unsnap_biceps · 1 years ago

Honestly, I'd give Musk the benefit of the doubt if he would even say that it was a joke or he didn't mean to make that particular motion. His refusal to say it wasn't intentional and it wasn't a nazi salute means, IMHO, that he ment it that way and it wasn't a joke, but a power play.

jodrellblank · 1 years ago

Isn't it concerning to have someone in the highest offices of power who thinks that's a funny joke, someone who has the lack of taste to find it funny in that context, the lack of diplomacy to think it an acceptable thing to do in such an important situation, and the lack of fear of consequences because he's in an almost completely untouchable position, and the unwillingness to say anything to excuse or apologise for it? Only the President can really do anything to him, and it's quite likely that he funds the president such that that can't/won't happen.

Trump has set a precedent of pardoning the January 6th insurrectionists - people who break the law doing what he wants get pardoned.

The supreme court is majority Republican, and he's been dismissing senior department heads and replacing them with people who have been pre-vetted for their Trump loyalty.

And he's possibly setting the precedent of ignoring court rulings he doesn't like; it's at least being accused by Republican nominated federal juste John Coughenour[1], JD Vance has spoken about ignoring supreme court rulings[2].

And The Whitehouse has announced that Elon Musk will police himself over his own conflicts of interest[3].

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

[2] https://edition.cnn.com/2024/12/31/politics/john-roberts-yea...

[3] https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/white-house-says-mus...

drawkward · 1 years ago

True, but that was a nazi salute wearing a thick layer of plausible deniability, not a "bad joke."

Capricorn2481 · 1 years ago

First it was excitement, autism, and now it's a bad joke. Whatever you call it, I will never forgive the people that normalized this in politics.

9283409232 · 1 years ago

We shouldn't treat people as if their words have no consequences either.

shitter · 1 years ago

It's not a lie. "I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life" does two things: characterizes endorsements of racism and eugenics policies as "stupid social media activity", and asserts that exposure of such activity should not lead to someone losing their job. The part about not rewarding journalists who "destroy" people does not exist in a vacuum away from his downplaying of Elez's abhorrent racial views. If journalists had revealed Elez, for example, was a secret left-wing antifa supporter on Bluesky, I think we can reasonably doubt Vance's reaction would have been the same.

Edit: Now that you've brought Vance's tweet into focus, it's also interesting that he does not think Elez is currently a "bad dude" when he's expressly stated a desire to normalize hatred against an entire ethnicity

ks2048 · 1 years ago

I'd like to see a a press conference:

"Question for JD Vance - can you look at your Indian wife and children and then say a guy posting 'Normalize Indian hate' is not a 'bad dude'"?

sjsdaiuasgdia · 1 years ago

"I don't think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid's life" is incredibly dishonest and Vance should be held to account for this incredibly dishonest statement.

The phrasing is intended to create the impression that the posts were made years ago, by some angry teenager, and it's not relevant to the person they are today. It's a way of downplaying the acts, creating distance between the person today and the acts at some unspecified point in the past.

But we know these timeline details. Elez is not a "kid" now, he's 25. These posts were not made when he was 13, they were made last year when he was, I suppose, 24 going on 25.

There are two conflicting perspectives being promoted by Musk, Vance, etc which IMO are in direct logical conflict:

1) This person's actions last year (going up to December 2024! Just 2 months ago!) are the actions of an irresponsible child and we shouldn't hold them accountable for those actions because they're not responsible enough to be held accountable for them.

2) This person is responsible enough right now to be operating at the highest levels of government.

He can't be both. So which is he, really?

llamaimperative · 1 years ago

wat?

We shouldn't reward journalists for finding and exposing morally repugnant people getting near the levers of state power?

That is 100% exactly on-the-money the absolute ideal usecase for journalism.

Aurornis · 1 years ago

> but I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life.

He’s 25 or 26, given his birth year. The comments were posted months ago.

This isn’t a “kid”! Calling him a kid is a propaganda tactic that got rolled out to try to confuse people about the true story.

He’s an adult. He made the comments as an adult.

> We shouldn’t reward journalists who try to destroy people. Ever.

It’s extraordinarily irrational to think that we should ignore important information simply to spite journalists.

There is nothing logical in that argument. It’s pure emotion and spite driven.

ttyprintk · 1 years ago

Second point is fair.

First point is not even true of the Watergate burglars. What makes crime indistinguishable from politics here is the recent ruling on presidential immunity.

KPGv2 · 1 years ago

come on, your average 1337 h4x0r does not have a criminal syndicate ready to exact revenge for their fallen comrade

ttyprintk · 1 years ago

Seems more likely that this can be completely subdued when the outcome of swatting is not a nuisance, but a conveniently extra-judicial raid by armed militia.

DFHippie · 1 years ago

He wields the sharpie. He's basically a notary public.

ModernMech · 1 years ago

Seriously yes. Having lived with someone who is schizoaffective, I recognize what is happening to America as an acute manic episode with psychosis and hallucinations.

adamrezich · 1 years ago

It's so strange to see this become a Partisan Issue so quickly and easily, when just a few short years ago everyone on the Internet cheered on Ron Paul's cries to Audit The Fed. (Yes, I know, “the Fed” means the Federal Reserve, and not the federal government—but that's clearly in the cards, too.)

And it's not as though the pre-smartphone Internet was majority Republican, of course—quite the opposite, if anything!

FergusArgyll · 1 years ago

No that isn't correct.

The authority of classification rests solely with the executive branch and the policies are established by EO.

A President can absolutely classify and declassify whatever he wants. This has been done a million times.

"It is true that the President has broad authority to classify and declassify, derived from the President’s dual role “as head of the Executive Branch and as Commander in Chief” of the armed forces. The “authority to classify and control access to information bearing on national security... flows primarily from this constitutional investment of power in the President and exists quite apart from any explicit congressional grant" ...

"Finally, as the district court recognized, the suggestion that courts can declassify information raises separation of powers concerns.... such determinations encroach upon the President’s undisputedly broad authority in the realm of national security."

- The New York Times v. Central Intelligence Agency, No. 18-2112 (2d Cir. 2020)

The only reason the material was not considered declassified in that case was because the possible declassification was "inadvertent" etc etc.

Even that ruling does not go far enough, and I'd be willing to give 10:1 odds SCOTUS would give Pres. full and complete powers over classification

perihelions · 1 years ago

No, the greyed-out parent comment is correct. It's an unintuitive and weird legal truth, but it *is* the truth.

- "While the president has the legal authority to grant a clearance, in most cases, the White House’s personnel security office makes a determination about whether to grant one after the F.B.I. has conducted a background check. If there is a dispute in the personnel security office about how to move forward — a rare occurrence — the White House counsel makes the decision. In highly unusual cases, the president weighs in and grants one himself."

