4,262 karma · joined August 15, 2013
me at waltonhoops.com
One of these things is not like the other.
What evidence? The administration has lready said in court that they have no evidence some of the men committed any crimes.
What's still being litigated is if the administration will be able to send any more flights to El Salvador.
Or just bad design. I use AI a fair amount for my personal work (my employer currently bans it), and what I've found is it's a great accelerant, BUT you have to be super vigilant with it to keep the quality decent. It's very good at producing code that will make it past your average code review but has design issues that are going to make things harder down the road and getting it to refactor these itself can be quite difficult at times. I generally find myself in a loop of asking the AI to do something, doing a few rounds of refinement with it, especially around test cases, then a manual refactor/cleanup pass over the tests, followed by a manual refactor of the code.
When I read accounts of other people gushing over AI, allowing them to do some semi-complicated thing in under an hour, it really makes me worry about how this is going to affect the readability of the average codebase in a few years' time.
This part has if you trust Elon as a source. He shared some graphs where there was no spike at 150, and people older than 150. If you trust Elon on this is really up to the reader, but it's a peeve of mine that sources keep reporting the COBOL epoch thing, which was always just a (plausible) theory as fact.
> Again, 150-year-olds are not collecting social security benefits.
This part hasn't. These 150 year olds are simply people whose death hasn't been recorded. They aren't collecting Social Security. In fact social security automatically stops at 115, and the number of Social Security recipients over 100 is within expectations [1]. This if course doesn't not mean there are zero deab people still receiving checks. With any system this size some fraud will exist, the question is how much, and how much does it cost to chase down.
The issue with unrecorded deaths for people over 100 has been known since at least 2015 [2]. In short it hasn't been fixed due to the cost, combined with the risk of incorrectly marking someone dead, which can seriously fuck up your life, not just social security. This whole bruhaha could have been avoided if someone did a 5-minute Google search before Elon/Trump started their theatrics.
[1] https://www.newsnationnow.com/business/your-money/people-ove...
So when Republicans challenged Obama's or Bidens executive orders, say student loans forgiveness for example, were they also intolerant of democracy? Or is it only anti-democratic when one opposes Trump?
Do you not see the problem with this? We aren't talking revoking a Visa, we're talking a lifetime of slavery.
> illegal immigrant
Many explicitly were in the country legally. The administration is not claiming they were in the country illegally.
> criminal gang members
Who the administration says in court they have no evidence of commiting any crimes.
> kick them out
They were not "kicked out". They were sent to slave labor in El Salvador.
I don't know that there's anything Trump can do at this point that will lose him support.
I'm not sure what this solves, and as far as I'm aware it's not being done, so even if it's an "obvious solution" it's a moot point.
> Other one is delegating most of the function to banks.
Again I don't know what this means.
> IMO this is prime example of self destructing empathy Musk has been parroting about.
I'd say the opposite. We are talking inconveniencing everyone on social security not 0.1% and very likely wrongfully booting some off who fail to get the memo or are otherwise unable to meet the requirements. All to chase some hypothetical fraud that makes up 0.1% of the budget. The damage done is very likely to outweigh any savings.
I'm *very* interested in making government more efficient, and even more so rooting out fraud. But the cost of the effort has to be considered, and frankly I have yet to see DOGE do either of those things.
How many social security recipients do you suppose are disabled? Are only those of sound body and mind deserving of the social security they've been paying into their whole lives?
> who's going to buy it? Nobody would want to own a molotov magnet
If nothing else, it has value as parts.
> In the end it'll be hurting my wallet and not Elon's because I have to junk the car and buy a different brand.
It hurts both. Nobody is going to buy Tesla is what they can look forward to a string of vandalism and eventually having to either sell it for a song or scrap it for parts. Tesla/Elon may already have the money from your current purchase, but destroying the second hand market and otherwise making it painful to own one reduces demand, and that hurts Elon's wallet.
Especially if these are people in your own life instead of randoms on the Internet, it's probably worth revisiting this. A great many people I know in my life saying things like this were spinning a very different yarn when it was Obama, the ACA or his executive orders. Or Biden doing... Well anything. In other words it's not good faith. It's a post-facto rationalization to justify whatever Trump is doing.
It's of course harder to do this exercise for a random stranger on the Internet. It's always possible this person was arguing the same for other Presidents. But I'd bet dollars to donuts few were.
Erlang has the array module, which IIRC uses lists of tuples internally to simulate arrays. I assume that's what they are referring to.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/7513
They are explicitly not following 5 U.S.C. § 7513, they are trying to do and end run around the requirements (e.x. 30 day notice, opportunity to respond), which you can read in plain English at that link, by firing all probationary employees "for poor performance". Which is why as you note some courts are intervening.
The rest of your points are similarly "a lot of words but little truth"
1. https://grants.nih.gov/grants/policy/nihgps/html5/section_2/...
There's a lot here and you should really take the time to learn about it for yourself than relying on random Internet comments to summarize, but in short:
- Federal employees in general have protections about being fired without process
- Most of the employees being fired are probationary employees who lack such protection. Note how the term is always "fired" not "laid off". There's a reason for that, these people are being fired "for cause", being told their performance is not up to par to avoid the beurocratic overhead of a structed layoff. Misusing for cause termination like this is not even legal for a private employer to do.
- Congress controls spending, and the Executive is generally obligated to spend the funds Congress has allocated for the purposes they allocated them (see also: Impoundment). Attempting to shut down agencies Congress has setup by firing everyone is generally runs contra to this idea.
- some agencies are setup specifically as independent agencies by Congress. Their heads can generally only be removed either by Congress, or by the President for some form of malfeasance. This sort of makes sense when you think about it. A agency responsible for protecting whistle blowers isn't much good if the president is just going to replace the head until he gets someone who won't protect the ones whistleblowing his malfeasance.
> My understanding of how the U.S. government works is that the President functions as the CEO of all federal employees.
This isn't correct. In a private company the CEO has tons of rule make power. The board doesn't generally set the rules directly instead controlling them by putting the right officers like the CEO in place. In the government however the primary rulemaking power rests with Congress. The Executive branch is doesn't have much (or isn't supposed to, this has been slipping for a long, long time) outside what is delegated by Congress. The Executive is simply charged with executing those laws and directives of the Legislative.
This is good practice anyway, if your laid off or fired unexpectedly, likely your going to be locked out of your machine without notice and without opportunity to clean up.
As was standard practice IT was given a heads up with a time. His manager would call him into his office at X time and by the time he left that meeting he'd be locked out of his computer and all his accounts.
Well his manager decided there was no point waiting and he might as well just do it, so several hours before the appointed time, he did. The analyst asked if he could get some personal files off his laptop, the manager agreed, and the analyst proceeded to delete everything he had ever worked on, from SharePoint and every PowerBI report he could including emptying the recycle bin, with his (now ex) manager sitting across the table from him.
Needless to say I got a very excited call from our management. Only nice thing I will ever say about SharePoint, once I worked out it was a thing recovering everything from the second stage recycle bin was pretty easy. I then pulled audit logs showing him deleting everything and let management know I had them anytime they wanted to pursue legal action.
The day I left the company those audit logs were still on my desktop never having been requested.
Maybe not quite "getting away with it" in that I was able to undo the damage, but pretty brazen and to my knowledge never faced any consequences.
Saying there are still terrorists attacks, so we should gut the FBI is like saying the flu is still a thing so we should gut the CDC.
They think they have little invested in the stability of the system.