Comment by lucasyvas

Thank you for citing that because it is really the basis of my point. It is meant to be apolitical and to demonstrate that we are not OK with this otherwise so shouldn’t be now.

> They need to move fast in order to replace the old system.

Why?

replace the old system with what exactly? and why does it have to be done quickly?

Big Balls, man? Really? This dude is vetted to make this change? Come on.

The kid wouldn’t be an unpaid intern at most companies. He wouldn’t pass the HR screen.

Regardless of politics, they don’t have the credentials.

Agreed. Show the check numbers, mailing dates, bank transfers, etc. If there's actually really tens of billions flowing out to dead people monthly... demonstrate that. Should NOT be hard at all.

I understand that these 140/150 year old recipients are actually the results of incomplete birthdate data.

To steelman the argument though, it seems reasonable to audit these recipients so that we can get their true birthdate entered. The number of recipients who lack a valid birthdate because they found a way to fraudulently claim benefits is likely non-zero, but probably low. But in any event, cleaning up the data can’t be a bad thing.

Show us the (public) Court Filings. The formal start of education to evaluate if there is truth, if there is a guilty party, and to legally render a verdict. The check numbers and other PII can be evaluated by the courts. We the People can know the numbers; the scale per case and in sum, of the 'fraud' identified.

Presence in the DB allows for downstream fraud, even by accident. If that DB is the source of truth for SS payouts elsewhere, clean up the data. There's no reason for it to be there.

Elon has been operating in bad faith since he called that hero diver a pedo

This is correct. Depending on the stakes, the right answer would be to err on the side of caution. Certainly repeated incompetence in a private setting would be grounds for suspension or termination.

At what point does incompetence /become/ malice?

There is certainly a level of incompetence that requires active ignorance to one's naivety. I'd certainly consider a stubborn person who arrogantly ignores concerns of experts malicious. The active nature certainly matters.

Yes and: fraud and errors are often indistinguishable.

People with malice like Elon Musk have noticed the widespread use of this aphorism and repeatedly leverage it to their advantage.

> The reason I still give them benefit of the doubt on their intentions is...because they did come out and say that 20% of the savings should go back to taxpayers as a refund and that 20% should go directly to reducing the debt. That being said, these are nice things that people would want to hear so I too am paying attention.

I'd rather the government keep the money and use it to pay for the many services that it provides. Like ensuring that I have clean water, unadulterated food, clean air, a functional banking system, healthcare, safe vehicles, making sure that unemployed people don't starve, researching infectious disease remediation, performing scientific research, maintaining national parks, making sure that kids have a baseline education, doing humanitarian work around the globe, and a thousand other things I don't have the time to enumerate.

You are not paying attention if you believe that a crack team consisting of the world's richest man and half a dozen tween interns physically invading government offices and dismantling entire departments fast enough to make your head spin is anything other than "ill intent".

You realize that the entire executive branch excluding defense is like 10% of the federal budget.

There isn’t enough money to be saved to give you back anything.

You're giving them the benefit of the doubt because they made a vague promise to give you a bigger tax refund?

You give them the benefit of the doubt because they tell you exactly what you want to hear?

Did they mention which tax payers those 20% will be going back to?

Do you think they can be trusted to tell the truth?

This is Clientelism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clientelism

It's what authoritarian populists do when they get control of governments. They "hack" the economy with short-term stimulus and giveaways to keep the rubes content and happy while they dismantle civil society and the rule of law and entrench themselves.

Economic stagnation and decline usually follow within a couple year, but if they've entrenched themselves well enough, they don't have to care about public opinion very much and can shift to repression.

I did have a question about that. Where does the other 60% go? Isn’t the whole point to reduce the debt?

I’m sorry but the naivety of your comment is absolutely hilarious. Good luck getting your refund when the IRS is being ran by a handful of angsty young adults

In the abundance of precaution, DOGE should indeed be quarantined and all its work reviewed. CAT should be operating alongside DOGE to review everything.

So far, there's no evidence they're delivering either transparency or auditing in any sense that anybody is familiar with.

