Comment by wnevets
4 hours ago
> The CDC Has a Cyclospora Lab. DOGE Downsized It Last Year [1]
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/cdc-cyclospora-lab-doge-downsize...
4 hours ago
> The CDC Has a Cyclospora Lab. DOGE Downsized It Last Year [1]
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/cdc-cyclospora-lab-doge-downsize...
DOGE will be seen by historians as the cause of so many crisis…
It is the government equivalent of El Muskito buying Twitter and then wantonly disabling components with the assumption they do nothing.
You don't need historians to see the crisis as it was happening and as it's ongoing, the only question we need to ask is how long should the people held accountable be in prison for?
For abusing democratic offices the penalty should be at least one decade in keeping up with ancient Athenian democratic traditions.
Well, I said historians because I don’t think that will happen anytime soon. The US is almost completely captured. The time to send people to prison was during the previous administration. I still cannot believe that Americans re-elected a literal failed insurrectionist
1 reply →
Imagine how frustrated the laid off staff must be, especially if they end up either the illness themselves.
optimistic, this requires the arc of history to bend towards non-fascism.
Yeah, as Norm Macdonald put it:
> “It says here in this history book that luckily, the good guys have won every single time. What are the odds?”
Well, there will at least be historians in other countries covering the downfall in detail, if there is indeed a bigger downfall than has already happened.
Democracies are pretty good at studying the failures of other countries and learning about them.
1 reply →
Optimistic, this requires a civilization to have a history.
>the arc of history to bend towards non-fascism.
From wikipedia: "Fascism [...] rose to prominence primarily in Europe of the interwar period"
So what were humans doing for all the thousands of years after the advent of recorded history but before that?
1 reply →
Fascism always collapses, the question is only how much will remain by the time that occurs.
5 replies →
Fair. Though based on previous experiments fascist regimes aren’t that stable and competent, they have a tendency to self-destruct once they are in power. It’s a sad state of affairs that is considered optimistic
Well, shit in peace i guess.
Well it's definitely not in piece/s I guess
[flagged]
From 11 to 3 employees. Doesn't seem that outrageous outside of such a time of crisis (since this lab seem dedicated solely to outbreaks, not research), which is when the parent entity should temporarily allocate more people.
> From 11 to 3 employees. Doesn't seem that outrageous outside
I hope I never have you as my manager If you think a ~70% reduction in head count isn't outrageous.
I've worked along scientists a few times, many twiddling their thumbs and coasting along on the back of their PhD. No idea if this applies here, mind you, but I don't see an innate need for that many people, even if this disease has major outbreaks (let's say > 50 cases) every few years.
3 does seem a bit low, though.
4 replies →
The thing about crises is by the time you’re in them, they’re gonna cost way more to clean up than just not getting there in the first place.
Sounds like the lag time between going from 11 to 3 employees and having an outbreak was ~a year, so unless this is wrapped up fast enough and cheaply enough to cost less than 8 FTEs, we didn’t save a whole lot of money and we caused a whole lot of distress, so it’s hard to really call this a win.
That ignores that point that this department only activates after the outbreak has started, so if it was increased to 100 people it wouldn’t have prevented the crisis.
1 reply →
Astroturfing still paying good?
While you're at it, give AI to the 3 employees and they will do the work of 30 /s
Too bad that article doesn't have any evidence that the alleged cuts have had any impact on the cyclospora response.
It's in the subheading:
> “Based on simple math, these outbreak responses—which require rapid, timely responses—are going to be greatly diminished,” the former CDC lab director tells WIRED.
Do you think that cutting funding to a lab would improve or hinder its ability to react to an outbreak like this one?
You think an agency with less people can more capably do its job? Come on now.
Just wait until 1 of those 3 employees left has surgery and needs FMLA, or out on maternity leave. Then it'll be even more capable. /s
1 reply →
Surely the burden of proof here is proving that a 70% headcount reduction doesn’t make a difference.
what would make you think that a downsized lab can do the same amount of work
They’re not thinking. They like the cuts, and DOGE, and musk, and the feel of that boot coming down on the neck. So they’re making post hoc rationalizations for everything.
It’s certainly not motivated by principles or a concern for reality.
Some people think that the only ones downsized were the “dead weight”, so therefore, with them and their bureaucracy out of the way, the remaining people will be faster and better able to do their real work. From what I’ve seen, this is not the case. If anything, the opposite may have happened.
What would make you think this would have prevented the incident?
7 replies →
As engineers we know that you can't catch everything. You build resilient systems by learning from your failures and investing/iterating in better practices over time. If you want to find out how to sabotage your company really quickly, just throw a bunch of politically radicalized interns with stupid red hats at your testing, QA, dev/ops, security, customer success (+etc) procedures, slash budgets, randomly, delete test suites and see where you land. Then when things go wrong, make sure your defense is "well we don't know they would have caught anything anyway."
The cuts were actual. There's no sense in calling something that is a matter of open public record which has been widely reported on "alleged."
I understand MAGA types like to fall over themselves to evade responsibility for their actions, because they think truth is a shell game and reality has no meaningful consequences if you deny them loudly enough (see: deaths due to science denialism during the covid response and shilling of bro-science alternative medicine, upsurge in preventable illnesses like measles due to vaccine denialism, brain drain from the insane gutting of public research funding institutions and cynical re-alignment of said institutions around corporations that donated to the presidency, drastic consequences of global warming, consequences of 2A zealotry in the form of school and other mass shootings... and so on and so forth).
The hard reality is that we've been trying to get a handle on food safety for over a century. It is incredibly laborious, difficult work that requires knowledge of the many and various ways contaminants make it into the food supply, how food producers like Taylor Farms obfuscate or lie to avoid legal liability or costly regulation, and knowledge of the law and how to shape and administer it effectively. If you slash regulatory agencies that have emerged over decades to own and shepherd this work, you're going to have to own up to a lot of nasty shit over the next few decades.
In my state, water pollution was so bad in the 70s and 80s you couldn't swim in major lakes and streams. Now you can. We got there through sustained public investment in regulation and oversight. We need more of that, not less.
[dead]