1. Methodical improvements mostly work to improve processes as they are. They don't delete processes that shouldn't exist.

2. Agency "empowerment" often means working with a lot of incumbent teams that are simply not suited to digital work and sinks way too much time/energy into stakeholder management.

USDS has done good work, but could have done a lot more if they were actually empowered.

[1] https://www.wethebuilders.org/posts/a-tale-of-two-effiencies...

Like, as someone who is generally fairly process averse, I’ve come to the conclusion that there is a huge middle ground between too much process that hampers getting things done and no process that leads to decisions that either break things, or worse, set disastrous acts in motion because basic checks or conversations with people who have more context didn’t happen.

I think if there was a good-faith attempt from the DOGE folks to audit and understand certain systems and processes, instead of gleefully dismantling and freezing programs, firing people, gleefully announcing how much money was “saved” (and often with incorrect amounts) and reflexively ripping on how terrible everything is, you’d probably get some cooperation from the people who have had to deal with bullshit bureaucracy. But that isn’t what happened.

What’s happened is akin to throwing the baby out with the bath water, all real security issues being completely ignored, under the guise that 19 year old crypto bros have the work experience, social skills, or common sense to foresee what is happening.

Governments are inefficient. That’s as much a feature as it is a bug. But with USDS in particular, you had people who left high paying jobs to work for the government because they wanted to make things better for democracy and the country. That is decidedly not the goal of DOGE employees, who want to out McKinsey McKinsey when it comes to just slashing and burning.

That's more of a Bain & Co speciality.

You bring in Bain to layoff the BUs McKinsey recommended your company build /s (kinda)

If DOGE were serious about increasing efficiency they'd be focused on process reforms. Instead they're randomly cancelling contracts, cancelling leases, and letting people go without doing the hard work of analyzing processes or analyzing organizations to figure out where the problems actually are.

It's like their philosophy is "if we cut one of the dog's legs off it'll suddenly become a more efficient runner".

Deleting processes somewhat randomly, then listening for the pain, is a pretty well-known technique for understanding and cleaning up legacy systems. Of course, it should only be used on systems where (temporary) failures are tolerable.

There are parts of the government where that is true, and parts where it is dangerous. The problem on both sides is assuming the same techniques should be applied across the entire government, when some services are indeed life-and-death and others absolutely should be deleted.

We know we need most of these programs and services! You can make them more efficient, you can identify and cut waste. You don't do that by just making blanket, massive cuts to staff and services and then trying to cobble the pieces back together over the next few years. It doesn't make sense. No sensible person would run a business that way.

We could save ~47,000 deaths in the next year if we banned cars. Do you think that the deaths of innocent children is an acceptable trade-off for your right to drive? You might not like to think of it that way, but it's just objectively true that this is the trade-off we choose.

If we really care about human lives, why isn't the entire federal budget redirected towards healthcare and medical research? Do you think it's OK to watch children die of cancer just to fund national parks and space probes? If we care about all lives, why don't we spend the entire federal budget on humanitarian aid? What kind of heartless monster would watch children in Africa starve to death just to make their kid's school slightly nicer? If we care about all future lives, why are we squandering resources on consumption now, when compounding returns over centuries could allow those resources to provide vastly greater utility in future?

Everything has an opportunity cost and everything is a tradeoff. We pretend that the status quo has no ugly tradeoffs to protect our sanity, but that's obviously untrue. People die every day because of things we take completely for granted. They die for reasons that are often directly contradictory - I die for want of a regulation that would have prevented a medical accident, you die because of regulatory burdens that hinder the development or dissemination of new medical technology.

Musk might be a mindless vandal or a maverick genius; I am absolutely not intelligent enough to argue that point either way. What I do know is that it would be a miraculous coincidence if the federal government's priorities circa 2024 were so close to perfect that any radical change is prima facie wrong. I have to at least entertain the possibility that we have been stuck in a local maximum and have been squandering massive amounts of potential. A handful of deaths is, in the context of the US economy, actually a very cheap price to pay if you genuinely believe that you can find a fraction of a percentage point of GDP growth.

