Elon's unchecked power at building a model? Or at politics?
I always worry whenever I see people telling me how to feel - rage in this case. We are in a political system that is oriented more around getting people to feel rage and hatred as opposed to consensus and deliberation. Elon is the face of that, but it's a much longer and larger problem. Throw in the complete dismisal that anyone not scared of this is ignorant, shuts down discussion.
The problem I have with Elon is that they are wasting a once in a lifetime chance to actually address and fix systematic problems with the US government. Deploying LLMs in the government space doesn't fear me with dread. Continuing the senseless partisan drive of the 20 years does.
> Continuing the senseless partisan drive of the 20 years does.
I think what the government is going through right now is wrapping up the last political system. The idea that Democrats and Republicans just need to learn how to work together is just wrong. The parties are being destroyed, and I think we should all cheer that. They were built to address the issues of the 20th century, and neither party in the current form is ready to address 21st century issues. I think AI, Climate change, world demographic changes around the world (ie: low birthrates) is going to seriously alter everything about our world from geopolitics, to economy, even social issues.
The democrats are stuck in supporting the new deal bureaucracy and the post ww2 order. That's over, it's crumbling right now, and i'm not going to try and defend any of it personally. It's just obsolete. The old Republican party your dad probably supported is dead too, that died a while ago. The new Republican party seems to be an alliance of people who just really want to cheer the crumbling of the old system (MAGA) and the first emergence of what politics in the 21st century is going to look like (the tech alliance).
Democrats would be smart to understand it's a new century we have new threats, new challenges, and need new institutions.... and this IS NOT a once in a lifetime opportunity to fix our government. This is the first draft of our new political system, and they have a choice to participate in shaping it, but they will need to get votes, and to get votes they need to stop stalking about obsolete ideas.
>The democrats are stuck in supporting the new deal bureaucracy and the post ww2 order
> The new Republican party seems to be an alliance of people who just really want to cheer the crumbling of the old system
I agree, and I think this is a bizarre flipping of the "Democrat ~= progressive / Republican ~= conservative" dynamic that has been largely assumed throughout my lifetime.
We need both conservative and progressive forces in our society. Someone needs to be saying "here's what's wrong with our system; here's what needs to change", and someone else needs to balance that with "here's what we're doing right; here are the parts that are working well and that we should not get rid of".
It seems to me that now, instead of that tug-of-war discussion happening between the two parties, it is happening in parallel within them. Unfortunately, the sane and responsible version of that discussion is happening entirely within the boundary of the Democratic coalition, in a way that is completely ineffectual because (a) the internal conservative moderating force is relatively strong in a moment when the populace seems to want more progressive action, and (b) to they have so little ability to effectively wield political power.
Meanwhile, the Republicans are dominated by a bizarro "progressive" faction that wants to pull us all in an entirely different (IMHO regressive) direction. And that faction is completely unchecked by any internal "conservative" moderating force within its own party, so it is for the moment able to push us as hard and fast as possible in its preferred direction.
> It seems to me that now, instead of that tug-of-war discussion happening between the two parties,
I'm REALLY looking forward to 2028, because I think that potentially will be the first election where we start to see what modern politics will look like. I wouldn't be surprised if there are multiple new parties, and multiples of them have a real chance. If it seems one sided right now, it's just because one side found their way to the start line first... but make no mistake, history shows that over time new political factions will form that offer resistance to bad ideas, and clear a path for the good ideas.
Given the rate of change with AI, We're going to have a real idea on what a world being disrupted by AGI (whether that is true AGI, or something close to it) looks like. At the same time Healthcare is only getting worse, and Trump is NOT going to fundumentally address it. China is going to be rising, and they're a real geopolitical threat. The war in Ukraine has completely changed what warfare looks like, and we're going to have to completely restructure our military (just like we have to restructure our healthcare). I also wouldn't be surprised if Trump's war with the cartel turns out to be far harder than expected because cheap autonomous drones allow a small military to compete against a large traditional military.
All of our prior assumptions on retirement are different too, retired boomers are not the same as the pensioneers from their day. They're not impoverished, instead they're flush with cash. I'm not sure in a world with an aging workforce you're going to be anti-immigrant... and all these benefits we give to retirees may not make sense in a world where retirees are wealthier than the regular workforce supporting them.
