GSA Eliminates 18F - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43221549

18F GitHub Repositories - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43222842

Just today on the All In podcast I heard Jason Calcanis suggest that the USPS go down to one delivery day per week because no one uses it? The unbelievable part is he was genuine and thought it was an intelligent thing to say. For reference the USPS delivers over 100B, yes billion, parcels per year.

The disconnect between the people who are running the show, and those who are in the ear's of those running the show is scary.

The goal is to destroy the US government, so it can be privatized and sold off. Same as what happened in Russia.

What we have now is an undemocratic regime where the executive branch is permanently controlled by a city that voted 91-6 for the losing candidate. It’s like those crosswalk buttons that aren’t connected to anything. No matter how people vote, the government just gives us more immigration and more globalism.

E.g. No presidential candidate has ever run on a platform of more immigration. Support for increasing immigration hasn’t topped 35% in decades. Yet the foreign born population has grown from 5% to 15% since 1970. Nobody voted for that. Who did it?

I don't think a presidential candidate has ever run on adding more debt either, but that has increased at an even higher rate. How about birth rate? I don't think any candidate has campaigned on lowering the birthrate either, but that has dropped from 17.6 per thousand in 1970 to 12 per thousand in 2020.

I would really like to understand why you believe that the executive branch doesn't have the ability to govern because people that would be carrying out the laws must also be politically aligned with the laws. I also would like to hear why you think that just because something wasn't part of any presidential campaign it somehow supports your opinion that the people who carrying out the instructions in the laws - is an explanation for how the president and cabinet don't have any real power.

There are almost 700,000 federal employees in DC and its suburbs. The President appoints only about 4,000 people. Many of those people are the ones in agencies making rules that have the force of law.

> I don't think a presidential candidate has ever run on adding more debt either, but that has increased at an even higher rate.

They have—they all run on cutting taxes.

> How about birth rate? I don't think any candidate has campaigned on lowering the birthrate either, but that has dropped from 17.6 per thousand in 1970 to 12 per thousand in 2020.

The federal government directly controls the immigration rate, unlike the birth rate.

> I would really like to understand why you believe that the executive branch doesn't have the ability to govern because people that would be carrying out the laws must also be politically aligned with the laws.

Because politics has become polarized along moral dimensions. E.g. people don’t think immigration is merely a knob to turn, but instead is a moral issue, with a more “diverse” country being a moral good in and of itself. You can’t trust those people to work hard carrying out mass deportations when the public votes for the guy promising to do that.

> I also would like to hear why you think that just because something wasn't part of any presidential campaign it somehow supports your opinion that the people who carrying out the instructions in the laws - is an explanation for how the president and cabinet don't have any real power.

The knobs that control the immigration rate are turned by people who as a matter of ideology believe diversifying the country is a moral good in and of itself. So they simply ignore what the public thinks and continue to turn the knob in favor of increased immigration.

My comment was more general.

> What we have now is an undemocratic regime where the executive branch is permanently controlled by a city that voted 91-6 for the losing candidate.

The alternative will be an undemocratic regime where the executive "branch" controls all the other ones in perpetuity.

EDIT: Sigh... To me, this is obvious, as I've personally witnessed it happen in several different countries, not to mention historical examples. Worrying about H1B and similar right now is like worrying about hanging the family portrait in the best way possible while the house is on fire.

Note: I would be happy to be proven wrong and I hope you revisit these threads in a few years to see if you have changed your opinion about MAGA (I will surely do).

He appears to be a proponent of Unitary Executive Theory.

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

Articles I, II, and III, have nearly identical clauses vesting the legislative, judicial, and executive power, respectively, in Congress, the President, and the Supreme Court.

Does anyone think Congress can create a law that enables the legislative or judicial powers to be exercised by employees independent of the control of the constitutional actors in which those powers are vested? It would be madness to say that Congress can create a law creating an entity in the judicial branch that can adjudicate cases without oversight from an Article III judge. Nobody thinks that’s true.

Yes.

Apart from the specific enumerated executive powers in Article II, Sections 2 and 3, the "executive power of the United States" is whatever the Congress says it is. If Article II Section 1 had been intended as a preemptive, unitary-executive grant, there'd have been no reason to enumerate specific powers.

As has been remarked, there's a reason Article I (concerning Congress) comes first.