It's the exact same thing as "defund the police" except applied to the entire government. If policing is net negative, reducing it will save lives. If this government program is inefficient / worthless / net negative, cutting it or disrupting it will save lives.

If nothing else, the opportunity cost of a few hundred billion saved eventually, even if it's just a small fraction of US total government spending, can be used to save or improve many many many lives.

Hyperbole like "yeah murder more people its good because I can't tell what is good or bad" doesn't help.

You might be against the death penalty, for example, because you can't bear the thought that the government would put innocent people to death. But some people believe that these are acceptable losses for the gain.

Likewise, you might think that a program that helps prevent violence against a certain minority group would be beneficial. But some people feel that this is a waste of money since it doesn't actually benefit the most people. If you spend money, after all, wouldn't you want to positively affect the most people you could? Everybody else--they are acceptable losses.

Some people want us to ridicule compassion. But Why? For Who? For What?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1NJwz5SCl4

(edited, maybe you personally already understood)

Tesla is constantly in the news for all the wrong reasons. FSD fuckups, the absolute disaster of quality control that is the Cybertruck, service delays, parts delays, safety recalls...

SpaceX reportedly has layers of management to protect the actual people who get shit done from Musk's interference. This being the most successful of the companies may possibly be a result of that. https://x.com/yoloption/status/1595213678147764224

He's the living corporate embodiment of what old school Reagan Republicans decry as a welfare queen, even down to the drug addiction.

Oh how nice, but we don't rely on Twitter to look after nuclear weapon stockpiles, warn us about E. coli in food, or fund vaccine development. So it's not really the same is it?

Second, you can't just turn on institutions or checks and balances again. Which is who DOGE does it - to cause permanent destruction they will blame on someone else and to cement oligarchy power.

I think their philosophy is to replace the dog's legs with ones that run (only) where they want it to run.

Look at USAID: they canceled everything, but there was a significant outcry about PEPFAR specifically. Now PEPFAR is back, and likely to stay.

It’s easy to be efficient when you’re no longer providing any programs or services.

> In short, the idea is to spend time on the floor with your returns team, observing the current process and asking questions to map exactly how you handle returns today. The result is a process map of how you handle different types of returns from end to end.

> 2. Delete any part or process you can

> So look at all the actions you take, question each of them: Question every step: can we remove this? What would happen if we removed this? Would the outcome still be the same? What would be the impact on our KPIs (e.g. customer satisfaction, handling time, and profits)?

I only got as far as step 2 and it's pretty clear DOGE isn't following the steps.

[0] https://deming.org/explore/fourteen-points/

However, the burn-it-all down approach does have some merit that critics of Elon/DOGE never admit to. How do they propose you carefully untangle the knots of fractal bureaucracy at speed and produce results if not by just cutting them off? The previous approaches of a special committee etc. just add a another fractal and yet another process.

Sometimes I feel the critics would be content if nothing was ever accomplished, if nothing ever changed, as long as thoughtful meetings were conducted and stakeholders were consulted. There is a very real layer of inertia that needs to be punched through, velocity has merit all its own.

I am very concerned about the possible outcomes of DOGE overall but business as usual just means the US goes bankrupt slowly with all the correct protocols observed. I am glad the inertia is being punctured.

I don't know. I'm not a fan of Elon, and never really used Twitter. The popular opinion was that firing most of the workforce, Twitter would go down. That it needed god knows how many SREs to keep running.

Then Elon fired everyone and Twitter didn't go down. What was destroyed?

Just being triggered by this phrase, the ideas that business as usual is unsustainable, and that the bureaucracy is unworkable, are articles of faith.

We have been doing that for about 25 years but can’t continue indefinitely. Especially not with higher interest rates.

Government has objectively gotten worse despite massive tax revenue and is involved in a lot of endeavors that are well outside its scope IMO.

As just one of many examples: Just try to build a house pretty much anywhere and you will encounter fractal bureaucracy. This is during a nationwide housing shortage and many societal ills can be directly linked to housing costs!

Our national debt looks like a hockey-stick: https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/natio...

And we spend about as much money on the debt as our entire bloated defense budget!

If you want to change how the government works, you need to change laws. Yes, government can be more efficient and effective, but blaming and firing civil servants is just scapegoating.