The general theme for the next decade is going to be throw out all the old books, 80% of our prior assumptions no longer apply.
Is this new political system akin to a banana republic? Because that’s what happens when you replace non partisan workers with loyalists in order to eliminate all accountability and oversight. Turning the rule of law into a partisan issue is a receipt for endemic corruption.
And even if you think the rule of law is antiquated, you’re misanthropically cheering the destruction of the largest institution in the world that 330 million people depend on for survival.
I'm happy to, thought the end of your statement strongly suggestions that you have are not acting in honest faith by asking this question.
1) All positions have become partisan, which political ideology being as critical to promotion in high level positions.
2) Congress refuses to act as the constitution intends, and have delegated their budget making authority to the executive branch.
3) The government specific procurement system is almost as expensive as what is being procured.
4) Auditing the government is almost impossible.
5) The debt load on the government is becoming unsustainable.
6) The lack of "digital transformation" (what we called it in banking) means poor service.
7) The unfunded liabilities (mostly at a state level) will swamp budgets in a few years.
8) Most large contracts should be fixed contracts, not cost plus contracts. Companies can do bilk the government for things that are a order of magnitude cheaper to the outside world.
9) Medicare refuses to lower health care costs (by reducing rates) due to political pressure.
10) No rationalization of government spending or revenue has occured since the post world war 2 era.
1. Making all positions partisan is a fascist tactic to challenge objective truth.
2. Congress as a whole isn’t a single entity —- one party refuses to compromise in any way while the other plays by the rules.
3. Doesn’t matter. Cost reform needs to go through existing legal routes.
4. What constitutes “auditing” the government? Because we had plenty of non partisan positions overseeing and auditing all parts of the government. DOGE fired those people.
5. Again, go through the legal route.
6. A lack of “digital transformation” is the vaguest most unconvincing point in this entire justification.
7. These budget issues need to be decided on through constitutional processes and with oversight, as before.
8. Ditto.
9. Medicare can lower health costs by other means, such as being available universally to all and setting limits on what they pay to providers based on procedure.
All of your points can be summed up as "Congress refuses to do their job".
Breaking all the laws to bypass the government does not "actually address and fix systematic problems with the US government", that is an absurd position. Caesar did not fix the Roman Republic.
And opposition to DOGE is not on the basis that people don't care about government efficiency. It's on the basis that the shit they're doing has nothing to do with government efficiency. There's not even a pretense of trying to calculate the "benefit" part of the cost-benefit equation with the cuts they are doing, they are just slashing and burning without any concern for outcomes as a power play and messaging tool. Elon is famous for doing this at Tesla and Twitter and all evidence points to it being incredibly harmful.
And not everything is about efficiency. Laying off veteran's crisis hotline workers or refusing to pay for the USAID employees you've just abandoned to be extracted (or in one case, medevac'd after a medical emergency) from the places they were sent to is just cruel (and again, illegal).
> I always worry whenever I see people telling me how to feel - rage in this case.
No one told you to feel rage.
> Throw in the complete dismisal that anyone not scared of this is ignorant, shuts down discussion.
Weird, there are a lot of comments doing discussion in reply to the parent comment. It hasn't been shut down at all! You read those words and disagreed with them, and wrote your own words in response. You're doing the discussion you're claiming is being shut down! What are you even talking about?
But it is a partisan issue. All these people on fat NGO salaries, all these federal workers not pulling their weight, all the welfare abuse, all these aid payments - which party do you think is keen to keep the spigot flowing? Of course, it would be a shame if they didn’t audit the Pentagon as well, definitely massive graft happening there.
It’s just wild to me that an attempt to tally up whats in the community grain store and where it’s allocated out to is even considered a bipartisan issue.
The problem is the person doing the tallying is doing it behind closed doors, has routinely been shown to lie to further his interests and has already been caught lying with the tallies he's released.
The GOP controls both houses and the POTUS. They could absolutely do a top to bottom audit with full transparency and make cuts where needed. But that's not what this is about.
Is that totally true, though? Maybe they have pulled wool over my eyes, but it seems like we've seen more transparency in the last few weeks than the last 40 years.