In Commonwealth Nations "the Crown" has ultimate deciding power, however "the Crown" simultaneously refers to functions of the executive, legislative (parliament), and judicial (Supreme Court and others), governance and the civil service. A Crown Prosecutor is equally known as "the Crown", as the monarch. Both are two very different individuals, but possess the same power, and use "the" nomenclature.

In your construction, all the work is being done by your use of the word “available.” But the constitution doesn’t say “the executive power is available to the President.” It says: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” The word “vested” means “secured in the possession of or assigned to a person.” So the executive power isn’t merely available to the President. It’s assigned to and given to the possession of the President.

Your Crown example actually proves the opposite of your point. That phraseology reflects the traditional british notion that all executive power is vested in the king, who is the chief prosecutor but may act through delegates: https://digital.sandiego.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?params=/con... (p. 1707).

In your construction, all the work is being done by "the." OK, let's play the same game, this time with the word executive: Suppose that Congress, using its authority under the Necessary and Proper Clause, creates separate governmental agencies — not subject to plenary presidential supervision — and gives those agencies the power to carry out specified tasks. You're complaining that this falls within the definition of "executive" power and thus must be presidentially supervised. The obvious response is: OK, we won't call it "executive" power, we'll call it something else. Word games? Sure, but that's what you're doing.

But, someone might respond, the term "executive power" must be interpreted today as it supposedly was understood by the Framers in 1787. That ipse-dixit contention is purely a matter of what Justice White aptly referred to in Roe as "raw judicial power" — and recall that after Dred Scott, a more-extreme version of such a contention was finally resolved at Appomattox as the culmination of four years of bloody civil war.

The Crown example still works as the Parliament is not selected by the monarch. It is not elected by the monarch. The monarch does not possess the power to reject them. Yet, the Parliament are still referred to as "the Crown", and possesses the executive power of the Crown.

Equally so, the Governor General of any Commonwealth Nation is free to reject the orders of the monarch, as they possess the executive power of the Crown. The monarch is also free to fire them for doing so, as the monarch also has the power of the Crown. Both are on equal footing. In the words of Whitlam "Well may we say God save the Queen, because nothing will save the governor-general."

Multiple people have possession of the executive power in such systems, even though the word "the" is used to refer to it. That alone is not enough to indicate that a singular individual controls it.

Article I and Article III have nearly identical language. Nobody thinks Congressional staffers or judicial law clerks impose “checks and balances” on the elected or appointed officials that hold the constitutional office. Why is the President any different?

Not to say that I think this good policy or constitution design – it grants the President an essentially monarchical position. As The Knoxville Journal once said (9 February 1896), "Great Britain is a republic with a hereditary president, while the United States is a monarchy with an elective king". I think the more collegial form of executive branch leadership found in the Westminster system – in which a Prime Minister has to continually keep the confidence of their party, since they can be removed at any time for any reason (no allegations of misconduct required); in which Cabinet makes decisions by majority vote (and the PM sometimes loses the vote), unlike the US Cabinet where no votes are taken – leads to better governance.

Maybe, one day, "Prime Minister of the United States" will be a real job title

The check and balance within every branch is the law, one which many state AG and court officials believe or have ruled is being violated.

The law is quite literally a limit on arbitrary uses of power. It is a check on concentrated power, and balances competing interests.

> Who did it?

Oligarchs.

H1B visa/undocumented labor are an anti labor power policy. Not only does it increase the supply of the workforce suppressing wages, but it gives companies coercive power over foreign laborers, preventing them from ever going on strike or asking for rights. Worse, when things start going poorly, oligarchs blame these people who just wanted a better life and then use the oligarchy controlled media to deflect people's rage away from the people hoarding wealth and power onto someone weaker than them, which gives them a sense of agency.

“The law” is it enforced and interpreted by humans. And the fundamental axiom of the constitution is that nobody can be trusted. Do you think the framers went to all that trouble to create this tripartite system, and then assume that all three branches would be checked by unelected prosecutors? If what you said was true, why does the constitution not mention an attorney general that could enforce “the law?”

All of this stuff is directly out of Russia's playbook. It's also Trump's, but Trump is too much of an idiot to accomplish this himself. He knows almost nothing about anything. I can near guarantee that he is being coached.

"Russian state media enters Oval Office during Zelenskyy meeting": https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/28/tass-oval-office-tr...

  > According to the White House, the Russian reporter’s presence was unplanned.

