coffee!

The second result is the comment above. I cannot find any more information on this otherwise.

Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

#787

Post by guappa »

WalterBright wrote: post #755

I was fascinated by electricity, chemistry, firecrackers, rockets and hotrods as a boy. It is a miracle I survived. My dad told me that God looks out for little boys, as otherwise they would not make it to adulthood.

Lots of them don't make it to adulthood. I know 2 that didn't.

Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

#788

Post by concordDance »

heresie-dabord wrote: post #538
dang wrote: post #684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent all day responding to the replies here, and then detaching them in order to save space at the top of the thread. But I just had a better idea. This is a stub comment so we have a single root to collapse the replies. This way (1) replies can stay close to their parent (the top comment) without flooding the screen with offtopicness; and (2) we can all re-experience the timeless truth of https://en.wikipedia.org…

> yet-another interchangeable flamewar You have earned my respect, dang, but this is hardly an "interchangeable flamewar". What is happening is frankly beyond anything we have ever seen before in the history of the country.

Unprecedented things happen in every US presidency, they're just different things. (Hard to mention examples because the ones I am most familiar with are the last 6 terms, and each topic has flamebait potential)

Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

#790

Post by sandworm101 »

belorn wrote: post #114

It has been a fairly common story, and part rumor, that intelligence agencies like to recruit young people active in the cyber criminal scene, and that the IT security industry also adapted this approach. They basically becomes part informer and part subject expert, especially since IT security expertise seems to be a difficult subject matter to teach in universities. When I studied IT security in university, about 1…

Those kids make good "experts" in thier narrow fields, but that doesnt last long. They are generally not effective leaders, thier usefullness drying up as the state of the art moves on. Some grow up and learn how to operate as leaders in a corporate or government environment, but most burn out once they meet the next generation of golden childs.

That's actually ok in a military context. Most kids right out of highschool dont serve more than a handfull of years. Then they are the corporate world's problem.

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