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/28/us/politics/jared-kushner... ("Trump Ordered Officials to Give Jared Kushner a Security Clearance" (2019))

wahnfrieden · 1 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

jonhohle · 1 years ago

Is that not how audits work?

e44858 · 1 years ago

After all the database leaks I've seen in the news, we should probably assume all SSNs have been leaked by now.

jonhohle · 1 years ago

OP was philosophizing. Why would anyone need any kind of clearance to access non-classified data. If they’ve been given permission by the head of the executive branch, what more authority do they need?

lmm · 1 years ago

> The laws are broken, so regardless of what you think "should" be legal, it isn't. They are being selectively enforced, though, and that's both the problem and probably the thing more worth your philosophical energy. Is that okay, when a criminal operation is too wealthy and influential to be held accountable?

All the laws have been being selectively enforced for decades. The people who were previously running these departments may have written the right incantations and negotiated a consensus with the departments that are supposed to watch the watchmen, but they had no more accountability to the average citizen/voter than the people who are moving in now.

The voting public no longer cares about "legal" versus "illegal", because they recognise that those categories have no bearing on anything relevant. This has been brewing for years, but the establishment benefited too much from subverting the rule of law to fix it. At this point they've made their bed.

jonhohle · 1 years ago

Regarding military and security, you are right. Unfortunately that means all superfluous spending becomes military and security.

mbrumlow · 1 years ago

> which have secret testimonies

Tell me what this has to do with am having access to USAAID and the Treasury?

talldayo · 1 years ago

"I want to know what the government is hiding" and "I'm okay with the government hiding what they know" is a very hard circle to square.

mbrumlow · 1 years ago

Stop being so pedantic, we have an idea what it is. When I say “we don’t know what it is” is a nice way of saying the things you say it is you have no proof of it being.

How about you give me an argument of why we should not have this sort of audit?

I am also willing to bet there is no situation where it could be done “right” and have the stated outcome Trump and Musk have outlined be okay. Which makes most of your arguments bad faith ones. Given the things already exposed should have all Americans upset.

mbrumlow · 1 years ago

No. No I don’t. Before all this nobody knew anything. Then Trump and Elon came along and now everybody on the internet is an expert, and has all sorts opinions based off fear.

We have a system. If it is not legal it will be flushed out. The only people who seem to have an issue seem to be ones who simply don’t like the who.

beedeebeedee · 1 years ago

How far of a step would it be to produce this type of manipulation? https://www.wcia.com/business/press-releases/ein-presswire/7...

BuildTheRobots · 1 years ago

The Olympics comment seemed more damning. He literally said twice they rigged the election.

> They all came in on the Olympics. And then I saw [Gulati] and we got the World Cup too. And you know, it's only because they rigged the election that I'll be your president representing you there. You know, I got both of them. I got the Olympics and I got the World Cup. And I said, you know, it's too bad. One was in 2026 or the other was in 2028. I said, I won't be there. I won't be your president.(...) But then they rigged the election and now we won. So I'm going to be your president for the Olympics and for the World Cup.(...) So [Gulati], thank you for the World Cup and everybody. Thank you for the Olympics.

https://youtu.be/TTHonqrM7Vc

Bancakes · 1 years ago

Not everyone is censoring you. Some of us want to learn about cool technology, not read politics irrelevant to daily life.

slg · 1 years ago

At what point does a story become big enough to disable the flagging mechanic? Maybe this post isn't the one to do it, but there has been an onslaught of stories about the damage Musk and DOGE is doing to the US government including lots of tech specific stories. This is an important ongoing story that is relevant to the community here and every post about it shoots up the front page of HN only to disappear minutes later because of mass flagging.

dang · 1 years ago

> We'd love to have the sort of useful discussion you're aiming for,

Alas, that is not true for all values of "we". Let's see how we do in the current thread. (Edit: so far it does seem to be a little better.)

> but all new discussions that reference Musk are being systematically flagged

Yes, and at the same time we've turned off the flags on quite a few of them—enough that this continues to be by far the most-discussed topic on HN right now. I realize that's not enough for those who want more, but this is always the case whenever there is a MOT (Major Ongoing Topic - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)

> by apparent supporters of Musk

But also by users who just care about protecting HN for its intended purpose, which is vulnerable to getting consumed by political flames. The pattern we've observed over the years is that when a MOT keeps getting flagkilled, the flags are coming from a coalition of these two groups (i.e. users who oppose it politically and users who are trying to protect HN), neither of which would have enough oomph to do this on their own.

> We're being censored.

That word has so many different meanings nowadays that nearly all sentences including it are both true and false. In one sense, sure, any story getting removed from HN's front page could be called censorship—but it's maybe not the most helpful description on a site where frontpage space is the scarcest resource and some kind of curation/selection is essential.

In another sense, the fact that this MOT is the most discussed topic on HN of the past few weeks means that no, it is not being censored—there have been thousands of posts about it.

Using the word 'censored' ultimately just means you'd like to see more of this topic on HN. I certainly respect that, but there are also a lot of other users who would like to see less of it. Our job is to serve the community as a whole, which is not easy when the community is so divided. Ultimately, whatever solution we come up ends up feeling unsatisfactory to nearly everyone. That is probably my least favorite square on the Cycle of Life of HN, but it comes up once or twice in every go-round.

Here are links to some other comments I've posted in the last few days about this specific issue. If you (or anyone) are willing to read them, take in the explanations, and then have a question that I haven't answered, I'd be curious to know what it is* and happy to take a crack at it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978572

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978389

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42977160

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911011

* (because as far as I know, all the important questions have already been answered, which is not to say everyone is happy!)

Quarrelsome · 1 years ago

its not censorship. There's several comments on here that have no relevance to the source article and are hand wringing which is unproductive and often is eager to descend into flaming. Lets talk about the article and its content and the potential cybersecurity risks to government data please.

yodsanklai · 1 years ago

> all new discussions that reference Musk are being systematically flagged by apparent supporters of Musk.

I'm not a Musk supporter at all, but I flag these discussions for several reasons.

1. To keep my sanity. These stories are pretty much everywhere and will be all over for the next 4 years at least. I don't want to engage in them and lose even more time and get even more anxious.

2. The comments aren't useful and don't bring new information. It's pretty clear what Elon and the oligarchs are trying to do. Those who don't see it won't change their mind at that point.

HN is one of the rare forum to avoid flame war, let's keep it that way.

lupusreal · 1 years ago

It's only censorship when the government does it, or so I've been told.

dang · 1 years ago

I agree in principle, but these are the dynamics of every intense polarized issue and I don't think there's much we can do about it other than nibble around the margins. For example, we try to downweight comments that are primarily name-calling or flaming, in the hope of giving more oxygen to posts that are reflective, find something new to say, and so on.

At bottom, it seems like this is just how mass psychology works—it's what you get when the inputs are (1) human nature, and (2) modern media. It stresses me out too, but I have to remind myself not to fight battles we can't win. That's a recipe for burnout and worse.

phony-account · 1 years ago

> “so and so is literally worse than hitler"

Can you give citations for where you’ve seen these sorts of statements?

However bad Musk is, I’ve yet to see anyone saying he is “literally worse than Hitler”

itronitron · 1 years ago

>> it's overwhelmingly people repeating the same falsehoods that might, at best, have a kernel of truth, but have been blown out of proportion to the point of just being not-true.