> ACTIVE SOCIAL ENGINEERING DEFENSE (ASED) LARGE SCALE SOCIAL DECEPTION (LSD)
Then there's the basic accounting 101 things like improper categorization, 150 year old people getting social security, etc. Why should the US government be held to a lower standard than a publicly traded company?
This ASED and LSD, aren’t they services to help the state counteract an information warfare attack? Just guessing, but it sounds like a legitimate thing where they’d want capacity to uncover/expose such activities, which I’m sure adversaries would consider.
Yes, the contract was for researching defenses against deception, was first awarded under Trump and also on public record, visible for many years, not "revealed" by anyone, especially not those DOGE masterminds. But what's even the point now? I think we're past discussing any facts here, because OP has a "sniff test" instead (see answer below).
Sure, sure. Pentagon money going to the western press, USAID (a literal terrorist organization) funding both sides of the narrative, what could go wrong?
There was a time liberals screamed at the top of their lungs over this type of threat to democracy, now they embrace and endorse it because they’ve fully merged with the primacy neocons.
Do you have a third party audit that this is true or have those datasets all been removed? Musk has shown himself unknowledgeable at best and purposely lying at worse so many DOGE findings are hard to take at face value.
Did you even read those articles? Full of BS excuses and justifications. None of them pass the sniff test by any honest person with above room temperature IQ.
People are just angry at Musk for turning their safe space into a free speech platform then switching sides. And that he’s now taking away their sides unlimited slush fund.
You clearly don't want to read anything outside of Twitter/Musk, but another error, fixed/hidden in order to keep showing incorrect data that looks better for DOGE.
The DOGE website initially included a screenshot from the federal contracting database showing that the contract’s value was $8 million, even as the DOGE site listed $8 billion in savings. On Tuesday night, around the time this article was published, DOGE removed the screenshot that showed the mismatch, but continued to claim $8 billion in savings. It added a link to the original, outdated version of the contract worth $8 billion.
So much honesty and transparency out of this group.
Man people can’t stand that Elon turned Twitter into a free speech platform. Anyways, I'm more of a long-form article, book, podcast and travel guy when it comes to informing my opinion.
I don't know any voters who want fraud to continue, but most do accept that fraud is just a part of any system designed and implemented by humans.
I personally would like to see the end of the "find gravy train, keep that gravy flowing at all costs" methodology of capitalism, because it's primary focus is money instead of the service provided. Whether it's pentagon contractors, business subsidies, or the heinous medicare and medical insurance fraud. But I don't want to cut SNAP even if someone buys a goddamn coke once in a while.
The current method seems to be brain surgery with a monkey wrench. Slash and burn with little thought given to the effects upon humans, especially those who don't have other options. Kagi gave me a figure of between 9.2 to 15.2 percent of welfare being fraudulent. Yes that's too high, yes I'd like to fix that, but I want that change to be considered, studied, and planned with caution.
Tbh I think “move fast and break things” is what’s needed. The government bureaucracy has ossified over many years, and any attempt
to change it gets bogged down in “committees” and “inquiries”. The only thing that will work is shock and awe, and if something important does get broken, it’s east enough to fix when its criticality becomes evident.
Has it occurred to you that the people who feel rage fundamentally understand the situation, and you may be undereducated in this area? What do you think are the root causes of that “senseless partisan drive”?
I’d suggest starting with Rick Perlman’s book “Nixonland” if you’re interested.
> Has it occurred to you that the people who feel rage fundamentally understand the situation, and you may be undereducated in this area?
Regardless of how justified the rage is or not, being very emotional about things usually have one of two effects on people A) people gets taken aback by someone's strong emotions or B) people get inspired/taking with the emotion, even feeling that emotion stronger themselves. Sometimes also C) they don't really care either way.
What probably isn't helpful, is calling someone is "undereducated" when they're clearly saying that they're person (A), and just because they may or may not agree with you (although parent didn't even clearly say they disagree, just that they're "taken aback" a bit).
Some people are calm regardless of what's going on around them, even if the world would be on fire, they'd try to describe what's going on around them with careful words and consideration. It isn't wrong or right, just like the people who feel rage and very emotional aren't wrong or right, it's just a showcase how we're different.