It would be like blaming contractors because you can’t build a house where you want, or hate the architect’s design or feel limited by zoning laws or construction codes.

The problems you identify are with the lawmakers, not the law implementers.

The housing supply in my locale exploded during the run-up to the 2008 crash. Acres and acres of land got turned into spec neighborhoods. There were multiple hi-rise condominium towers going up within eyeshot of my house. In fact, my dad remarked presciently: "Condominium construction is a traditional indicator of the end of a housing cycle."

And yes I directionally propose that we should build houses until property prices fall and then build some more.

The housing crash was funded primarily by the govt. Loans were being made because of govt policies that never should have or would have been made otherwise!

2008 was devastating because it made us stop building housing due to speculative price manipulation of securities and again the govt being in a business it should not have!

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1880048376349356050.html

They should be able to tell the departments their budgets getting cut and let the distributed leaders and experts evaluate the detailed logistics of how to manage the resulting budget in their own department. Elon going like by line in the US budget is like my CFO looking at my micro-service’s memory allocation, just seems silly.

Leaders should be setting high level goals and budgets and those on the ground can make the necessary adjustments to make them match.

I hope the people behind the submission get their message across. But you shouldn't have the conversation about efficiency. That is entirely the distraction.

Don't talk me about efficient governance of autocracy. It always ends in burning down the land on which it feasts.

Autocracies are not efficient at all. There's corruption everywhere.

The larger the state, the more opportunities for corruption. Of course, dismantling the fat state will anger many - those who are fed by it. Unfortunately some "false positives" are part of the process. All the rest is poetry.

When the fascists conclude the take-over is complete, they will prop up someone with a more acceptable appearance, and the public will be relieved. The media will keep a narrow focus on just the drama of actualities. But still, a tyranny installed, democracy gone. And people will accept it as the new normal. Everyone will keep normalizing everything, the rituals of democracy as a smokescreen for the powerful.

  Fake symbols. Fake titles. For the eyes that want to be blinded.

Yes it has been a slippery slope. And now an avalanche, like planned.

The work is you. You should be fed with so many distractions, so many logical fallacies, such that in the end you will say

  Trump's election is the most democratic thing to happen in decades.

"The work is you. You should be fed with so many distractions, so many logical fallacies, such that in the end you will say

> Trump's presidency is the beginning of a fascist coup to destroy Democracy"

At this point, this is not a struggle over reality-consensus, it is just a battle of who's propaganda is more convincing.

The goal is the latter though. The super wealthy and powerful head to an era where they decide what happens, they do not want the rules and the law apply to them.

----------------------------

Angry about a transgender you have never seen? Good, very good. They want your power.

It is you or them.

The outrage over transgenders are psychological tricks to split a populace. Let people make it their identity. Normalize bullying, normalize bullshit, normalize "might makes right".

They need it, because they are few and you are numerous. You must excuse them. You should be fighting your peer.

Or at least believe both sides are not clean, so you should excuse their power grab. That is the binary belief trap I spotted.

  "Haha, see the tears of those hypocrites, lol". 

  "They are operating the kids!!"
  "They eat the dogs, they eat the dogs!!" 

As soon as society accepts the lies because the team they think that is their team is winning, you go from bad to irrecoverable worse.

Like Steve Bannon said, just yesterday, on CPAC (the conservative parties and associations):

  "fight, fight, fight!" 

Steve Bannon did the Hitler salute after shouting "fight fight fight" on CPAC. That is the alliance of conservatives.

People keep making excuses. But have mercy upon them, as they do not know what they do. "Social media" are a hellish combination of drug and a pathway for psyops. Americans now rather own the neighbor they have seen on "social media" than saving their own house.

There is a small frame of time left. When enough people in the media are willing to kill off their career, they can overthrow corporate owners and tell the people that the spades are indeed the spades. But it will be suicide, at least for their career. (Even the army is purged now, not a discussion topic on HN so I guess many don't even know.)

Europe needs to cut themselves off from the oligarch networks, as the pandemic might spread there too.

Email runs the risk of de-anonymization, as most people don't know about Proton, and this very much falls close to whistleblowing.