That describes basically all posts about AI, so let's all join in and start flagging any HN post about AI.

dang · 1 years ago

Edit: oh wait, I think I understand you now. When I said "that will only confirm that the flaggers were right", I did not mean "that will only confirm that the flaggers all had the right motive". (Obviously not all of them do, as I've explained below.) Rather, I meant "that will only confirm that this submission wasn't a good one for HN, and therefore it was good that it got flagged (even though not every flag was rightly motivated)".

-- original comment --

> That would only be true if the flaggers were disinterested judges who never comment.

I don't follow this argument. Can you rephrase it?

Flagging flamewars is an appropriate use of flagging on HN. If this thread turns into the kind of flamewar we normally want to see flagged, that's evidence in favor of the users who made that call in the first place.

> the possibility that any of them could be flagging or commenting in bad faith

Yes. I've made this point many times, including in this thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42993092): there's usually two kinds of flaggers: users who want to suppress a story because they don't like it (e.g. politically), and users who feel like the story isn't in keeping with the site guidelines and are worried about protecting HN. I assume by "bad faith" you mean the first kind.

throwup238 · 1 years ago

I don’t know how many flags it takes to flag kill a whole article, but the threshold for comments is two or three flags. It doesn’t take a lot of people to kill an entire topic of discussion by flagging related articles, especially for users who only peruse the front page. Brigading on this site is almost trivial.

Dang’s anti-flagging mechanism is the human factor that balances that very blunt automated system. People don’t seem to vouch for articles as much as for comments.

atoav · 1 years ago

I don't see how this isn't hacker news: "What is the technical education of the teenager with security clearance to the network of the org that is responsible for nukes"

That sounds *literallyf like the plot for any 80s hacker movie out there. You know, when hacking was political and hackers were people interested in undermining structures of authority and bending the rules.

That is the origin of hacking, and as such it is totally in order to discuss such topics here, IMO.

I'd rather read stuff like this than another CEOs musings that are entirely marketing and make believe (cue Sam Altman). Just because it affirms billionairs viewpoints of the status quo doesn't make it apolitical. If it feels apolitical to you that probably says something about your political biases.

talldayo · 1 years ago

> It isn't particularly newsworthy.

I disagree. Krebsonsecurity has regularly delivered HN salient and interesting frontpage material, and this is currently the most flagged submission they've ever had on HN. We've discussed security assessments very similar to this in the past, even political ones, with technical curiosity and good faith discussion. The constraining factor is now people who unconditionally idolize Elon Musk. It's easy to see who's in the wrong when flagging relevant, well-written and objective reports like this one.

My personal view is that HN shouldn't promote political content at all. It should just be moderated out or flagged with no opportunity for recourse, whether it's Syrian independence or the invasion of Ukraine. But I abide by the exceptions made in HN's guidelines and consider this a technically imperative article that most can tune out if they dislike. It's very easy to see the title and decide for yourself whether you're comfortable reading and discussing the article.

c22 · 1 years ago

I think the fact that we keep hearing about DOGE grey-area accessing of computer systems run by the US government and not about whatever else the Trump administration is currently doing is pretty good evidence that HN maintains a bias towards stories of interest to hackers. Like it or not, I think most of the hackers here are also US citizens.

jacobjjacob · 1 years ago

This site is called hacker news… the article is news about hackers

fragmede · 1 years ago

Ignoring the US politics angle, would this post have been flagged? It's Brian Krebs, back after being DDoSed yet again, reporting on hackers hacking. doxing and swatting people. hacking. That's not of interest on hacker news? If, then, the subject without the political angle, would have been of interest here, then why does adding, yes, a highly contentious topic on top of that, make it of less interest to the community?

dang · 1 years ago

This is a (very) well-explored issue on HN and the solution we arrived at has been stable for many years: most stories about politics are off topic, as the guidelines say (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), but some stories with political overlap are on topic (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...).

Here are a couple recent posts to look at if you (or anyone) want to understand the principles by which we decide which ones get to count as "on topic":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978389

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911011

If you read those and follow the links there, and still have a question I haven't answered, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.

> What's the point of having the flagging mechanism if you just remove them when people complain?

I made precisely the same point a few minutes ago! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42993906

The answer is that we don't "just remove them when people complain". We only remove them sometimes, when doing so seems in keeping with the principles by which we moderate HN.

milesrout · 1 years ago

I am responding to the content of Daniel's comment, not hijacking his comment to coattail my views of the article itself. I think the replies to his comment are the most appropriate place to respond to it.

The effect you describe is an unfortunate side effect of any threaded forum where the ordering of sibling posts is determined by some measure of quality: all responses to the first top-level comment, no matter the quality, precede the second top-level comment, which is probably of higher quality (on average). This is one of many reasons that threaded comments are flawed. Flat comments (phpBB style) of course have their own flaws and chronological threaded comments (LWN for example) have their own too.

dang · 1 years ago

Normally we turn off replies on pinned comments to avoid this problem, but today I decided to leave it open, to give people a chance to air their objections/counterarguments/feelings and hopefully get responded to.

However, to avoid the thread ballooning at the top of the page, I'm also detaching these subthreads as I reply to them.

dang · 1 years ago

Thank you!

dang · 1 years ago

I hear you but I think this sequence of stories has interest to HN readers on both sides of the political abyss, though not necessarily for the same reasons, and I think one can find the stories interesting without crossing into personal attack. (It's true that some of the articles do that more than others.)

We don't want too much of this, but a certain amount is ok, and that's how HN has operated for at least the last 15 years.

madeofpalk · 1 years ago

Don't click into the comments would probably be a good start.

afavour · 1 years ago

While I understand the sentiment (and support it with a lot of political content on HN) the start of this administration has an undeniable tech angle. If you don’t want to read the stuff, don’t click. But it belongs here.

dang · 1 years ago

The preferred approach is (1) flag the stories you think are off-topic for Hacker News, and (2) make peace with the fact that the front page sometimes has stories that you feel don't belong there. This is true for everyone, including me. It's a consequence of the site being under conflicting constraints, and frontpage space being the scarcest resource (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).

Oh and (3) if you browse HN while logged in, you can always click 'hide' on a submission and the software will not show you that particular one anymore.

zfg · 1 years ago

Something simple and direct you can do is don't buy Tesla. It may now genuinely be in America's national interest to not buy Tesla.

There's no point giving Musk more money, power, and influence. He's now calling for the impeachment of judges because he thinks they're in his way:

https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5134725-elon-musk-impe...

He wants any opposition or limit or restraint to him gone. Here's an interview with Kara Swisher about Musk's mentality that's worth watching:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xXLycFv5Gc

demosthanos · 1 years ago

Why would it have to be organized flagkilling? A combination of a sizeable pro-Trump faction (even 20% of users would be more than enough) and a sizeable "just keep US politics off the front page" faction would be more than enough to account for what you're seeing.

dang · 1 years ago

You need only look at the threads that HN has hosted about this to see that "pro-Trump" is a strong overstatement. The community is divided, just like the society at large is divided (or societies, since many countries are represented here).

