Comment by mbravorus
8 days ago
so most people here are salty about Doge actually delivering on transparency, albeit imperfectly, vs promises and SLS style multi billion "effort" unable to deliver for decades?
mind you, it's totally legit to ridicule the noob security lapses, but the rest of the sentiment here seems a bit meh
I agree the website itself is fine -- not that the information wasn't publicly available before, but having it consolidated is nice.
But as for transparency, DOGE isn't at all being transparent about what it is doing. I'd give them an F so far on that.
I'm generally trying to keep away from the whole political madness going on, but when I do follow a story, Iat least try to verify what I am seeing. This requires a fair bit of mental energy, intelligence and frustration tolerance, and is frankly impossible to do for more than a fraction of what is going on.
For example, the recent headlines of the state department trying to buy $400m worth of armored Tesla vehicles was obviously a Democrat plant. It was done under the Biden administration in December, with no chance of fulfilling before the handover. Some.one thought it would be a simple way of making the Trump admin look bad.
You have to always be wary of being misled by the media in today's age. That said, the shit-slinging coming out of Doge has been largely false and illegal. If Congress assigns money to fund impressionist dancers in Pakistan, then that's what it has to be spent on. The real issue here is that to get a bill passed in the US a lot of fluff has to get attached to it. Doge can't unilaterally cancel payments without breaking the law.
Even in the cases I looked at were real corruption is plausible, ie. the money given to the Clinton Foundation, Doge just straight up lied about the amounts and purpose.
Outside of corruption, there is no good reason to move this fast and reckless. At least no good reason for the American people. They are moving this fast because they know what they do is illegal and idiotic and false, and they are trying to drown us in bullshit.
Musk gets a nice kickback for every single link going back to his own website (that is actually corruption), but more importantly, they are building up outrage fatigue for normal people and a frenzy for their fanatics. This is all about paving the way to paint legality as corruption so that they can justify ignoring the courts and Congress going forward.
Most people here on HN are idiot savants - little to no experiences that expose them to govt bureaucracy and corruption (example:taxes beyond simple salaried income tax, buying/selling property,run a business,run a payroll, investing, inflation etc. )