Also, anyone who seriously wishes to say anything should probably NOT respond via IG or even follow the page. If you are whistleblowing, maintaining anonymity is critical.

[0] - https://github.com/freedomofpress

> Proton had to comply with a Swiss court order

I agree this isn't Proton's fault, but that does not change the fact that it happened and lead to an arrest. It is difficult to make a Proton account anonymously without providing a recovery email (it seems they use this as an anti-spam measure when you're using a VPN or Tor), so imo this is an important point.

> Proton didn't endorse Republicans on official social media accounts.

  Proton’s official Reddit account posted a now-deleted comment stating that “Until corporate Dems are thrown out, the reality is that Republicans remain more likely to tackle Big Tech abuses.”

Networks matter and trust matters, they should prefer to do business with people they know!

That doesn't mean there shouldn't be accountability and investigations into cushy speaking gigs. But the government should absolutely work with established companies run by executives they know.

But I don't think dismantling the government and giving the pieces to Musk is the solution to corruption. That just sounds like more centralized corruption.

The current problem is corruption but the real problem is that corruption will always happen when the power is there. The only way to prevent it is to not place the power at that level in the first place.

Limited power is the only anti-corruption tool that works.

But there's still corporate corruption. Corruption among charities. Corruption among churches. Etc.

There are trade offs everywhere. If you make your government too small to bust monopolies, then you end up with a country beholden to giant corrupt monopolies.

And you still have to worry about Trump because he doesnt care about the rule of law or the constitution. Its much easier to blindly destroy then to build.

Plus almost no one actually cares about so called states rights(I'm sure you do but the actual number of people is negligble). Even before Trump most conservatives who claimed to care about it didnt. I prefer to be honest and state that at least in US history its usually a bad idea. But ill take good policy at any level, if a state implements good policy I wont object, although usually it would be ideal for a good policy to be nationwide and help most people.

Unfortunately right now the opposite seems to be happening, Trump funneled US taxpayer money (and foreign government money) into Mar-a-Lago his whole first term and still got reelected.

But that’s the entire point. Every time GOP finds anything in the government that’s anywhere near productive, they intentionally destroy it. They can’t be bothered to continue improving it. The government can’t possibly be good at anything so let’s come in and make sure everyone knows that!

In my time in government contracting almost nobody understood or wanted to acknowledge this (at least in the Navy). You could practically play bingo with non-technical PMs talking about "increments" and "milestones" on the way to "fielding a complete capability" as though it was a weapons system that'd be stuck in the field for 30 years instead of the CRUD app that it _actually_ was. Any attempt to expediently deploy a thoughtfully-engineered vertical slice to iterate upon was stymied by year-long compliance processes and deployment procedures rooted in the year 2004. The culture is used to building tangible physical products (airplanes) and fails to comprehend that software is just bits and bytes that can be changed at will and automated. Even worse, any attempt to introduce a more sane process resulted in something that strongly resembled the status quo being repackaged and disingenuously branded "Agile" or "SecDevOps" or some other buzzword.

I'm certainly not in the "move fast and break things" npm/Xitter/Google camp but it shouldn't take 18 months to get a web app in front of beta testers. It's a real shame that the USDS is being gutted because I was very impressed with what I saw of their work and think that it's the path forward to cost savings in government software development.

The USDS is wonderful. Unfortunately, there are a couple factors that might have impacted its lifespan. I think the USDS has been a bit quiet about its accomplishments. One reason for that is the common public view of the government agencies as ossified and of government employees as slothful, ineffectual, and arrogant (which has not been my general experience). I think the USDS has been very willing to give its partner agencies the lion's share of the credit in order to assure future cooperation and avoid any public controversy, to refuse to play into that narrative.

Unfortunately, without a lot of publicity, I think there has been a faintness in the public perception of what the USDS does, and how well it does that.

The overall company was broken up into divisions, essentially the west coast facility was its own division, the midwest, east coast had its own division. They are reasonably independent, with their own facilities, own profit and cost centers, etc.

