I gather things like this all the time. I'm against DOGE as much as 90% of the US is, but collection of open data for curiosity and interest is really not a thing to focus on.
Point of contention - according to a recent YouGov[1] poll, 48% of respondents think DOGE should be kept or expanded, while only 37% think it should be reduced or eliminated. A far cry from 90% either direction. You may be subject to confirmation bias.
I don't really care about a single YouGov poll about what people think about a headline -- that's a shallow approach, misses quite a bit of context, and when used as a summary would rightly be called clickbait. Digging deeper and past propaganda, the activities of DOGE are deeply unpopular to the electorate wholesale, and my 90% claim is easily justified by a groundswell of current and long time understanding of the electorate:
- negative impact to the economy is deeply unpopular [0]
- lying about savings is deeply unpopular [1]
- threatening cuts to entitlement spending is deeply unpopular [2]
How you ask a question, what question you ask, and how you collect data will unduly influence any poll -- event with adjustments.[3] People aren't as fickle as headlines would otherwise lead you to believe.
My take on your oblique reference to "maybe [I] have confirmation bias" is that you are taking the headlines as fact and thus can dismiss anything that doesn't agree with your perspective. This may be mistaken on my part, but if you feel deep inside that it is not, then I encourage you to dig deeper.
However, i am let's say, at least dubious about the whys of an agency which is wreaking so much havoc need to collect data on us sensitive infrastructure. If you were dealing with drugs, and you told me you buy codeine based pharma products in bulk, i wouldn't think you caught a cold
There are companies that are making bucks selling satellite photos of russian army storage(s) so that it is possible to calculate how much of remaining tanks are in storage. While a single photo of a single storage wouldn't matter on its own, having a clear picture of every russian storage can give you an idea of how many tanks were refurbished and remain in stock
The government has whole departments of people whose job it is to be on top of this sort of thing.
Why is it suddenly part of the job description of a junior DOGE employee to build workforce org chart visualization tools and investigate strategic resource datasets? Isn’t that weird to have one brand new government employee doing self-taught random investigations of topics as complex as ‘government workforce management’ and ‘strategic resource analytics’?
> Why is it suddenly part of the job description of a junior DOGE employee to build workforce org chart visualization tools and investigate strategic resource datasets?
That is totally fine to focus on. My point was focusing on the code prior to DOGE existing showing collection of GIS data.
> Isn’t that weird to have one brand new government employee doing self-taught random investigations of topics as complex as ‘government workforce management’ and ‘strategic resource analytics’?
We're in total agreement on this particular point.
The problem is, compiling the list like he has, and being on the DOGE team, makes it all very, very suspicious. And it is sensitive data - even if it is open. Those are important infrastructure locations.
He said, ironically speaking with authority on something he had no idea about..
"classification by compilation" is literally part of the Security Classification Guide (SCG) and given as mandatory training to everyone with a clearance at least once a year. Individually unclassified pieces of information can absolutely become sensitive or even classified when aggregated. Read the SCG people, this is not rocket science.
(I am not saying that applies here to this data. Merely stating that none of you have any idea what you are talking about.)
Well, yeah, not from some rando, but that's not some rando, they are an employee of the government department that is trying to gut the government. That aside, the work product that is the result of an alaysis of open data can absolutely be sensitive - not because of the open data, rather because an adversary may be able to infer intent or plans from the tools, access patterns, or outputs of that analysis.
He is saying the malicious actor is doge itself, if I understood what is being said by the previous comment. Which is the idea behind which I posted the news here on hn
Then what is the point, that Americans aren't really prudish at all and that other people are silly for saying that certain things aren't porn? If it's sarcasm I don't really get the point it's trying to portray
It feels like there should be a user option to allow (default deny) this. Like it doesn’t have to be that the minute you install WhatsApp it gets access to all of your texts or calls. But it sucks to be stuck w iMessage when that’s just locking me into apples ecosystem
The problem is that we have decades of experience with your approach. And it simply doesn’t work. Users will click any dialog box especially when the app makes features conditional on its approval.
The only way this works is what Apple and Google have implemented. Which is to allow access to a single photo or contact but not the entire library. But that’s not what Meta is after. They want everything.
Even if it was ‘just incompetence’ 95% of the time it would still be irrelevant to the average HN reader, since the remaining 5% would still be too much to ever feasibly track.
As there are tens of thousands of government departments, offices, committees, etc… with some amount of decision making power.
And as there are an exponentially large number of subtle ways the 5% of bad apples could influence the 95%, via a few degrees of separation, that cannot be easily reasoned out.
I think we can pretty safely say bitcoin was a dead end other than for buying drugs, enabling ransomware payments, or financial speculation.
Show me an average person who has bought something real w bitcoin (who couldn’t have bought it for less complexity/transaction cost using a bank) and I’ll change my mind
Bitcoin failed because of bad monetary policy turning it into something like a ponzi scheme where only early adopters win. The monetary policy isn't as hard to fix as people make it out to be.
Yes but they’re also anonymous. You don’t have your name attached to the account and there’s no paperwork/bank that’s keeping track of any large/irregular financial transactions
I heard this as one of the early sales pitches for Bitcoin. “Digital cash.”
That all seemed to go out the window when companies developed wallets to simplify the process for the average user, and when the prices surged, some started requiring account verification to tie it to a real identity. At that point, it’s just a bank with a currency that isn’t broadly accepted. The idea of digital cash was effectively dead, at least for the masses who aren’t going to take the time to figure out how to use Bitcoin without a 3rd party involved. Cash is simple.
No, not exactly. If you know someone used cash at one place can you track every cash transaction they've ever made? If you know one bitcoin transaction from a wallet you can track everything that key pair has done from genesis to present. So, if anything, it's worse.
Isn’t the idea that the money and resources have to come from somewhere?
Raise taxes or debt for the monetary side. Divert workers and other resources on the implementation side. Both of those might be better used by the private sector
When a Western government (or other state actor) decides to build something — public housing or satellites or a packet-switched network, for example — they don’t actually build it themselves. Governments don’t own construction companies and electronic design companies and research labs. The money goes to private actors who do the work.
So “divert” seems misleading. If the American government hadn’t “diverted” funds to build ARPANET half a century ago, we’d probably be stuck with the equivalents of AOL-style walled gardens instead of a single Internet because that’s the kind of network that private interests wanted to have.
... and this is called the "broken window fallacy".
You're right in that you remark that it's less bad than it initially seems. Some wealth is indeed recovered when the broken window is repaired. However everyone is by necessity worse off than if you didn't break the window in the first place.
Yeah but the website literally says “zero code changes”. It’s the long tail that’s dangerous since most people don’t understand it as well as a the core functions