  > “TASS was not on the approved list of media for today’s pool,” a White House official said. “As soon as it came to the attention of press office staff that he was in the Oval, he was escorted out by the Press Secretary."

  > The White House did not address how the unapproved reporter was able to gain access to the Oval Office.

And yes, something like nearly every branch of Federal government with regulatory power is (well, was) investigating him.

Transportation, Justice, Labor, Interior, and Agriculture departments, as well as the National Labor Relations Board, EEOC, EPA, SEC, FCC, FTC.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/20/us/politics/elon-musk-fed... or https://archive.is/x7chR

I seem to recall that Tesla alone has set the record for the largest number of active investigations with the NLRB and EEOC. The sheer number of incidents of blatant racism alone are shocking. At one point Telsa factory employees were spraying racial slurs on the walls and management ignored it.

Do I think the ripping apart of the federal government will further entrench the Oligarch class? Yeah. But honestly Musk seems to just be doing this because he's just getting vengeance on all the departments and people who he thinks won't let him be his very best genius self.

https://www.sos.ca.gov/business-programs/business-entities/s...

Otherwise, wait until fascists complete their takeover, it will certainly be much easier then.

My insisting you lose weight in your GUT is not the same as losing weight in your SKULL. Where, when, how fast determines whether fitness, torture, or murder.

BE MORE DISCERNING

Nope, it's simply impossible. Look at all the failures like Tesla, SpaceX, Meta, Rivian, Bluesky, etc.

Someone think of the CEOs!

Having presented no hard evidence for your claims, I can only assume the standard you demand is the scrupulous separation of interests, conflicts, and bias to demonstrate the absence of bias beyond a reasonable doubt which is a laudable standard.

Yet, you applaud to the clear, unabashed, unapologetic, intentionally biased application of the law to further individual interests. By an entity whose interests, conflicts, and bias are so thoroughly intertwined that the presence of bias is beyond a reasonable doubt.

Can you please explain why you apply diametrically opposed standards of evidence based on their alignment to your in-group?

In Elon's case, he is not a truthful person. He was recently caught lying and cheating about being good at video games of all things. Just for cred. Imagine what he's capable when the stakes were higher.

'Lawfare' is just a way for the out-of-power party to cry victim even when they fully and absolutely did the crime. It means that when they get back in power they not only get a free pass but also an excuse to crush anyone who had the gal to even try and hold them accountable.

Innocent people can be genuine victims of lawfare, just as easily as guilty people can claim to be victims of lawfare.

The previous administration is widely regarded to have engaged in lawfare, so I would prefer to assume that their political rivals are innocent until proven otherwise, rather than guilty by default.

Widely regarded? You're already dealing with a goofy subset of humanity when you're using words like "lawfare."

And for a hypothetical, if he was in fact guilty and the investigations were warranted. And then he used his presidential power to punish and fire everyone remotely associated with those cases. Would this be a good or bad thing in your opinion?

No, it wasn’t. That was claimed by a specific subset of people who wanted to evade consequences for the crimes they committed, but that wasn’t backed up by even a cursory review of the facts.

You can see a similar example with claims that Eric Adams suffered from “lawfare”, which might be an effective political tactic but are clearly contradicted by the evidence against him. Lots of criminals claim they’re innocent but that doesn’t mean they’re right.

We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.

Most regulations come about due to agency rulemaking under vague or broad statutes, so this implicit assumption is likely generally true.

Given that power, it doesn't surprise me that Republicans would be uncomfortable with organisations like 18F that had zero ideological diversity, in much the same way that I would expect Democrats to be uncomfortable inheriting an agency composed entirely of MAGA types.

Regardless of their technical prowess, as a government organisation, they should have taken more care to avoid becoming completely partisan, and shouldn't be surprised at this outcome.

Ideological diversity within the federal bureaucracy is exactly what the war against the permanent civil service is directed against, in favor of partisan patronage and Führerprinzip.

The best of the best that actually want to take part in making effective change for the better within goverment services will tend to have a progressive outlook.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/18F

I've known this was true forever but it's interesting seeing it said out loud now.

Particularly if the tent is broadened to include traditional pre-Trumpian conservatives.

"Should" seems prescriptive.

Within a standard deviation of the mean general distribution for the US Federal service would be probable by the Central Limit Theorem.

In theory DOGE could be diverse. In practice, at this specific time there's no real indication they're age diverse, gender diverse, or even messiah diverse.

