Comment by dmvdoug
2 months ago
I am really, really eager and excited to see the result when these DOGE-istas cook up whatever insanely “rational” schemes they imagine will make government not completely “dysfunctional” roll them out to the people they actually need to implement them (i.e., Congress).
Surprise! Politicians only claim to care about budget and spending matters when the opposite party is in control.
But I think most of us aren’t so naive as not to realize DOGE is just and only another way to troll Democrats, not actually a serious way to tackle our fiscal and budgetary problems. The past n Comptrollers of the United States have been banging away on that policy drum for as long as I’ve been paying attention to politics (beginning ca. 2000). Nobody cares. They write nice reports though.
Agreed, but you have to look at this from “government and elites realized that we’re screwed, and need to just do whatever possible to see what sticks” perspective. This time banging the drums actually might matter because a competitor (China) has caught up in most of industries and playing the “win at all costs” mode. I have no idea how US is going dig itself out of this situation as there’s no cultural, economical, nor political alignment.
There is a genuine belief in some people that if you just put a few thousand smart people into work, they’ll have a solution. But what is lacking, I think, is boots on the ground employees for numerous amount of industries. They’re thinking of a financially engineered solution, but there’s no appetite to pay or maintain an industrial workforce.
There is also no financially engineered solution possible when one of the groups has final say on whether anything changes and if it does, what exactly—at least when that group gains from the status quo. Cut x number of federal programs? You’ve now also directly reduced the amount of money flowing into y number of Congresspeople, and the number of districts in which that reduction doesn’t also make reelection more (marginally) troublesome is asymptomatic to 0.
It’s hope and prayers kinda season, maybe bunch of people will figure out something. I have no clue what they can do, but I’m not a smart person with 6496493 IQ.
> a competitor (China) has caught up in most of industries
stop spreading misinformation. go look at largest companies by market cap in the world https://companiesmarketcap.com/ and you'll see US domination while China has a few handful of companies, mostly banks.
> government and elites realized that we’re screwed
That's more like China. That's why 15k rich chinese are fleeing the country in 2024 https://www.forbes.com/sites/miltonezrati/2024/07/03/high-ne..., the most of any country in the world. US isn't the one where the stock market and real estate has collapsed.
All those things you said are objectively true. But it’s literally US government who is up in the arms right now screaming left and right how “we have to win against China”. Not taking China as a serious competitor is just weird nowadays. Take most of top industries, and you can find its equivalent in China serving the same amount of people.
But they're all super duper smart! Surely it can't take more than a month or two to solve govt waste with that kind of brainpower.
"We cut cancer research and will replace all government vehicles with Teslas. Ez!"
My guess at what it will look like:
* Ruthless budget cutting. Import social programs that (purely by coincidence) don't alight with the far right's ideology will be cut because e.g. only 1% of the population uses them, ignoring that 1% of the population is still 3 million odd people.
* Lots of brain drain. There are good people in government. I suspect the good ones won't much enjoy being told that they're morons who are wasting everyone's money. The actual morons won't care much, and the people doling out the firings won't be around long enough to figure who is who.
* Some low hanging fruit that requires a dictatorship and wide-ranging mandate to achieve. There's definitely inefficiency in government that can be solved by pointing everyone in the same direction and telling them their jobs are on the line. But not that much. I'm sure much fanfare will be made of what is solved though.
* Lots of corruption, cronyism and people under-qualified for their roles but over-estimating their abilities. This is a playbook we've seen from Trump and from Elon "I looked at Twitter's code for 5 seconds and instantly made 100x improvements' Musk. Thankfully, government projects span years or decades, so the effects of these terrible contracts and inexperienced leaders will be felt for years to come.
[ignoreme]
Just curious: did you actually read the whole post?
When I got back home and regaled my friends with my mountain stories, one of my friends joked that I should work for Elon and Vivek at DOGE and help America get off its current crash to defaulting on its own debt. So I reached out to some people and got in. After 8 calls with people who all talked fast and sounded very autistic smart, I was added to a number of Signal groups and immediately put to work.
Working for DOGE for 4 weeks, remembering the power of urgency
Within 2 minutes of talking to the final interviewer for DOGE, he asked me if I wanted to join. I said “yes”. Then he said “cool” and I was in multiple Signal groups. I was immediately acquainted with the software, HR, and legal teams and went from 0 to 100 taking meetings and getting shit done. This was the day before Thanksgiving.
The next 4 weeks of my life consisted of 100s of calls recruiting the smartest people I’ve ever talked to, working on various projects I’m definitely not able to talk about, and learning how completely dysfunctional the government was. It was a blast.
I learned about the power of urgency and having an undeniable mission. Not by reading it somewhere. By experiencing it. I came to realize how laughable my robotics stint had been in comparison. And I started to realize that, although the mission of DOGE is extremely important, it wasn’t the most important thing I needed to focus on with urgency for myself. I needed to get back to ambiguity, focus on my insecurities, and be ok with that for a while. DOGE wasn’t going to fix that.
Full disclosure: no I didn't. Sorry about that.
Having read that portion, this guy seems like a poster-boy for the blind ignorance of the ultra wealthy.
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