In fact, their operations -- in as little as they've been made public -- have been pretty opaque and sweeping (i.e. not detailed, as in transparency), and what little we have seen of their analysis techniques seem to be shallow and unconventional (i.e. not formal and measured, as in auditing).

I'd warn you not just take what public figures say at face value. Transparency and auditing are indeed virtues to strive for in governance (and we have many running systems for those already), and maybe they'll someday reveal that they're actually contributing to those virtues themselves. To date, they have not done so.

I'm all for cutting government waste, I think there is probably quite a lot. Here is why I do not like Doge:

Doge is using a sledgehammer when they need to be using a scalpel. There's already been so much chaos with things like federal disbursements being frozen then unfrozen, firing and rehiring employees, moves being blocked by courts due to being unlawful, etc. You can't "move fast and break things" with a trillion dollar bureaucracy, people's lives are at stake and something might break catastrophically.

I also don't trust Musk with so much power because (1) he's an ideologue and (2) there are numerous conflicts of interest. I am skeptical he would be held accountable for any potential wrongdoing in this political environment.

I don’t believe they actually think that transparency and auditing are bad. I think that many people are either excited for possible benefit or horrified by what they are watching and have understandably been unable to detach themselves enough from what is happening to recall their own expertise to guide them.

We all should know the way this is being done is wrong and it will either have to be removed or redone, which is equivalently costly and might as well be the same thing at the end of the day.

I would expect the same practices from all of you in your own day to day work. We expect it from each other.

The lack of transparency is enough for anyone here to worry. It bucks every best practice and is a red flag in itself. We do not accept this in our work - it is what we all value and that has to be the north star.

It’s an issue of who watches the watchers. If their intent is transparency and auditing, why are they not reflecting that intent?

This is why I do suspect their intent. They are not walking the talk.

Have you ever participated in an audit? You literally have no idea what the words you quack mean.

I don't believe you believe this is about transparency and auditing. You're sealioning.

Where are the forensic accountants? Who uses CompSci-track college kids to audit billion-dollar orgs?

How can they be described as transparent when they fired people who administer FOIA requests?

There is nothing transparent about DOGE. They are also not doing an audit. Can you share why are you opening offtopic content?

I don’t think you know what an auditor is

Regulated?? The entire point of DOGE is to be unregulated. They are ignoring existing regulations (read: laws), and specifically targeting regulatory and oversight bodies for destruction. Wake up!

If any of the income tax data they are touching at IRS is out in one of those AI tools that have been referenced, each disclosure is a federal felony punishable by up to 5 years in prison.

But remember, Elon doesn’t follow the rule of law, and has no doubt engineered things in such a way that his little minions are accountable.

Man it's pretty crazy seeing all those reasonable looking stories flagged and made dead.

Also what's with the blue non-link links? Never seen that before on HN.

> to fund trillions in tax cuts for the .1%

That isn't even what your link is saying. To begin with, it's citing a Treasury Department document requested by the Biden administration to do an analysis comparing the proposed tax cuts with a contrived alternative.

If you do generic across-the-board tax cuts, not targeting any particular income group, everyone's taxes are reduced in proportion to how much they were paying to begin with. Obviously then the people who make more money and pay more taxes have them reduced by the given percentage and that is a larger absolute number.

The same thing happens even if you target only the brackets for people who make less money. Suppose you lower the rates by 2% for every bracket below $400,000. That's not even enough to be in the 1% (for which you'd need to make ~$800,000), much less the 0.1%, but what happens in that case? Well, everyone's taxes go down by 2% of their income up to $400,000. If you make $40,000, they go down by $800. If you make $400,000, they go down by $8000. If you make $4,000,000, they also go down by $8000, from your first $400,000 in income. The absolute amount of the reduction is still highest for people who make more money, simply because it's a percentage of higher number.

The analysis the Biden administration requested was to do the tax cuts for people making less than $400,000 and then raise the tax rates on people above $400,000 to make sure they didn't get any net reduction, and their contrived example would have people making $400,000 paying a higher tax rate than people making $500,000+. Basically the purpose of the analysis was to generate a large number to put in a headline rather than compare it to a real proposal to lower taxes in general. This is also why they announced the cumulative total over a decade rather than listing the annual number as you would when comparing it against an ordinary government budget. Because "~3.5% of the budget" sure sounds a lot less than "trillions of dollars".