> W̶h̶i̶t̶e̶ m̶e̶n̶ DOGE can't be ideologically diverse?

where I "quoted" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43228120 which "quoted" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43225916 by performing s/ DOGE / White men / and I returned by performing s/ White men / DOGE / ?

You would first have to ask scarab92, dragonwriter, and hypothesis if they ' really mean "ideologically" ' and then address the question of why did you substitute DOGE with White men .. which is all getting a tad meta for me.

As for that part of "there" ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43228187 ) which is all me .. I very much meant that the DOGE operatives do not appear to suffer from any form of diversity by any metric.

Perhaps they differ by meme coin preference?

On the whole. Yes. Given the lengths of careers, the structure of the civil service system (both the formal structure and the way it has, until last month, been applied in practice), and the different and (in some areas more than others regional and occupational-area biases in who is attracted to it, that would be hard to avoid.

> There were no conservatives at 18F.

Even if that were true, the mass firings of federal civil servants haven't been limited to 18F.

And we know this how?

If Republicans are unhappy about how agencies use rulemaking power, they have had many opportunities over the past few decades to pass bills more clearly defining the powers of those agencies.

If that sounds like conspiracy level crazy, it’s because it is.

Just a super compassionate person who really embodies the spirit of The New Colossus.

Stating the facts of this situation makes one sound like a conspiracy nut, which is strategic. It's part of the fascist project of reshaping the perception of reality. We're all supposed to (and over time we will, if it's left unchecked) question our own lying eyes and begin believing it when they say things like "the sky isn't blue in fact it's green".

Don’t forget it. He’s just getting started.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/10/who-is-russe...

The older I get, the more I see through this awful behavior.

Completely coincidentally, Andreessen stands to make billion from AI.

He is a deeply unserious person not worth listening to.

They are working to secure the conditions for themselves that the French royalty and elite had in 1788, while preventing the masses from reacting how they did in France.

So, no, I don't believe that they're intellectually deficient. They're just liars.

He recently admitted he stopped listening 6 months ago due to how out of touch they were...

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

That's because the actual goals are not the stated goals; the whole thing is part of a well-documented plan to destroy the federal civil service and much of the government so it can be rebuilt as a partisan patronage operation.

Because of this, suggesting a single delivery day doesn't scale at all, even if you regionalize these days, unless USPS moves to delivery hubs, which would further erode quality of life for rural people (many of whom have limited mail service as it is) and probably make deliveries to really remote locations (some parts of Alaska; mountainous areas; etc.) impossible.

If he suggested this to make it easier for his FDX and UPS stonks to go up, he probably isn't aware that these carriers often use USPS for last-mile delivery because they are the ONLY carrier that have the infra to deliver to the aforementioned destinations. No private company will attempt to replicate this infra, as doing so would require billions of dollars of investment for very little ROI, and why spend big money improving the lives of citizens when the AI furnace needs more fuel?

USPS is fucking incredible for the value, and it sucks that conservatives are so invested in destroying it.

By looking at Musk's tweets about it being a "far-left" group (plus his two Nazi salutes) and DOGE's emphasis on cutting DEI/sexual and racial minority programs, the unstated goals are clear and loud. If you don't look for the unstated goals and only listen to people's words rather than their actions, you're going to be blindsided by a lot more cruelty and not see it coming.

And now gutting the agency that enforced basic employment laws.

Say goodbye to the 40-hour work week.

Oligarchic societies do not try to maximize the overall economy. They try to maximize the wealth the elites can extract. If there is an alternative where the overall economy is 2x bigger but the elites receive 10% less in absolute terms, it's clearly a worse outcome from their perspective.

From that perspective, government services should not be evaluated based on their outputs or their impact on government efficiency or economic growth. They should be evaluated based on their impact on the elites. If they don't benefit the elites, they are overhead that can be cut if necessary.

Oligarchs do not care about the economy in the sense it is traditionally understood in the West.

Clearly not an American, or an adult, or he would have needed the mail for things like:

- Receive unemployment tax statements from the state

- Life insurance forms. Especially converting a group policy into an individual policy.

- IRS notices

- Utility company refunds

- Receive insurance policy documents

- Receive notice of security breach at hospital

- Receive bills for unexpected services like ambulance and medical

- Receive license plates

- Receive vehicle registration

- Auto and homeowners insurance policy documents

- Receive checks for credits from utilities after you move

- My company got a check for $95 million in the mail from the IRS

- Reimbursement checks from insurance companies

- Certain correspondence with the I.R.S. can only be done by letter. No phone calls. No online.

