Comment by morgante
1 day ago
I'm not here to defend DOGE, but you're making the same mistake as the article of assuming the DOGE approach has no merit.
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.
The pain you're listening for here is dead veterans, dead trans kids, dead disabled people, starving seniors, people dying from preventable viruses because of vaccine program cuts. The pain you're listening for here is toxic water and food-borne illnesses.
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.
These people genuinely believe that some amount of human death is acceptable collateral.
Not everyone believes that some amount of human death is acceptable collateral, but essentially everyone behaves as if that were true.
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.
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This is absolutely true, and I think something that a lot of bleeding heart liberals don't fully understand.
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.
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These are some extremely serious claims that I'm going to need to see sources to believe. I'm by no means here to defend DOGE, but what have they done to put the lives of trans kids at serious risk?
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Twitter is losing users and is resorting to mob protection racket techniques to get more advertising spend.
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
Take away all of Elon's government subsidies and how successful are any of his businesses in terms of actual lifetime profit vs loss?
He's the living corporate embodiment of what old school Reagan Republicans decry as a welfare queen, even down to the drug addiction.
Most of his businesses are failures. He has two enormous successes. Unsuccessful businesses eventually fold and go away. That's not an acceptable option for the federal government.
Governments aren’t businesses. They have different incentives and goals. You’re very naive to think otherwise and falling for a pretty common conservative trap.
> Elon's businesses are highly successful running exactly this algorithm.
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?
No, that is definitely not well known or time tested technique in anything that actually affects things that matter. You do that when you don't care about consequences. And in this context, not caring about consequences is sociopaths.
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.