Given what we know about the demographics of HN—for example, users here are probably more likely to be college-educated, many come from outside the U.S., and so on—the community here is probably less pro-Trump than the general U.S. population is, but that still leaves a great many users on both sides of that issue.

Of course I understand that any level of pro-$X can be disturbing if $X itself is disturbing enough. But that's more of a qualitative experience than a quantitative one. I've called it the "shock experience" in the past and wrote about it here, if anyone is interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098.

dang · 1 years ago

I'm not talking about the events themselves or how significant they are—I'm only talking about HN comment threads.

Often, a sequence of related stories (S1, S2, ..., Sn) produces threads that are more or less the same as their predecessors, rather than focusing on the specific new information introduced by any Si. This particularly happens when the topic is a major and divisive one, like the current one.

What happens in this cases is that people tend to post their generic views about $Person or $Topic, often in vehement terms and without much curiosity about the specific details of what's happening. In this way we get threads that don't differ very much from one discussion to the next. That's what I mean by "interchangeable".

jahsome · 1 years ago

That same statement applies to literally every moment the country has existed.

ameister14 · 1 years ago

I tend to disagree, in terms of coordinated upheaval we saw something similar in Andrew Jackson's presidency. Nothing new under the sun, I'm afraid.

concordDance · 1 years ago

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)

reaperman · 1 years ago

In this context, "activating" is speech which elicits gut-reaction. Whereas "interesting" is speech which stimulates thoughtfulness.

dang · 1 years ago

Ah good question and sorry that wasn't clear—I use that word a lot. By "activation" I mean arousal of the nervous system, particularly the sympathetic nervous system, which regulates fight-or-flight responses, and the limbic system of the brain which assesses threats and seizes control when it feels that survival is threatened.

What happens in flamewars is that when people encounter material they strongly disagree with, these systems get activated and rapidly produce aggressive and defensive responses that have to do with self-protection, and nothing to do with thoughtful consideration of the material, things one might learn, points where one might be wrong, curiosity, playful interaction, and so on. When survival is at stake there is no time or space for the latter sorts of reactions. But it's the latter that we want on HN—they're what the site is for.

Of course we all know cognitively that our survival is not really at stake when someone disagrees with us on the internet—at least our frontal cortices know that—but our limbic systems and autonomic nervous systems definitely do not know that. They experience it as a threat and from then on it's kill-or-be-killed. The fact that survival is not really at stake has no effect; what matters is the feeling that it is so.

This is what underlies commenters being so angry, snarky, sarcastic, aggressive and so on, on the internet. It's also what underlies our inability to hear each other or respect each other.

I sometimes describe this is as 'reflexive' vs. 'reflective' responses (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). By 'reflexive' I mean when the rapid-response system I just described takes over and reacts from "cache", so to speak, to quickly counter a threat. By 'reflective' I mean the slower processes that happen when one is in a relaxed state and available for curiosity and play. In the jargon I'm using, 'activated' means being in 'reflexive' mode, and 'interested' or 'curious' means being in 'reflective' mode.

This has all kinds of interesting aspects. Here's one: you can't be in both of these states at the same time. It's literally one or the other. Think of the implications that has for a community like HN, where basically everything we want comes out of one of those two states and everything we don't want comes out of the other.

Someone is going to object that political developments can and do present real survival threats. That of course is true, and maybe to the extent that it is true, people have no choice but to function in kill-or-be-killed mode. But we feel this way and behave this way to a greater extent than we need to, and that's one factor preventing conflicts from being solved. That's a vicious circle which it's in all our interests to explore our way out of. We can't kill our way out of it.

In case it's not obvious, I'm using the word 'kill' metaphorically. What I mean by 'kill' is what we do when we try to eliminate threats (and the feeling of threat) by annihilating the other. That shows up as real killing in extreme situations like war, but the same (let's call it) psycho-physiological state shows up in other environments too, including trivial ones like internet forums. Here it shows up as people trying to annihilate the other by maximizing the aggressive potency of their language.

How do we end up getting so activated when we don't need to? and what can we do to become less activated in this way? I believe that if you tug on those threads and keep tugging, you arrive at the most important problem in the world. That's one main reason why I've kept working on HN for so long. Internet comments are trivial, but this environment is a laboratory for learning about this stuff—not just by observing others, but mainly by working with what they activate in oneself. In that sense it's a driver for growth and learning. This learning isn't primarily conceptual—it's more somatic.

p.s. Lots of people on HN know far more about the physiology here than I do. What I'm saying comes from my explorations of the therapy world, e.g. somatically-oriented trauma therapies and even-more-out-there stuff. That culture veers into metaphor more often than genuine specialists would be comfortable with. If I've done that in this comment I would certainly be interested in correction!

c0nsumer · 1 years ago

As I read it, when someone is "activated" they are provoked to responding; someone replying because they want to say something. I see "triggered" as somewhat of an analogy, but a much more loaded word.

This seems to stand opposed to people who reply because they have something interesting to say.

dang · 1 years ago

I guess 2 days isn't new by firehose standards, but this particular story didn't get discussed until today and there's still some interest in it. HN has a long tradition of hosting threads about the exploits of young hackers.

dang · 1 years ago

I don't feel out of depth. To me it feels like variations on places we've been before.

But I hasten to qualify this:

(1) This is just my feeling! You asked how I feel, so I'm telling you, but I don't claim my feeling is anything more than that.

(2) I'm only talking about dynamics on HN. I'm not talking about what Trump might do or AI might do; it's not my job to comment on those and your guess is as good as mine anyhow.

dang · 1 years ago

My thought is that it's not great in absolute terms but reasonably ok in relative terms. Any thread on a topic this intense is going to have a lot of qualities that aren't good-for-HN.

We do some moderation things to try to nudge it in a more reflective/interesting direction, but there's a limit to how much that can help.

IOT_Apprentice · 1 years ago

I’m curious what you consider to be a smear. Are the items about his background & history factual or not? If true, it seems calling it a smear attempt might be disingenuous.

tomrod · 1 years ago

What in the article do you consider as lacking a factual basis?

dkjaudyeqooe · 1 years ago

I see you're "ready to label one of the “other side” as evil" but the article seems well researched and referenced while your comment makes vague claims.

I see a lot of really specific and well thought out raising of issues in this thread, as it applies to technology, commerce and security, all very much on topic for HN.

Criticism of the current administration is an important part of democracy, we need to hold the government accountable, no matter who runs it.

dang · 1 years ago

> I think it’s very irresponsible of you to allow articles about US politics in the front page

There are a couple answers to that. One is that it's not possible not to. We tried once, as an experiment, and it had the counterintuitive effect of making the site more politicized.