What was telling was that they also had a "Data" division. This was a branch that had its own division level autonomy, but was installed in each of the other divisions. The Data division managed the mainframes at the time. If one of the divisions needed computing facilities, they contracted with the Data division. Considering the expense of setting up and maintaining the mainframes of the time, it made sense.

But that's where my special project group came in.

We offered internal computing services, without the Data division, for our group. We ran on mini computers and the exploding PC and workstation machines. Our boss had sales reps from everywhere dropping off new gear to evaluate.

Typically, we've all heard it before, that our group of college level "kids" was much more nimble and responsive to the needs of our group than the Data division ever could be. We were a sunk cost that could be spent on anything rather than bound by contracts and such. Specs were delivered over coffee and recorded on post it notes. Then we'd just get to work and iterate.

It seems this concept had to be continually reinvented, and rise again, and again, and again, from the ashes. Maybe its a software thing. We all know how it always seems faster to burn the old, reinvent and rewrite the new. How the "best" way to lose technical debt is to `rm -rf /` and start again. "Do it right, this time." -- again, and again.

You'd like to think there's a middle ground, but I think it's just the institutional nature of the business and the practice. Obviously, nowadays we do have some substantial, long term, long lived systems. But they're more rare than not, they're imperfect and still suffer from issues, new and old, as they evolve.

Today, I'd be kicking myself, if I'd moved to DC, only to have this insane rogue invasion of government happen.

In my opinion, this is the biggest cost of the current political climate.

I know a lot of people on both sides of the political aisle, and none of them are more sympathetic to an opposing viewpoint after having been insulted.

Please, HN, be kind.

DOGE is not trying to find efficiency. DOGE is trying to funnel money from the people to the powerful. DOGE is actively part of a project to destroy the government. DOGE does not give a damn.

I'm curious why you asked "when did HN become this" if you're now telling us that it's been "this" for over a decade.

> which has been documented and remarked upon by others on sites

You should supply links so readers can make up their own minds about how convincing this documentation is.

These are examples of users complaining about HN in the way many users always complain about HN. You'll find countless such comments making general claims about how the site is "all X" or "has become Y" or "never allows any Z".

The problem is that these perceptions are not reliable—people base them on datapoints that they happen to notice because they dislike them so much [1], and from there they jump to general conclusions.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Trump funneled US taxpayer money (and foreign government money) into Mar-a-Lago his whole first term and still got reelected.

There was an incredible backlash against incumbents across the globe. Trump literally did not need any help from Elon to win.

And this is literally an example of government efficiency, a simple cost-effective solution that benefits actual people. The kind of things that DOGE is supposed to supercharge.

It's far worse if things are just left to decay and disappear. NIH research is an example. It can just disappear and never recover. And the worst thing, people won't even know about that. We'll just be getting fewer new drugs and treatments.

Not using a commercial service to complete federal and state incomes taxes together, I thought I'd have to reenter my information on my state's income tax site. Thankfully, I didn't, the state site got the federal information (I don't recall the specifics of how that worked).

The cause may have merits but the method we should all agree is illegal and unconstitutional.

You may not like it but congress needs to make these decisions.

You don’t put someone who stands to make billions from reduced regulations on his personal companies in charge of firing said regulators. This is “how to avoid corruption 101.”

Even if you love doge, there is zero chance Elon exclusively makes decisions that are completely impartial. It’s practically impossible when he can strike fear in any random federal employee, and only hires extremely loyal people. Anyone in that position has so much power.

As a result, you have to hire people for this position who have no conflicts of interest, and who have a strong track record of thoughtful, data-driven decision making, who invite disagreement, and who try to understand problems before pressing the delete button.

You cannot tell me with a straight face that Elon is a good fit for this position without divesting from his personal interests.

100% false.

DOGE is a legal entity that has authority to do what it is trying to do.

Specifically, DOGE is the Department of Government Efficiency, which is a legal entity created by your President inside the USDS. The USDS is a government agency created by President Obama as the "United States Digital Service" and renamed by President Trump as the "United States DOGE Service".

It's authorized. Let's get on with it.

And by "the judicial branch has OK'd it", are you referring to the President's immunity from prosecution for official acts?

That is fundamentally different than "presidents have the power to do whatever they want".