The Mump playbook relies on wild exaggeration.

In this case Musk reckons he can save $2tn which some (better informed) analysts are saying is bollocks.

In fact, it's cover to let him destroy/neuter agencies they don't like and get endless material to pressurise any opponents.

One positive though: if there is any alien tech, Musky will find it. You can bet that's high on his list, as improbable as it may be.

In this case, DOGE should be quarantined from making further changes until CAT can operate alongside DOGE for auditing purposes. Every change and access should be reviewed.

I generally try to assume that people are well intentioned. But when they start doing Nazi salutes...

Otherwise said, you want to destroy government, because you never cared about learning what various agencies do. And you want reform it, but without knowing what it does and without knowing what you want to improve other then "let it go away".

If on DOGE, that is ill intent.

> I believe he is well-intentioned and a good person

You should read more about the things he says, does, and the way he treats people, especially from those who are close to him. The picture it paints is something I'd consider "cruel, bordering on inhuman" (and thats before the nazi salute.)

Alternatively, I have a lucrative investment opportunity I'd love to get you in on.

Are you talking about the man who does Nazi salutes from the bottom of his heart? A good person?

[flagged]

Considering how crazy the general population is (and other online spaces) it's a small miracle that HN still has this (sub?)culture.

Also things are happening at a breakneck pace and, uhm, the media is tragicomically incompetent.

It's more important that the takes generate "curious" discussion, regardless of how naive and wrong they are. Especially during a "MOT", where things quickly get hidden.

First, if you’ve used HN at any point since the Snowden leaks there has never been a shortage of outrage here.

Second, while that was a major topic in international news for years, it did at least stay in the national security space where access is restricted. A lot of the concerns around DOGE are because they bulled through all of the normal rules for who gets access to sensitive data and how it’s handled. Say what you will about the NSA, and many here have, they didn’t just hand out credentials to inexperienced people with a history of leaking data or condone use of personal computers for government work.

This is especially of concern if the reports of write access being used to push code changes or deploy monitoring keyloggers are true: do you really want to bet that the guys who made a .gov site world-writable couldn’t be compromised by a foreign intelligence agency? There are legitimate concerns about the level of process overhead in government IT but that doesn’t make the reasons for it go away.

Which is why I personally disagree with

  >> The question isn't what's being accessed, it's who is accessing it.

There will always be good reasons to access data, and sensitive data. There is always good that can come out of this. But just because you can do something good with it doesn't mean you should. You can do a lot of good with a nuclear bomb, but I don't want any ever built because it takes only a small mistake (not an act of malice!) to have huge consequences. There is always a cost, you must always consider if the costs are worth the benefits.

I think a lot of people on hacker news were equally if not more outraged about Snowden leaks. Not sure what you’re trying to say.

Surely the response to the Snowden leaks should not be 'Well, Snowden showed that we have a lot of illegal snopping, so all snooping in the future is also ok'?

Not a totally unfair point, but to be fair, some people are still outraged after the Snowden leaks.

> Where was your outrage since the Snowden leaks?

Did you also miss the global protests against the 2003 invasion of Iraq?

>"Where was your outrage since the Snowden leaks?"

It's been there, and growing, ever since.

It’s another side of the same problem. We REALLY need data privacy laws in this country.

There was a huge amount of outrage since the Snowden leaks. What are you talking about?

Classic deflection and whataboutism.

If it wasn't obvious, no. I have a position but I'm really trying to make a neutral point here.

How about "You're fired"?

The average american citizen doesn't care about privacy? Go outside and look through the window inside peoples homes. See how long you last until the cops are called on you.

Why does other peoples' sincerity or lack thereof dictate what I am allowed to be outraged by? "Whatabout whatabout whatabout"; what about you worry less whether other people meet your standards for legitimate outrage and worry more about an unelected billionaire giving the federal government the old private equity pump 'n dump?