The other answer is that a limited amount of political overlap is actually part of optimizing the site for intellectual curiosity. Lots of past explanations at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... if anyone wants more.

dang · 1 years ago

Just as many people feel that HN is horribly right-biased as left-biased. I could give you hundreds of examples. Here are a couple:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42618465

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42066014

The way out of this logjam is to stop thinking in quantitative terms (how many 'left' posts vs. how many 'right' posts) and instead look for the highest-quality articles you can find. If there's a high-qualty article about USAID, meaning one which contains interesting information and isn't primarily hammering on partisan drums, I don't see why that wouldn't be on topic here.

ty6853 · 1 years ago

I have some empathy, mostly because it may be challenging for them to retrain and they have been institutionalized.

I hope they are given some runway or options to prepare for the private sector. But viscerally it is deeply, exquisitely satisfying to observe feds have shit canned their parasitic positions predicated on collection by armed tax collectors.

likeabatterycar · 1 years ago

[deleted]

Hard to hold a discussion when everyone is arguing in bad faith.

moshun · 1 years ago

I think we both know the answer. Most of these DOGE people wouldn’t have been allowed in the building, much less the system root a couple of months ago because they’d never pass a clearance check.

genewitch · 1 years ago

There's a rumor that the doge team went and did their metadata dump at treasury on midnight on the 21st or whatever. But what I think would be more interesting is if musk hasn't done anything, and all this crying and screaming is just at the threat of peeking at the books.

Because that seems more both their style.

SequoiaHope · 1 years ago

Perhaps giving an inexperienced script kiddie full access was part of a broader plan to allow someone else to covertly “steal” the data without directly implicating those in charge.

the_snooze · 1 years ago

SF-86 Section 13A Employment Activities

>For this employment have any of the following happened to you in the last seven (7) years?

>Fired, quit after being told you would be fired, left by mutual agreement following charges or allegations of misconduct, left by mutual agreement following notice of unsatisfactory performance.

>Provide the reason for being fired.

https://www.opm.gov/Forms/pdf_fill/sf86.pdf

nicce · 1 years ago

> One of the DOGE kids may have just cloned every repo and then connect the machine to public internet because they need to fed it to an AI to figure out how things work.

May...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/02/06/elon-musk-d...

SV_BubbleTime · 1 years ago

I like how you are 100% convinced that this “a mess” and “we can only assume the worst” and that PII is compromised, etc.

What actual facts do you have for anything?

I understand why the media is mad, why NGOs, and why liberal politicians are mad, I get why foreign countries are mad.

I’m interested in fraud and abuse, regardless of who does it. So if Musk’s team finds it, great, if they get caught committing it and have to deal with that, also great.

But right now we know there is something broken. Instead of being mad about that, you are angry about hypotheticals that have not happened.

Why is that?

jodrellblank · 1 years ago

> "What will happen when PIIs of every individual with dealings with the Treasury gets leaked?"

We see what happens when big companies leak personal data - almost nothing. Maybe they give you 3 months of 'credit monitoring' or 'identity theft monitoring' service, maybe they write an apology press release. We've seen how Trump presents things, he quite realistically could say either "it was Democrats weak security, we're fixing it" or "hackers must have got it, we'll clean it up" or even "fake news" and then ... do nothing, we never hear about it again and the affected people deal with it as best they can. Why would you expect more than that to happen - a newspaper writes a damning article, lawsuits are filed, the news moves on in 24 hours.

We saw how he reacted to COVID, it wasn't a world class good reaction.

leptons · 1 years ago

> And I have NFI how you'd deal with potential malicious changes to your data and backups.

The backups should be stored on WORM tape. They can't be altered (easily or at all?). Of course they're probably wiping their asses with the backups like they are the constitution.

testbjjl · 1 years ago

Worked in IT a long time ago for a branch. There was some Java, a lot of Perl and SVN. We got releases from DC to run on local servers. Folks with experience with SDLC were prevalent and that was a prerequisite for doing anything meaningful. Never saw Cobol, doesn’t mean it wasn’t there.

cozzyd · 1 years ago

The double entendre of DC is amusing here

grandempire · 1 years ago

Yes. I don't know many accountants who are familiar with polynomials let alone what a DAG is, etc. I am sure there are graph concepts they use by other names.

> Light SQL skills tend to be the upper end of technical accounting

This would be the main point that would need correction if I am wrong.

dang · 1 years ago

Please don't cross into personal attack, regardless of how wrong another commenter is or you feel they are.

If you know more than someone else, two good options are (1) to share some of what you know, so we all can learn; or (2) not post. Snarky putdowns are not a good option.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

grandempire · 1 years ago

Apologies. I responded to the wrong comment.

SoftTalker · 1 years ago

OPM has had major leaks. I think it’s safe to assume most federal IT leaks like a sieve.

A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 · 1 years ago

The story did get memoryholed very fast. At the time, I was not sure what to ascribe it to ( well, still don't ), but I did find it interesting that it was pointed out how limited in scope it was.

throw0101d · 1 years ago

>> Did everybody already forget only a month ago it was revealed Chinese hackers had access to US Treasury computers including US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen's own?

> I find it strange that neither activists nor politicians nor journalists cared about that enough to make it a continuous news cycle.

Because (a) that was a month ago and that's a long time given recent events. And (b), it's implicit that someone 'inappropriate' having access is a bad thing, but with Trump/Musk/DOGE it's being done on purpose.

It's the purposeful part that's at issue now.

There are people who have reportedly just graduated high school that have root-level access to things:

* https://futurism.com/elon-kids-gutting-opm-doge

Beside being party loyalists, do they have any kind of qualifications?

dennis_jeeves2 · 1 years ago

>I find it strange that neither activists nor politicians nor journalists cared about that enough to make it a continuous news cycle

No not strange, because Elon etc. will cause more damage to their corrupt careers than other security breaches.

Cornbilly · 1 years ago

Because those were done by state or criminal actors and this one is allegedly being done with the consent of our elected government? It’s really not that difficult to figure out.

Why don’t you just state your opinion instead of being vague?

throwaway2037 · 1 years ago

What was the impact of the "exposed personal information" from Change Healthcare? One thing that makes me suspicious when I see those leaked personal details headlines: I am sure that my own personal info has been leaked many, many times. And, yet, never once have I been hacked (PC/laptop/phone) or had financial crimes against me (steal credit card, unauth'd charges, etc.). And, I write this as a total normie, who basically depends upon Google Accounts/Passwords to "do it all for me" (and my commercial banks where I have bank + credit cards). I don't do anything particularly special.

To be clear: I am not here to defend companies with weak cybersecurity, but the impact of these leaks is virtually nil. "One hundred million" sounds like a huge number, but it provides little insight on the realised impacts.

kenjackson · 1 years ago

Only unclassified data was accessed. Which is still bad but I suspect those types of hacks happen nearly daily.

pxmpxm · 1 years ago

It's pretty obvious that people opposing the goals of DOGE are pushing this story, same way they were pushing the earlier "doxxing" of the young engineers working for DOGE or the Elon nazi zieg idiocy.

Say what you will, but Musk has a track record of executing well at preposterous speed, so for legacy players/media this sorta of PR campaign is about the most they can muster.