- Get hurt at work? Paperwork from insurance and from the state comes in paper form, not TikTok.

this is how government should work, we get one person’s opinion on how they operate and how they use said utility and that ought to do it - problem solved

>Clearly not an American, or an adult, or he would have needed the mail for things like:

is bullshit.

I haven't seen any indication that it's a lie. Please post a link to the proof.

Is not a lie simply because it doesn't align with your political view.

Note that what you consider junk mail, other people may find valuable. I know someone who digs those ValPack coupons.

Someone else posted some links in this thread already. But OK here: https://www.uspsoig.gov/sites/default/files/reports/2024-09/...

No, and nothing I've said implies any agreement with the person whose nonsense you were countering. But you were countering it with more nonsense.

Parcels is 6-7B: https://www.pitneybowes.com/content/dam/pitneybowes/us/en/sh...

Put another way, if you kill the USPS, don’t you think that junk mail will still find a way to get to you?

Which indirectly shows the efficiency and value of the USPS. The fact that they can get stuff to people so cheaply is something nobody else can replicate.

It seems like there are two possible reasons he could've made a statement like this:

- He is utterly detached from reality and how the world works, shocking for someone who is at such an elevated position in industry. Borderline disabled.

- He is stating this dishonestly, not because he believes it but to signal to other right-wing reactionary zealots in his peer group that he would support dismantling the most critical institutions in his society in order to enrich members of his tiny class at the expense of everyone else.

I'm inclined to believe it's the latter.

Its almost like to exist in the tech space is to cultivate an intentional naivety about how power works and who has it that is being exploited to run cover as truly bad actors accomplish their goals.

Shipping and packages account for 41% and First-Class mail is about 32%.

https://about.usps.com/newsroom/national-releases/2024/1114-...

Feel free to reply with your sources.

This is tremendously wasteful.

While spam funds a lot of the postal service, it allows it to price mail lower than the true cost of delivering mail across the country.

https://www.optoutprescreen.com/

Until 2006, the Postal Service was entirely self sufficient, with no debt and no need for taxpayer funding.

However, in 2006 Congress passed a law requiring the Postal Service to prefund future retiree's health benefits (75 years in advance), which costs $5.6 billion per year. By 2012, the Postal Service hit its $15 billion debt limit, directly because of this.

The Postal Service itself does not lose money, and does not require funding, because it sells postage-- mailing is not free. The insane policy that Congress has foisted on it does lose taxpayer money, by requiring it to do something as far as I know no other organization does or is required to do.

If you want to fix the budget deficit at the Post Office, simply get that law repealed.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_Service_Reform_Act_of_2...

And it’s a service! It’s not supposed to make money. The government is not an investment firm for taxpayers. You might as well ask when we’re going to scale back the military. We hardly use it and it’s running at a loss!

The same is true for my company. In fact I'm not sure we received one piece of physical mail in the past year of any consequence.

Obviously this isn't true for everyone, but some reduction in frequency of delivery could save a lot of money. Either that or raise the cost and kill junk mail.

I suspect it's because you do receive "one or two important" pieces per year and because you cannot anticipate when someone will send them to you. That's the value provided to all Americans by this beautiful system.

Junk mail is bad.

Full stop.

If you get lots of important items 6 days a week via first-class mail then I can see you having the perspective of junk mail is actually subsidizing this important service.

However, my guess is that most people don't. This is based on my own lived personal experiences and those of the extended network of people in my social circle. It's not made in a vacuum. Therefore common sense is that we're subsidizing an errand of cleaning trash out of our mailboxes several times a week.

I get that people are sensitive to government services under the current political climate but there is no reason we couldn't cut back service to say 5 days a week instead of 6.

[0]https://stateimpact.npr.org/new-hampshire/2011/09/27/how-jun...

[1]https://qz.com/emails/quartz-obsession/2062562/junk-mail

This is not intuitive. We're maintaining a service because we have made a democratic decision to provide that service. The junk mail is subsidizing that service. I hate junk mail too, but we don't get to claim that the sky is "down" just because we're standing on our heads.