But we should aim to at least understand each other, not by trying to provoke, instigate or look down on others, but by asking questions to clarify and to better understand.
You're doing the exact same thing he is addressing in that statement above. He's not belittling anyone's rage, he's speaking about people who incite others to feel the rage with them. Now let's turn your question around.
Has it occurred to you that the people who feel rage fundamentally misunderstand the situation and are completely undereducated in this area, and are only fuelled by sensationalism and Media manipulation? And then I suggest you go read Dirty Politics by Kathleen Hall Jamieson if you're interested, because that's what people who want to sound more intelligent than the other half of the conversation always do.
Given the two of you probably have different models of reality, perhaps you two can try and figure out which is correct by seeing which model gives better predictions?
So try to come up with some sort of future observation that can be made where you think the other person's model would give a different answer to yours about what you would be able to objectively observe.
Over what time scale, how do we agree on facts, and how do we evaluate things that require a common value system to determine whether the facts are good or bad?
The idea would be that the two of them collaboratively agree on some observable prediction they differ on. E.g. level of officially reported government spending in 4 years time or gdp growth rate next year or number of plane crashes next year or what have you.
Just some observable metric.
If they literally can't come up with a single observable predictive difference then the predictive aspects of their models are actually equivalent and they are only narratively different and don't "really disagree". Like Copenhagen interpretation vs many worlds.
Many things don't have quantifiable metrics like that. For example, is USA still a democracy in 4 years? Are people more or less free?. You know, important questions that aren't just economic numbers. Even semi-quantifiable stuff like "are Americans better educated" is debatable on many topics if you can't agree on truth. Oh, and that GDP growth rate number? That relies on a lot of trust as to who's doing the reporting. For example, many people don't believe China's reported GDP numbers. What makes you think the USA doesn't devolve to such a distrust as well.
If "democracy" is just metaphysics then it's irrelevant. But if it has actual tangible effects such as "can you vote?", "can you protest the government?", "is the leader of the opposition arrested?", "do most people think they live in a democracy?", "how popular is new legislation compared to previous years?", etc...
Then you can make predictions about it and test them!
You can even do local predictions if both can agree, such as "will the combined incomes of my family be higher or lower in 4 years time?" as low coupling proxies for gdp. (Ideally one would use probabilities for loosely linked proxies like that and use the probability differences the two theories assign to give bits of evidence to one over the other, so you'd want many many such proxies, ideally uncorrelated ones)
> can you vote? can you protest the government? do most people think they live in a democracy?
Was Jan 6 a protest of the government or an insurrection? Can Russians vote or are elections a sham? Do the majority of Russians believe they live in a democracy if they’re afraid of whose conducting the polling (or the MAGA non response to polling)? Those are values question that require you to have an agreement on reality.
> You can even do local predictions if both can agree, such as "will the combined incomes of my family be higher or lower in 4 years time?" as low coupling proxies for gdp
Your personal income has absolutely no predictive value on gdp. It’s more predictive of whether you personally made successful bets or even if you’re better at sucking up to the current power structure. It tells you nothing about population level metrics if you have no way of conducting reliable population level surveys. For example Donald Trump’s personal net worth sky rocketed under Biden because he won the election while as the leader of the opposition to the democrats was looking at jail time and whether that was legitimate or not depends on which political lens you look through it.
> If they affect your life they can be observed.
Ah, but if either side distrusts the other about whether the observation made is truthfully reported, how do you solve that? It requires some amount of trust and right now there’s a very clear divide there.
There are definitely tangible predictive differences in the case of, say, Russia vs USA. Things like "If you go to the capital with a bunch of friends carrying placards saying '$LEADER is corrupt and evil and should be replaced by $OPPOSITION' how many of you end up in a jail cell in the next day?".
If there is literally no tangible difference then it's just label games and metaphysics and doesn't matter.
> Your personal income has absolutely no predictive value on gdp.
It actually is correlated (admittedly in most day-to-day cases it's just a lagging indicator, but things like natural disasters hit both). It's not the strongest correlation but it would still be evidential. Definitely under 1.0 bits though... One would need a LOT of such observations and having them not screen each other off to start getting a convincing number of bits.