At the end of the day thought, we'll all have to compare real word results versus those PR narratives and I am positive i know which way that will swing. You just can't PR bullshit you way out something like a 250ton piece of stainless sticking a landing.

johnnyanmac · 1 years ago

>The reaction to alleged violation of privacy here seems inconsistent and disproportionate, and I wonder why?

because they made a public show of it. That's the big difference. Meanwhile, Healhcare is already under more scutiny than ever and want to bury a lede of hacking.

A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 · 1 years ago

Hmm. I am hesitant to engage this post, but it may be well worth to point out, that some of issues with status quo are precisely the result of "people that had access to this data got that access after passing background checks, had years in the treasury, supervision from higher-ups, and other processes in place". Until now it was old boys club that did not dare to shake things up a little.

My point is that there is plenty to dislike here, but if your argument against him is: he is a nazi, you have already lost, because you do not understand the sentiment out there.

bad_username · 1 years ago

You say there's security clearance which was a prerequisite for the predecessors but was bypassed by the DOGE team. Understood.

verdverm · 1 years ago

I think he was likely after a lower price than the impulsive one he offered

mattnewton · 1 years ago

I always assumed it was because he believed the price he was paying was now too high anfter the tech downturn, and he wanted to try lower it a few billion. It’s roughly worth a few million in lawyer fees to take a 10% chance to lower the purchase price by just over a billion.

fragmede · 1 years ago

would you mind looking like a fool for a chance to save a couple billion dollars?

there's no fair market value for Twitter because there's only one Twitter. If you're rich, money is just a means to an end. you see something, you take it. If you think you can save a couple (billion) bucks on your way out, why not give it a shot? it's already yours

Capricorn2481 · 1 years ago

> things like distracting everyone by paying a team of people to play PoE for him so he can lie about it and generate widespread and inconsequential outrage is an insignificant cost to him

Yes, the salute was the same thing. Not to say he couldn't have white nationalist tendencies, but the outrage is what he wanted. He's been doing it on Twitter for years, retweeting clearly incendiary and offensive things with "Interesting" or "Huh". This has been the alt-right playbook for years.

tbatchelli · 1 years ago

Agreed, but part of the reason I think people are not aware of what’s going on is that we’re not calling things for what they are, in a weird and self-imposed Orwellian way. Like calling a rocket that blows up “unexpected rapid disassembly” or some other BS. The rocket blew up, the cars blow up, it’s a coup, they’re nazi sympathizers, etc…

lawn · 1 years ago

That's why they dumped it all into an LLM online?

Applejinx · 1 years ago

If DOGE is acting in an adversarial capacity to the US, there's no reason to put any stock in any claims they make regarding 'it is secure' or 'it is still in the hands of DOGE alone and definitely not being conveyed anywhere else, it has just been wrested from the grasp of the US Government'.

If they are adversarial enough to justify such wresting from the grasp of the US government, is that not already a problem, compounded by the fact that if they are already in an adversarial position there's no reason to assume they are acting alone in that position? Why believe any claim by them if they are already taking pains to take a position as an adversary?

It's taking their say-so that they are a domestic adversary rather than a foreign adversary, as if that made all the difference. I can't agree that it makes as much difference as they claim it makes.

amazingamazing · 1 years ago

You base this off what? X isn't a public company.

unsnap_biceps · 1 years ago

So why did the bankers that finance the loan write it down by nearly 80%? They have access to all the financial data and yet decided to take a major loss on their loan due to?

From what it appears, Late 2024, Fidelity wrote down their loans by 79% [1] and then sold it early 2025 for 97 cents on the dollar (of the reduced value) [2].

I really struggle to believe that the banks are just taking this massive loss by mistake and that the value is actually still there.

[1] - https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/29/fidelity-has-cut-xs-value-... [2] - https://nypost.com/2025/02/05/business/banks-sell-5-5b-of-x-...

tristan957 · 1 years ago

I don't mean this negatively toward you in any way, but it is easy to say when you aren't in that situation.

threeseed · 1 years ago

You’re right that previous governments did not just recklessly disband entire agencies based on the wishes of an unelected billionaire and a bunch of teenagers.

I wonder why.

nemo44x · 1 years ago

Correct. It’s hard for people to imagine but the country functioned very differently before FDR and before him Lincoln. We’ve lived in FDRs government for 75 years and it’s served well for a good deal of that time. But nothing lasts for ever and even wine doesn’t continue to get better forever.

You could argue there have been 4 Republics - articles of confederation, Washington, Lincoln, FDR marking the turning point. The world has changed a lot. It feels like the time is right to rethink the federal governments scope and function and how it relates to her people and the world.

threeseed · 1 years ago

Not sure what you are talking about. Audits happen all the time in government.

What is extraordinary is doing so with (a) no thought to privacy or security, (b) using teenagers with no security clearances, (c) by a billionaire who seems to just be going after his enemies e.g. USAID was investigating SpaceX.

fzeroracer · 1 years ago

I think the problem goes deeper than that, for two reasons.

The first is the obvious one. Congress is captured by a bunch of ineffectual assholes that either don't care enough to stop this or actively support ceding power to the executive.

But the second is that Congress has no actual enforcement mechanism. There are a few Congress members that are trying to stop this, but the executive can just play games with the court and lock out Congress members from any sort of oversight. If the executive refuses to abide by the laws of the country, who has control to stop it?

JumpCrisscross · 1 years ago

Thank you—missed this. I’d still say there is an escalation step missing in trying to stop the DOGE bros from entering the premises, up to and including getting arrested.

Look at Seoul. The balls on those lawmakers saved their democracy. I’m not seeing that strength or resolve in the Congress anywhere.

JumpCrisscross · 1 years ago

> Regarding USAID: That is under Rubio now

Almost certainly not. The President can’t reorganise e.g. the CIA and Federal Reserve under HHS, for example.

Where I agree with you is in USAID not being politically worth the fight. And after the last 8 years (and Biden’s twilight) it’s hard for Democrats to argue for the rule of law per se.

whamlastxmas · 1 years ago

Maybe the government shouldn’t keep this information on its citizens without probable cause?

thephyber · 1 years ago

And university students during the Iranian Revolution.

amazingamazing · 1 years ago

> not a team of financial auditors if he really wanted to cut government spending?

jdross · 1 years ago

I know a number of them but they’re rightfully not looking to be especially public about it now on the internet — life is hard enough just doing the job they’re trying to do. Which is frankly a lot of banal accounting and auditing type work. They’re in their 30’s and 40’s with prolific backgrounds in PE, as entrepreneurs managing nine figure budgets and thousands of employees, etc.

Politics vs policy, or something like that?

n2d4 · 1 years ago

A larger list of DOGE employees is on Wikipedia. While there are a variety of members, most of them don't have the experience you'd expect someone to have in the respective roles. The average age is definitely higher than 25 though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_Government_Effic...

theGnuMe · 1 years ago

So an endgame is grok runs the government.

I’d be worried about real spies gaining access in person given the confusion of who is doge or not.

rcpt · 1 years ago

"flying in from time to time"?

I'm sorry but what are these guys working on that's taking precedence over this?