We could make a decision to cut back service if we want, but we haven't. I strongly suspect that part of the reason we haven't decided to cut back the postal service is that many voters are elderly and find the postal service vastly more essential than young technical people on HN do. I'm not in a position to tell society that it's wrong.

(And frankly, given that we barely have a working electronic payment infrastructure in this country that can serve that audience, I'm not sure we're ready to do that.)

Your experience is not the only experience.

There are another 300 million Americans with different needs than yours. And it's hubris to pretend that your way and your life is superior to everyone else.

The only reason I can this being downvoted is people see this as a political discussion. It really isn't. As people have turned to email and bills get delivered online, we're subsidizing junk mail in a sense because the USPS operates at a loss.

It feels like we're setting the clock back a decade at a time when trust in institutions is already at a nadir and we're facing global threats that only the federal government has the capacity to tackle. I can only hope civil society is able to pick up the slack in the short term and future administrations are able to execute better.

I'm still sticking to the comment, even in awareness of history and having entertained the comparison. Let's hope I'm not proven wrong.

Bumbling fool seems apt to me.

We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBH9TmeJN_M

18F are the bureaucrats they want to traumatize.

I'm also aware of at least a handful of hacker new members, and people I've followed, who took time out of their carriers to do a "tour of duty" at 18f.

I feel for all today, you were doing good work!

1. Defund and cripple gov. services

2. Point to those, and say "See? it doesn't work. We should get private sector to provide those services, as the private sector is much cheaper and more efficient."

3. Hand out contracts to your buddies.

4. Years later, down the road, another sitting government will revert back to the original state - due to the private contracts turning out to be much more expensive than anticipated, and delivering sub-par service.

5. Next pro-privatization government is elected, goto step (1).

The end game seems to be a state of permanent competitive insecurity for most of the population, with fatal consequences for dissent/bad luck/mistakes, while everything is owned and run for the benefit of a handful of aristocrats who exist in vapid self-indulgent splendour.

If this seems exaggerated, consider that most people are already only a few pay checks and/or a major health crisis away from homelessness, bankruptcy, and starvation.

1. Reduce funding and investment in public education.

2. Claim that our educational system is broken and we need to privatize.

3. Fund charter and private schools with vouchers while continuing to defund public schools.

Unfortunately, I have yet to see steps 4 and 5 where we return to well-support education for all.

Probably? Government jobs pay below market and was like that way before the current president and the company.

> 3. Hand out contracts to your buddies.

I mean, Microsoft is getting about 15B from US government alone. Is Microsoft 'buddies'?

I agree in general that those tricks are old. The only difference I see today that they are done is less elegant way.

Yes?

But essentially creating self-fulfilling prophecies or moving goalposts is one of the oldest tricks in the book by dishonest folks of any ideological alignment. In an alternate universe where socialism / central planning is the default ideology if we wanted to make as unfair of a comparison demonizing private sector we'd have asked half of Silicon Valley companies to forego VC funding, not allow them to do M&A, demand that they be able to serve the general public for even the most obscure of problems, and so forth. That sets them up for failure out of the gate by measuring them against the criteria of the status quo and eliminates any of their advantages over a centralized planning system. And in fact, a large part of these ridiculous restrictions is exactly why NGOs are structured to fail to make much progress on any of the important societal problems they work on.

At what point will I stop going to your job, if you have one, and take to the streets instead? What has to happen for you to do that?

Come up with a serious answer. Write down the answer. Put it on an index card or other prominent place so you will be constantly reminded of it.

Now read the news every day. If the thing on your index card happens, take to the streets. Even if you are the only one, do it anyway.

It's not as if they're starting where the obvious bloat is (defence, fossil fuel subsidies...) and working back to the rounding errors.

It's entirely predictable supremacism - the doctrine that wealth and skin colour define virtue, and government in the public interest, which interferes with the "freedom" to abuse and exploit inferiors for profit, is an unnatural abomination.

I am well aware.

> What evidence does the parent have for intentions to harm

Just watch/read the news since 2016. Too much to list.

In addition Elon is seen as a captain of industry. PayPal. Tesla. Space X. So it can be that Elon is inept.

Is it possible that they have some other, important objective which can only be achieved by degrading the quality of government technology? In principle. But I haven't seen any explanation of what that objective could possibly be, and I have seen people with arguments for why they think it should not be easy to get access to NOAA weather data and it should not be easy to file your taxes with the IRS.

To wit, we already had a word for this: this is a purge.