- This ruling doesn't say the government isn't breaking the law, it says the people suing didn't go through the right channels.

- This ruling is not the government winning the case, or the plaintiffs losing the case. Plaintiffs asked for a restraining order and didn't get one.

- There are about 80 different lawsuits against Elon/DOGE right now, for various actions. Multiple judges have granted restraining orders against the government because they think the plaintiffs are likely to prevail in their claim.

And the judicial branch hasn't okayed what he has tried to do, which is why there have been multiple orders issued by multiple courts against his stopping of payments.

I keep hearing all these things about how the voters voted for this and that but uh when did the candidate promise those items?

It's also unnecessary. This rushing to the endgame is extremely counterproductive if you support their goals. They have both houses of Congress, both of which are filled to the brim with eager knuckle-draggers. They can pass anything they want through actual legislation, and it would be a lot harder to undo in the future if they did.

At this rate, even this Congress is going to have to push back hard to preserve their own jobs.

It shouldn't even be a politized topic in the sense that the consensus in a democratic Republic should be that private entities cannot usurp the institutions of the state.

California's Prop 65 is the perfect example of this. It seemed like a good idea at the time (put a label on anything that could cause cancer), but it turns out when implemented that you have to label so many things that people just completely ignore it. Businesses are still required to put on these labels that serve absolutely no purpose, though. It should be deleted, but we'll probably be stuck with it forever.

At the federal level, I'm incredibly supportive of killing NEPA. Good idea, but in the end more detrimental to the environment (by slowing/blocking/increasing the cost of good projects) than helpful to it. Ideally they'd take the lessons learned from what went wrong and craft something better, but given the choice between keeping NEPA and killing it, I think killing it is right.

That said, DOGE's execution has been very poor. Just look at the people they've fired (nuclear safety, people actively working on the bird flu epidemic, etc.) and then rehired. That is clearly incompetent execution.

Also, Musk's approach of cut, cut, cut and then add back when you realize you cut too much clearly has problems when applied to government. Cutting all the various science funding meant that research had to be stopped, and even if it's restarted later, there will be damage from stopping that can't be recovered.

So yeah, as with all things from this administration I am attempting to think positively (largely for my own mental health). There is probably tremendous value to getting rid of a lot of the bureaucracy that has built up over the last 250 years, and I greatly hope that value exceeds the damage that's done with the ham-fisted execution.

The executive branch cannot "kill NEPA". It's a law. Congress has to repeal it. Vote for congressional candidates who support your position.

Laws exist for a reason. It's incredibly dispiriting that so many people seem not to understand or care about the division of power made absolutely clear in the Constitution.

I certainly understand the Constitutional division of powers - you shouldn't accuse people of not understanding things simply because they don't address them in a question that doesn't ask about them.

So sure, you might understand it, but you didn't include the legality of what DOGE is doing in your analysis of whether it's a good idea.

It doesn't seem to me like you care.

  There is probably tremendous value to getting rid of a lot of the bureaucracy that has built up over the last 250 years.

This whole operation is to dismantle government programs so corporations can swoop in and fill the void.

Ideally you'd get people who have some experience in them but are far removed. Like I've heard Casey Handmer talk about his time at NASA (I think it was NASA, at least) and how the organizational cruft made it hard to get anything done. I'd love to get him in there to make some change, but he's otherwise occupied. I am optimistic about Jared Isaacman, though.

In terms of corporations swooping in, that might happen, but in practice what I expect will happen is that the Democrats will return to power and will rebuild a lot of regulation. It seems to me like that's sort of the ideal cycle - add regulations and add regulations and add regulations, then do a cycle of cutting things, then return to adding regulations, ideally informed by the failure of past regulations.

I'd implore readers to catch up what Yarvin's ideals are because it helps frame what's happening and the ultimate goal in plain terms rather than making us work backwards divine intentions from the news.

I rarely have the patience or temperament to read Yarvin, so I can’t say whether you are right or not. But I can say that his critique of progressive institutions has resonated with a much larger share of the right than his positive vision of politics.

And this makes sense! It’s entirely possible to have insight into the problems your side is facing while being off base about the solutions. That’s pretty common to intelligent, eccentric thinkers across the political spectrum.