HillRat · 1 years ago

Not going to defend the cult of the consulting MBA, but when I was running strategy work, my consultant-level kids had been recruited from a small number of MBA programs, undergone six-month intensives, and then spent 2-3 years as entry-level spreadsheet jockeys and task trackers before they were given any actual responsibilities, and we would have had a partner or up-for-partner management overseeing every identifiable tranche of work (plus federal work usually requires additional oversight layers and sometimes totally separate resource silos). Worlds different than parachuting in a handful of teenage or barely post-undergrad interns and letting them run riot through the most sensitive areas of the federal government without so much as an MSA or SOW, let alone security clearance investigations.

mbesto · 1 years ago

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.

tzs · 1 years ago

All of those were full of traditional experts.

jodrellblank · 1 years ago

Curiously both Tesla and SpaceX benefit enormously from government spending[1] to the tune of almost $5Bn of taxpayer money. And then Tesla paid zero income tax last year[2] and none in 2021 either[3]. And now Musk is taking the position that the government spends too much taxpayer's money and needs to be torn down.

Musk also did very well by plainly lying (which I would call market manipulation) about Tesla products; the Cybertruck video where Musk claimed it was faster than a Porsche while towing a Porsche was a lie[4]. A 2016 video demonstrating self-driving was faked[5]. Musk's statements about what the Tesla Semi can do were not just generous marketing, they are impossible[6], claiming 500 miles range and PepsiCo reports they can't even carry a load of Lay's potato chips for 500 miles and on heavier loads they can only travel 100 miles. Faked self parking videos, faked SolarCity videos, faked Optimus humanoid robot videos, faked CyberTruck towing an F150 video[7]. The Optimus robots at the October 2024 event were remote controled and remote-voiced by humans[8]. They walk like Honda Asimo robots walked 25 years ago but they're being spun like they are Boston Dynamics killers. Musk's talk of tentacle arms to recharge Teslas never turned into anything (though BYD in China has had public automated electric-car battery-swap stations for years now). Musk's talk of full self driving first promised, what, 2017? turned out to be misleading with cars not even having the hardware to do a good job of it. Musk's early plans for completely automated Model 3 factory faded very quickly with them reverting to humans in marquees.

Yes Musk has done pretty well with investors letting him get away with a lot of broken promises and taxpayers letting him get away with a lot of subsidies and customers letting him get away with a lot of shoddy products. Lucky for him the Tesla engineers were competent true believers(tm) and delivered decent Model 3 and Model Y but that should only give them a similar valuation to other car companies, shouldn't it?

[1] https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hy-musk-subsidies-201...

[2] https://itep.org/tesla-reported-zero-federal-income-tax-in-2...

[3] https://edition.cnn.com/2022/02/10/investing/elon-musk-tesla...

[4] https://www.insidehook.com/autos/no-one-exposes-elon-musk-li...

[5] https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-faked-video-in-2016-pr...

[6] https://www.autoevolution.com/news/tesla-semi-gets-debunked-...

[7] https://dawnproject.com/teslas-history-of-faking-demonstrati...

[8] https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/13/24269131/tesla-optimus-r...

AnimalMuppet · 1 years ago

Not necessarily. Other peoples' work can assume what "everyone knows"; starting from first principles can (sometimes) show up where that's the case. That doesn't mean you're not very smart; it means you're aware enough to know that some limitations that aren't real creep in to the body of knowledge of a field.

Or it can be just arrogance. (In fact, even when it's reasonable, it probably also contains some arrogance...)

meowkit · 1 years ago

Principles.

Its about assuming most people operate on dogma and heuristics. This is extremely true in my opinion.

By making this assumption, you dispel bad practices and behaviors that might have built up within an organization. Even more importantly you can reveal why certain chesterton’s fences exist.

lmm · 1 years ago

The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it. Physics has to work, organisational processes don't - Maxwell himself wouldn't have been able to understand the travel expense rules at some organisations I've seen, and the right response isn't always to try to reverse engineer what people were thinking when they came up with this crap, sometimes you really are better off throwing it away and coming up with something reasonable from scratch.

numpad0 · 1 years ago

I'm echo chambering on this and one other comment[1], and starting to wonder if those guys are actually neurodivergent, autistic, whatever implies combination of entry-superhuman intelligence and unfortunate psycho-emotional development, or it's complete opposite and they're faking intelligence with vastly superior EQ, put aside pointlessness of taking IQ/EQ seriously.

Because, I don't think Musk had ever shown issues understanding or even precisely manipulating people's sentiments with bare hands which some of us struggle even with tools, while also there being countless examples him showing lack of understanding of laws, order, code, all such brittle dehumanized systems in general.

All his successes owes to his mastery of orchestrating humans as animals, not machines or humans as intelligent constructs. Why are we nearly dead set that it's opposite of that?

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42993901

indoordin0saur · 1 years ago

It seems to have worked well for him many times.

dani__german · 1 years ago

considering the massive amount of (still often true) information at our fingertips, appealing to authorities that have proved themselves unreliable many times in recent memories is not the benefit one might initially think it is.

"first principles" doesn't mean "go back to 2 + 2 and reinvent the rest of math".

pkilgore · 1 years ago

And gullible enough not to realize how disposable they are to prevent their leaders from getting in trouble.

timewizard · 1 years ago

Tax data is not particularly sensitive and several nations just publish it. Even in the US many forms of non-individual tax filings are public by default. The results of audits /are/ highly sensitive but there's no reason to hold those on computer systems for longer than 5 years after the audit.

I think the medical industry can easily be regulated without the government having access to my actual medical file. They regulate cars without having any idea how I drive mine. They regulate planes without sitting on the flight deck themselves.

It's like we know how to build good businesses, good databases, have solid user control practices, but then we give the government a pass because it's imagined to be "really hard." It's laughable.

jokethrowaway · 1 years ago

I'd be happy if they dropped both taxes and regulations

SoftTalker · 1 years ago

Taxes could be consumption based with no need for anyone’s personal data at all.

brigandish · 1 years ago

Financial data that seems to be subject to those running massive fraud or allowing it through negligence, but somehow attempting to tackle that is more dangerous than a 19 year old holding an incredibly efficient weapon.

The foxes were already in the hen-house before DOGE turned up, either, as many seem to think here, there are now competing foxes in there, or a clean up is happening. I've yet to see any evidence of actual damage done by DOGE, so why is everyone ignoring the evidence of actual damage that they've found? Can we work that one out?

Aeolun · 1 years ago

I do find that knocking them down to find out why they were necessary is often a lot more efficient. Even at 37 that hasn’t really changed. But that’s a lot easier to justify when the impact of that decision is a bunch of process interruption at worst.

SV_BubbleTime · 1 years ago

That’s just USAID.

It was 30-40 million for all depts to poltico.

You can not be “independent journalists” when your largest single client is the US Gov.

Politico running the Russia hoax, Hunter’s laptop, and dismissing the wuhan lab leak are three examples of them being on the Biden admin’s side.

Can you point to a single time Poltico backed up a theme or narrative that benefited Trump but turned out to be wrong?

bakuninsbart · 1 years ago

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.

