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Comment by manicdee | Hacker News Reader

Clearly it was the CDC at fault here, not a few hand picked bureaucrats, not the chain of command, not a president with a penchant for firing people who challenge his authority.

What a poorly concocted article. The least the author could do so remind people of the “starve the beast” approach to public utilities that the Republicans have been pursuing for decades.

Nope, we’ll just throw the entire CDC under a bus.

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There's this strange phenomenon on HN sometimes -- or at least I've noticed it here several times -- where people will somehow manage to condemn the article while arguing for exactly the thesis of the article. That's what you're doing here.

That's what happens when people don't actually read the article before they comment.

Given that a lot of people dont read articles and go straight to comments, comments that challenge title are valuable if the title is at odds with article content.

I literally can't read most articles due do adblock blocker or because they block european visitors.

Turn your adblocker off if you want to read those articles? If you don’t, don’t.

adblockers are a non-negotiable necessity nowadays. not due to ads, but due to tracking.

OK, then you don’t get to read the article. It’s a fair trade.

That is fine, I just wanted to give another perspective why people only read the title and not articles.

That doesn’t give a perspective on why they feel compelled to comment though. This is a discussion of the article not a guess-what-the-article-might’ve-said contest.

Most articles end up being a discussion of only what the title says, and not being able to read the articles is one of the reasons.

Firefox containers, cookie auto delete, and overlay remover.

“Your welcome.”

To give a more helpful response:

Some of those "turn off your adblock" barriers are just CSS and can be removed. When the browser gets physically redirected, (like Forbes did (or does?)) I've found using plain old wget will get the page in question (in most cases).

I read the whole article and it is consistent with the parent comment, not yours, in my opinion.

It does mention stupid things done by the Trump administration, but at the end, it describes the CDC failures as "baffling" and presents the blame of an "inept administration" i.e. Trump, as an excuse.

Overall, it seems to be an article about the inexplicable failures of the CDC, with an effort to be "fair and balanced" in covering other factors.

You’ll need to enlighten me as to how the article raises the issue of starving the beast when the only attempt at suggesting Whitehouse pressure being involved was a suggestion of why the CDC would continue trying to develop its own COVID-19 test when the process of development was fraught with errors and missteps.

Failing that, can you tell me how many paragraphs you read in the “starve the beast” version of the article you read?

For what it's worth, and despite the title, when I read this article the message I took away is exactly the one you are describing.

It is Buzzfeed after all.

I've found the Buzzfeed content that makes it on here to be pretty good. Which is weird, it is Buzzfeed after all. I don't think it's just the HN selection effect, as P(liked|Buzzfeed) > P(liked|HN).

BuzzfeedNews in particular makes a regular appearance because it is a world-class journalism organization. It does not seem to share much with Buzzfeed.

Yeah more crappy for profit media spreading outrage. The news/media is always negative ...tired of it and tuned it out/enjoying life without it!

It’s a culture problem throughout fedgov, not so much a funding problem. The DoD is also a huge mess, despite having plenty (most people would argue too much) funding. Take a look at something like the Afghanistan papers. Decision-making at every level and internal politics impacting competency are massive problems. Changing Presidents can’t fix this, because it’s a slow-motion problem going on for decades, and Presidents actually have very little power over what actually goes on in these agencies internally - that’s what the contemporary complaints about the so-called “deep state” are about: most agencies are in practice virtually independent from the White House, and will simply sandbag or defy any direction from the White House or appointees they aren’t interested in following. These people are experts in exploiting bureaucracy to achieve their aims, which are dominated by personal politics and career advancement.

I used to say exactly what you’re saying, but now having seen how it all works firsthand, I am afraid the problem is intractable without major Congressional overhaul of the entire executive branch, including mass layoffs to get out the problems, before we increase funding to any agency. And I don’t think Congress is ever going to do this.

Additionally, at least according to Forbes, the CDC employs more people now than ever, having increased headcount by 25% since 2007, when it was already at an all-time high. (The article also complains about comp, but I personally don’t think it’s too high.)

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2020/02/29/106...

Agreed, we’ve all watched the president say all the wrong things at the wrong times during this episode. I don’t doubt he is pulling the wrong strings behind the scenes too.

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