Probably not realistic to have humans manage these sorts of numerous tiny updates though...
/nitpicks
> Ah, but if either side distrusts the other about whether the observation made is truthfully reported, how do you solve that? It requires some amount of trust and right now there’s a very clear divide there.
Yeah, it gets much trickier like that. But I do think two reasonable people from the opposite political sides could agree on some sort of observable to the extent their disagreement is anything other than narrative.
> Things like "If you go to the capital with a bunch of friends carrying placards saying '$LEADER is corrupt and evil and should be replaced by $OPPOSITION' how many of you end up in a jail cell in the next day?".
If the other side calls it a violent riot does it still count as people getting put in jail? Cause the Jan 6 insurrection and BLM protests occurred at about the same time and are viewed very differently depending on which political lens you put on.
> If there is literally no tangible difference then it's just label games and metaphysics and doesn't matter.
You’re discounting feelings as if it doesn’t matter. But if people believe or feel like they live in a dictatorship, what quantitative data are you going to use to disprove that. Moreover, why aren’t feelings valid when talking about politics which is fundamentally an emotionally driven human activity and not a data driven one? By the way the left believes they live in an authoritarian dictatorship under Trump while the right believes they lived in an authoritarian dictatorship under Biden. And political power literally is the power to emotionally manipulate others because you individually can’t actually accomplish anything by yourself.
Has it occurred to you that nothing is more powerful for coming up with intellectual arguments than a strong driving emotion?
Yes, rage might be the appropriate and response given the situation. But it’s often true that it starts with an emotion, and then people just argue from there. Even while being wrong. Just look at all the people with contradictory opinions in history, both with strong, emotional rage, and and equally certain of their connection. Throwing the fact that people actually has a tendency to want to be angry.
Rage is the fuel of the internet, but it’s fundamentally useless when it comes to seeking truth. Social media platforms are engineered to maximize engagement, and the most engaging emotion is anger. This isn’t accidental—outrage drives clicks, shares, and ad revenue. The internet has long been called a “hate machine,” and there’s plenty of truth to that.
This creates an environment where misinformation and emotional appeals spread faster than facts. When discussing complex, non-trivial topics, logic and reason are the only tools that can cut through the noise. But in a system designed to reward outrage, those tools are often drowned out.
I highly recommend Sam Vaknin's talk about Social Media toxicity.
As a Historian (and a German historian in particular) - I've spent a reasonable amount of time educating myself on the nature of fascism and in particular the break down of democracies (Wiemar, France, and also the erosion of civil liberties during the great depression in the United States).
I have also been a delegate to both the RNC and the DNC at a state level.
This is not a appeal to authority, but rather a honest response to your request for my education level.
IMHO, The root cause of the "senseless partisan drive" is the fact that he founding fathers could not come up with a way to restrict parties (they called them "interests") and left them unchecked. This is a constant "sin" of the American political system, and is a key reason Slavery survived as long as it did, why separate but equal became the law of the land, why America shot itself in the foot several time with the Banks of America and why we are looking at the wrong side of history now.
The parties now act to destroy each other as their prime directive, rather then to better the country. I liken this to Wiemar Germany, where the increasing radicalization of both the Nazis and the Communists led to political instability and eventual violence that destroyed the government. That erosion of democratic norms, as well as the "other side must be destroyed for us to survive" messaging is the true threat, IMHO.
I would strongly suggest Richard Evan's three part history on Nazi history to understand Fascism. Don't worry, you can still hate and worry about Trump and think he is the next coming of Hitler afterwords - it will just be for better reasons.
I always worry whenever I see people telling me how to feel - rage in this case. We are in a political system that is oriented more around getting people to feel rage and hatred as opposed to consensus and deliberation. Elon is the face of that, but it's a much longer and larger problem. Throw in the complete dismisal that anyone not scared of this is ignorant, shuts down discussion.
The problem I have with Elon is that they are wasting a once in a lifetime chance to actually address and fix systematic problems with the US government. Deploying LLMs in the government space doesn't fear me with dread. Continuing the senseless partisan drive of the 20 years does.