UncleMeat · 1 years ago

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."

SV_BubbleTime · 1 years ago

Upvoted for the apt part of the quote that everyone leaves out.

They let you do it.

hypothesis · 1 years ago

What does “resistant” mean here?

It appears that they passed audit just a few months ago:

> Opinion: Williams Adley concluded that USADF’s financial statements as of September 30, 2024, and September 30, 2023, are presented fairly, in all material respects, and in conformity with U.S. generally accepted accounting principles.

> The audit firm also found no reportable noncompliance with provisions of applicable laws, regulations, contracts, and grant agreements.

> The audit firm found no material weaknesses in internal control over financial reporting but found deficiencies in the internal controls over the Funds Held Outside of Treasury process. We collectively identified these deficiencies as a reportable significant deficiency.

https://oig.usaid.gov/node/7291

It sure looks like retaliation hit job.

filoeleven · 1 years ago

There's no way that USAID was more resistant to an audit than DOD.

dools · 1 years ago

Trump is a liar, he lies about everything. Starting a sentence with “trump said” implies that any concurrence with reality is purely coincidental.

KingMob · 1 years ago

I have no idea what proportion of Twitter's jobs were necessary or not, but it is DEFINITELY not fine.

From images routinely failing to load, to the current mess of logins that is the dualistic nature of x.com vs twitter.com (where which accts appear logged in fluctuates constantly), to my favorite bug, where it's always stuck in dark mode in mobile browsers...

And that's just technologically. Firing moderators, letting neonazis run rampant, and driving away advertisers and non-nazis...

Honestly, they might as well have brought back the Fail Whale.

buddavis_ · 1 years ago

twitter doesn't have near the income it used to have. or audience. it does have the same profit. 0%

alephnan · 1 years ago

If there is even a 1% chance irreparable damage is being done to 350 million Americans, chances should not be taken

IAmGraydon · 1 years ago

I would agree with you were it not for the fact that Musk, Trump, Vance, and several of the DOGE boy squad have links to Curtis Yarvin and believe that his idea of Dark Enlightenment is the way forward. He was even invited to the Coronation Ball for Trump's inauguration. If you aren't familiar, you should read up. It's truly demented and twisted. The minds of people who would follow such a philosophy have been utterly compromised and corrupted beyond help. These people are not to be trusted.

EricDeb · 1 years ago

Well I remember a certain freakout from the other side about Hilarys email server... This seems like a far greater security violation

qaq · 1 years ago

I didn't know FED data that was accessed at the Treasury department contained data on classified nuclear weapons systems. I've also never seen this level of freakout over real breaches like say SolarWind done by APT-29(Cozy Bear) actual Russian foreign intelligence group. That breach included Treasury, DoD, DoJ, State Department, DHS, Energy Department and so on.

brigandish · 1 years ago

From CNN[0]:

> Farritor was granted access to basic IT including email and Microsoft 365, one of the people said. The chief information office only does a small amount of IT and cybersecurity work for the National Nuclear Security Administration, they said, including providing connectivity and running basic internet services for NNSA’s headquarters. It does not run IT systems for the nuclear agency’s labs controlling the nation’s nuclear stockpile.

As to this part of your comment:

> and you think you've got sober and thoughtful take to offer on this situation, do you?

Please take note of Dang's comment at the top of the page, hyperbole and hysteria are not interesting.

[0] https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/06/climate/doge-energy-depar...

throwaway2037 · 1 years ago

    > owning foreign property is unfriendly countries

sitkack · 1 years ago

I have a theory that the normalization of homosexuality in the united states was a move by the security agencies to lower their exposure risk. If everything is cool, nothing is blackmail.

Blackmail is what sinks orgs because you have no idea who is going to be a mole.

b8 · 1 years ago

It was just an example, but you can read the DCSA appeals page to find worse illegal stuff that has been adjudicated: https://doha.ogc.osd.mil/Industrial-Security-Program/Industr...

roguecoder · 1 years ago

America has recently waved the security clearance process entirely for certain roles, so currently there isn't anything that is disqualifying right now.

Prior to that change, lying in the clearance process was the one thing that was absolutely disqualifying. As you noted candidates are incentivized to lie, and so "did you lie here, where it is likely to benefit you?" becomes an effective screening mechanism for people who are willing to compromise their ethics for personal gain.

pc86 · 1 years ago

US intelligence agencies really only care about your third point directly, everything else they care about only insofar as it can blackmail you or make you beholden to criminal interests.

They don't care if you're gay, but they care if you're closeted. They don't care if you do drugs, but they do care if it's such a problem you could become financially beholden to someone over it.

b8 · 1 years ago

People often lie yeah. The polygraph has been proven to be pseudoscience and the tactic of we know you're lying about x to get you to spill the beans is common knowledge now.

Heres the DCSA clearance appeals page showing people getting or keeping their clearance from drugs and other issues: https://doha.ogc.osd.mil/Industrial-Security-Program/Industr...

nis0s · 1 years ago

Making a judgement against someone based on where they randomly happened to be born is self-defeating as talented people who are security- and defense-oriented will just work for another place that you maybe don’t want them to work. Interestingly, most of the news I’ve come across of someone betraying national secrets has almost always concerned a white man, but maybe that’s just what I know.

someothherguyy · 1 years ago

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/memo...

Also, why is your history all Musk'd?

roguecoder · 1 years ago

Interns aren't around long enough to get security clearances and interns in defense companies usually work on non-classified work. The only vetting is "are you a citizen or lawful permanent resident?", for export compliance.

If an intern had access to any classified materials, it is because a crime was committed.

roguecoder · 1 years ago

Journalists' rights to publicize who works for the government is absolutely protected by the first amendment.

Republicans didn't have any problem with that when they used it to blow Valerie Plame's cover in political retaliation. Somehow now that it's Musk's army of channers stealing our data and breaking the government payment systems _some_ people have decided the first amendment is optional I guess.

ozim · 1 years ago

Not saying IT security cannot be admins, sounds like you are bringing theoretical viewpoint. I already have some years of experience and certifications in the field - so it is hard to surprise me.

I am pointing out that in most places there is separation of duties so you don't give "red teamer" or "pentester" access to any databases when they are in offensive role.

Then most likely administrators (who can have formal education on paper called cybersecurity) who have loads of work so 90% is configuring and keeping all configuration proper will have requirements like background checks and you are not going to hire "mischevious people" for that role.

Security is a broad spectrum but still offensive testing is maybe 1-2% of the work that needs to be done, all those systems need people to configure them. Having good security 90% of work is waking up updating software and keeping configurations of systems documented and in proper state. If some company doesn't have their security posture basics fixed there is no point of doing "red team assessment" or a "pentest" with them, that would be waste of time.

matt-attack · 1 years ago

Um it is. And it was started by Obama. He

psychlops · 1 years ago

Their stated purpose is "to reduce wasteful and fraudulent federal spending". Organizations that have waste and fraudulent spending will not "give" access and will throw every obstruction in the way.