Science isn't always "science". If it's not clear by now it never will be that there is a massive amount of fraud in the "scientific" community as a whole.
At the end of the day, these attacks on privacy are always in reality for keeping incompetent politicians and bureaucrat's safe from meritocracy.
Built into the onslaught of demands of backdoors are two key ideas: A) That the backdoors will only be exploitable by the authorities and that B) they're even necessary to carry out their work in stopping trafficing.
I think most people know by now the first idea is preposterous. The second idea is too. The EU should focus on better police tools and tactics that detect and track the actual movement of goods.
Sadly, I don't think that that's true. I've been shocked by the lack of understanding there in groups of technical people who should know better. It's even worse in groups of non technical people. I'm afraid this is an ongoing battle, and every time ideas like this come up from government it's going to be an effort to inform the public.
> The EU should focus on better police tools and tactics that detect and track the actual movement of goods.
This is a point that doesn't get raised very often: the actual crimes occur in "meat space", not electronically on a device. Haven't police and intelligence been solving crimes like that since 'the beginning'?
The coordination of a crime may be done electronically 'on device', but the actual crime occurs somewhere physical, generally with physical objects and the presence of the criminals themselves.
Why is it suddenly so much more difficult for law enforcement to do their jobs that the privacy of every member of the public needs to be able to be invaded?
Are police forces under-resourced to take on the "how it's always been" approach to fighting crime? Are law enforcement being subject to inapplicable software engineering rules of efficiency to save money? (Ie. Too much focus on the metrics, not the outcomes).
Don't police have great physical surveillance tools? Yes, it may cost more in having to physically surveil targets, but that seems (to me, and this is where the rift lies) that's a good compromise opposed to surveiling the entire populace.
Anyone can say anything in a piece of correspondence that they think is private. If it's made public it completely changes the context. A joke between friends, criminals or not, can look like conspiracy to X, Y, or Z. Research for a crime novel could appear like preparation for a Louvre heist. And even if it is, it's not a crime until it occurs, until that point it's not 'real', the thing suspected of being planned hasn't actually taken place until it takes place. Are we implementing pre-crime without the three psychics?
And one thing I know for sure is that law enforcement do not understand context. They're bred to find guilt, not innocence, and having a larger haystack they'll find plenty of hay they think look like needles. Gotta hit those metrics.
There's plenty of nuance missing from what I've written here, but I fairly strongly feel it's leaning towards reality rather than liberal fantasy.
The police had the ability to intercept phone calls, mail, email and telegrams for a century now.
So yes, their work is now harder and they're pushing back against that and trying to enact laws that return the previous state (or give them even more power).
I call it the "unaccounted-for activist problem". Certain people will, without fail, like clockwork, if given the chance, ban or "silence" a LOT of other people from anywhere and everywhere that they can whether a bus, a playground, a public or private space, or a social media site. You have to account for these kinds of people, and you have to see through their bullshit of "speech is violence", no violence is violence and speech is speech and any platform that confuses the two will either fail or enslave everyone to many other lies.
What's certainly not going away is that Government waste and bloat is a home-run bipartisan issue where the size of the government has vastly and consistently outgrown the private sector in both times of feast and famine.
Everyone left and right instinctively knows this is, that it's a problem that they're both taxed directly for and (I hope) many people know they're also indirectly paying for it through inflation caused by government borrowing beyond their actual tax income.
DOGE may not be the right answer, but it's the first actual reduction in spending in my lifetime.
I don't know if this was in your lifetime, but Bill Clinton reduced government spending through the National Performance Review. Not only did he do it, but he did it in a planned and strategic way, that included an initial phase of research, followed by education and recommendations, which were send to congress for approval.
You'll notice that this approach is consistent with basic project planning and execution principles, and follows the principles of government set out by our constitution. In contrast, DOGE sidestepped the legal and administrative principles of the government, which led to cuts followed by retractions, which are ultimately more costly and wasteful.
The Republican party is literally in control of Congress and the presidency. Copying Clinton is something they could do. The fact that they don't appear to have made a serious effort to increase revenues and reduce spending in a sane and organized way raises questions.
The Republicans have this idea that cutting taxes and increasing spending will reduce the ratio of debt/gdp by increasing the denominator. It does increase GDP but I think it increases the debt faster, so it can't work. Happy to be proven wrong.
They do not actually believe that. What they believe is that cutting taxes will give them the short-term means to acquire assets that will become much more valuable after the nation has been destroyed, to which the escalating debt contributes. The crisis is a feature for them.
It doesn't "raises questions" it "answers questions". Anybody who believes the republicans in America are "the party of fiscal responsibility" is a joke.
That's not what I was saying. And "winning" elections implies legitimacy but when that comes via gerrymandering, voter disenfranchisement, and possible vote tampering that claim rings hollow.
If you actually believe in democracy and what it stands for you might have some concern, rather than just cheering on the team whose jersey you wear.
The Senate still requires 60 votes to close debate and pass legislation, with rare weird exceptions like reconciliation. The 1990s had more bipartisanship, so Clinton skillfully got enough Republicans to support some of his moves.
Whereas these days any Democrat supporting any Republican action is likely to get primaried at the next election, and vice versa.
