Communists are suspicious about people and disregard them because of their parents, leather shoes, german sounding surname or actions as a kid. Kids are doing many things being kids, it's their privilege to do so. Solar Designer came from cracking group.
Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'
831–840 of 1001 posts
Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'
#832Earlier 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…
> To me DOGE is doing something right. Instead of shooting the messenger, discuss the actual findings they already did. > $110m to find water in Afghanistan I assume that's the same as the whitehouse.gov [1] talking point: > Hundreds of millions of dollars to fund “irrigation canals, farming equipment, and even fertilizer used to support the unprecedented poppy cultivation and heroin production in Afghanistan,” benef…
Yeah the opium one is a particularly interesting example of "waste." Most of the complaints are about "woke shit" and usual reactionary talking points or whatever but this one is just a generally widely agreed to be a good idea that didn't work. If "we tried something and it didn't work" is sufficient to justify destroying an entire organization, then oh boy does the entirety of silicon valley need to be shut down. "No project may ever fail" is the polar opposite of "move fast and break things" or Musk's "eliminate all process, re-establish the necessary ones once things break."
Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'
#833I just want to highlight one thing about this whole government takeover debacle. The reason you have the separation of power (legislative, judiciary, executive) is not to be efficient, it is to prevent generational abuse. Even a well intentioned benign autocrat if given power would not part ways with said power voluntarily. So even if the current administration is "good" there is no reason why this kind of power coul…
Right, unfortunately the trend has been increasing power of the state for some time. But I think the point also argues against having an extremely powerful administrative / regulatory state. For instance, suppose you want to create a department to "fight misinformation" and it will have wide ranging power to push for censorship. But depending who is running it, it might censor vastly different kinds of speech. If you…
> So I think that there's a difference between "government takeover to shrink the size of the state" is different from "government takeover to add another layer of unelected bureaucracy to run our lives"
Maybe in the short term, but in the long term they are no different because the power separation is eroded in either case. If you want to reduce the size of the state you need to get congress on board with your plans.
Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'
#834Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reporting on this is terrible. There are also senior (in age and experience) people, but much of the focus is on the youngins for obvious reasons. Musk also believes (either arrogance, or true belief) that much of this stuff can be figured out from first principals without much need of traditional experts.
As a side note: that is very similar to how a consulting team would operate. Very young (inexperienced) team on the ground + senior people flying in from time to time.
Except young people are utilized because they are cheap, not because they are quick or effective. This is not what is being touted (by Musk) here.
Source - spent more than half my career as a consultant.
Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'
#835I just want to highlight one thing about this whole government takeover debacle. The reason you have the separation of power (legislative, judiciary, executive) is not to be efficient, it is to prevent generational abuse. Even a well intentioned benign autocrat if given power would not part ways with said power voluntarily. So even if the current administration is "good" there is no reason why this kind of power coul…
> It is really the same reasoning with dictatorships, even if the dictator is good, competent and capable his successor most likely won't. Democracy is the best form of government because there are clean, regulated ways to transfer power. Not a scramble for dominance that once settled is meant to last in perpetuity.
You're assuming that there will be a successor, in a democratic sense.
Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'
#836Earlier quoted context omitted.
it all mirrors the Twitter takeover (fetishizing "hardcore coders", micromanagement, randomly breaking or cancelling things), so this might just be how Elon Musk approaches things.
He did cut Twitter's workforce by 80% and things seem fine absent his deranged heel turn.
twitter doesn't have near the income it used to have. or audience.
it does have the same profit. 0%
Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'
#837I just want to highlight one thing about this whole government takeover debacle. The reason you have the separation of power (legislative, judiciary, executive) is not to be efficient, it is to prevent generational abuse. Even a well intentioned benign autocrat if given power would not part ways with said power voluntarily. So even if the current administration is "good" there is no reason why this kind of power coul…
This is always in my mind. Whatever we choose to let the ruler du jour do, what would, let us say, the $hitler be able to do when they come to power through the mischoices of our fellow citizens? After all, history tells us that such people will both exist and come to power.
So it behooves us to be a little jealous of our own rights, and to push officials to limit other officials.
There's an interesting fork here where you can argue for a very libertarian view, _or_ you can argue for a "government whose interest is in restraining government (the metagame of 'checks and balances')".
Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'
#838I just want to highlight one thing about this whole government takeover debacle. The reason you have the separation of power (legislative, judiciary, executive) is not to be efficient, it is to prevent generational abuse. Even a well intentioned benign autocrat if given power would not part ways with said power voluntarily. So even if the current administration is "good" there is no reason why this kind of power coul…
> It is really the same reasoning with dictatorships, even if the dictator is good, competent and capable his successor most likely won't. Democracy is the best form of government because there are clean, regulated ways to transfer power. Not a scramble for dominance that once settled is meant to last in perpetuity. You're assuming that there will be a successor, in a democratic sense.
I see no reason why it wouldn't, they don't seem to be trying to dismantle the voting system. I am not super familiar with the US system but my impression is that a most of it is handled at the state level, not the federal level.
Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'
#839Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It is really the same reasoning with dictatorships, even if the dictator is good, competent and capable his successor most likely won't. Democracy is the best form of government because there are clean, regulated ways to transfer power. Not a scramble for dominance that once settled is meant to last in perpetuity. You're assuming that there will be a successor, in a democratic sense.
I see no reason why it wouldn't, they don't seem to be trying to dismantle the voting system. I am not super familiar with the US system but my impression is that a most of it is handled at the state level, not the federal level.
I'd want to wait until an election is coming up to be sure no changes to those systems are made, really. It's only the first month.
Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'
#840I 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…
Suppose they are indeed working 18 hour days. So they've done six weeks of work in two weeks.
Do we believe that six weeks of ordinary work is sufficient to make the claims that Musk is making and take the actions that Musk is taking? "We are working really hard" doesn't give me any more confidence in the speed that things are happening.
Heck, being absolutely exhausted sounds like a great way of making mistakes. If I heard that the team designing and building a bridge I use to commute was work 18 hour days in order to move fast I'd be quite a bit more concerned about that bridge.