(For the record IMHO it would not be okay.)

DOGE is one of those things where the stated concept sounds good, but is almost impossible to pull off in a hurry, and the way they're going about it looks very disingenuous.

It's suspicious of the highest order that DOGE is prioritising programs and agencies that Musk personally ideologically opposes. He has had a falling out with a trans daughter that no longer speaks to him, and he's had personal issues with DEI because he would much prefer to hire white men than be "told" that that is racist and sexist by outsiders.

Allowing billionaires to be in charge of the government is insane when its the government's job to keep them in check. It's like letting criminals run the police department.

Of course, the guy with the $2M Lamborghini is going to get rid of all speed cameras the instant they get to be the head of the department of transportation! Of course they're going to go on TV and justify their self-interest with some bullshit made-up story about speed cameras.

Look.

You can make a legitimate argument that speed cameras are merely a revenue-collection device and not a safety device. You can make arguments that speed cameras in some locations can increase accidents because drivers look at the speedometer more than the road. You can do studies, run A/B experiments with and without speed cameras, etc...

But if the repeat-offender caught doing 150 in a 60 zone that has racked up tens of thousands in fines they haven't paid bribes their way into power and immediately fires everyone in the fine collection agency and the speed camera maintenance department, it can't be thought of as anything other than naked self-interest. It's doubly suspicious if they have no plan to replace the lost revenue, they just want to get rid of the cameras, and then... there's no "and then".

In the case of DOGE and Trump's general policy, it looks an awful lot like a bunch of very right-wing politicians have been itching to use states' rights to enforce their Christian vision for America, but have been blocked by federal government agencies. They now have their chance to gut those agencies so that they can ban abortion, teach "Christian values" in their public schools, and put women and gays back in their place. Add to that some capitalists that can finally get rid of the EPA, OSHA, and the like so that they can profit in peace, unbothered by pesky little matters such as the environment and workers limbs not being cut off on a regular basis.

If they didn't want to be downtrodden, they should have chosen better parents.

In 2007 the average person on HN was considered progressive or left leaning because they generally felt that same sex marriage should be legal.

Those same people in 2025 are now considered "far right" by the left because they believe that women have a right to say they feel uncomfortable being exposed to penises in the locker room when playing college sports.

No one has been working on the USDS for a long time. It was created in 2014 to _improve archaic systems_. That was its mandate, and it came from the top.

Elon's not doing anything special or respectable. Decisive action and moronic flailing are not mutually exclusive.

And I'm not an expert, and maybe you're not in England, but NHS England has supported online appointment booking for about a decade. Can't imagine it's that different elsewhere in the UK based on a quick search.

https://www.england.nhs.uk/gp-online-services/about-the-prog...

Think stripping out the copper wiring rather than doing a remodeling.

You asked yourself how would the system work best for you. Not how would the system work best for everyone. Elderly people make up a large proportion of GP appointments. 20 years ago they weren’t going to be booking anything online. Even today there are many that won’t.

At this rate they're going to need to find a whole lot of fraud and waste to make up for the havoc they've created.

EDIT: Added a couple links for the harder to find examples.

1: https://bsky.app/profile/bradheath.bsky.social/post/3lijt5eh...

2: https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/19/politics/doge-canceled-contra...

Because what I've seen is a lot of keyword searches that cut stuff that's actually important.

For example, "transition care" for disabled kids getting cut because it contains a naughty transgender keyword. Or the word "inclusion" getting grants or contracts cut even though it's regular-ass english used in areas that have nothing to do with DEI.

I want to see actual rigor and substance, not Elon Musk or one of his reports coming out on stage and telling me they saved 50 billion dollars and that I'm going to get a $5000 check any day now. The guy's been saying robotaxis are a few years away for over a decade now, hasn't he? Why should I take him at his word?

This tech savvy team, to their benefit, might also be culture savvy.

The masses aren't on Bluesky, they're on instagram and twitter.

And while both are owned by "tech bro cult" people, only one is owned by the head of the department you see as a problem.

Doesn't take a rocket scientist to see the (sound) reasoning here.

purity tests just cede more control to those who don't care about being ethical.