> Whereas these days any Democrat supporting any Republican action is likely to get primaried at the next election, and vice versa.
Biden passed the bipartisan infrastructure act as well as USICA subsidies. The first step act was bipartisan. The deficit reduction in Obama's time was bipartisan. The american rescue plan wasn't bipartisan, but republicans claim credit for its effects. You don't really have much evidence here.
> Everyone left and right instinctively knows this
That’s the first sign that a large group of people are going to something thoughtless and destructive.
Looking around at actual data from both gov and think tank sources, this quote from Pew is a good summary: “While the number of federal workers has grown over time, their share of the civilian workforce has generally held steady in recent years.”
But that’s not the whole story. The postal service is shrinking, the vast majority of those federal employees work for the VA, the amount of funding being directed by the federal employees has grown (because of budget growth), federal regulations touch more private sector activity than in the past, and state and local governments employ significantly more people than they used to.
DOGE’s focus on headcount was wrongheaded because the number of federal employees is not the problem. The problem is Congress (budgets and laws) and states.
Conventional wisdom is that federal payroll growth is massive, and that is just wrong.
> DOGE may not be the right answer, but it's the first actual reduction in spending in my lifetime
On what timeline? The week of the first round of RIFs? The first month?
I assure you, as someone who works with in the space where DOGE has played, it will NOT be a reduction in costs in the long run. In fact, costs will go up because of the indiscriminate nature of "cost reduction". When the only people with knowledge of a system are removed, the remaining people cannot run it - no matter what AI they are given. At that point, you have to either hire back the people you fired, with a serious delay of important work, or you stumble for years until it can be figured out at the cost of delays, protests, lawsuits, whatever.
Considering firing everyone a reduction in costs is a shallow, short-term view.
> the size of the government has vastly and consistently outgrown the private sector in both times of feast and famine
The US government at the start of this administration was roughly the same as it was in 1970[1]. This, despite the addition of new departments (1970 is pre-EPA, for example), many new responsibilities, etc. And obviously the government has to perform all these services for 140 million more people than in 1970, a 70% increase.
Doing more with the same resources is a textbook definition of increasing efficiency.
What metric are you looking at when you say "the size of government has vastly and consistently outgrown the private sector" - AFAICT, excluding 2020 and 2021 (which I think is reasonable), the federal budget has been between 17% and 25% of GDP for the past 50 years (where the fluctuations are more a function of variable GDP).
The number of federal government employees has also remained mostly flat for the past 50 years (and IIRC most growth in overall public sector employment comes from schools).
No, it does make sense. Most of the purported growth in government spending is just using raw figures, and not correcting for either inflation or monetary expansion. It is a convenient mistake.
> they're also indirectly paying for it through inflation caused by government borrowing beyond their actual tax income.
Don't worry – unless we stop giving out tax cuts as well, we'll still be running deficits until Social Security and Medicare become insolvent. For the average taxpayer, it's about fiscal sustainability - "smaller government" may as well be a feel-good abstraction compared to that.
I do not instinctively know this, no. I encourage you to take an evidence-based approach. The deficit has largely grown over the past 25 years because of foreign wars, tax cuts, and pandemic response.
And how much of the work that they did will be out-sourced to private contractors at 5x and cost+ rates, lining the pockets of right-wing donor's corporate coffers?
People are having a tough period where they think their government doesn't care about them, to see so much wastage ignites the hard feelings that the "elite" has prioritised others than their own people.
I believe that is the reason why DOGE was supported by Trump, but I do think something like DOGE is needed but perhaps for better and less egotistical reasons.
> People are having a tough period where they think their government doesn't care about them, to see so much wastage ignites the hard feelings that the "elite" has prioritised others than their own people.
Have you considered that maybe a segment of the population feels that way because of decades of propaganda targeted at dismantling the government?
At least in the UK we had a decade of austerity done under the guise it was needed to "improve economic growth" or "balance the books" and that we were living beyond our means.
It was the only thing to be optimistic about in this administration, but it sure didn't last long. We should all know that this was the last attempt that had a chance of addressing the national debt -- the only other way out is extreme inflation.
Musk was absolutely the wrong guy for the job. He doesn't have the patience to spend 4 years carefully poring over government expenses, nor the security clearance (AFAIK) to address pentagon spending. Plus, I don't think he's humble enough to bring in people who actually know what to look for.
The most incredible piece of logical gymnastics I remember from civics/history class in high school was that during economic downturns, we need government to spend more to help people, and during economic growth we of course also need more government to manage all the new growth. At no point do we cut the spending we've added, because it would always hurt those who have jobs.
People like to criticize DOGE for going after smaller amounts (like hundreds of millions instead of tens of billions) but those are still hundreds of millions that could be put elsewhere, or even returned to the taxpayer or put towards federal debt. The biggest concern with DOGE is that much of the spending is just going to come right back during the next election cycle
That's not a fair---or accurate---summary of Keynes.
The claim is that the government should act as a stabilizer: spending to drive aggregate demand during downswings (especially ones caused by external shocks) and regulating during up-swings.
In other words, "more" refers to different things and in different proportions in different phases of the business cycle; it's emphatically not a "heads-I-win-tails-you-lose" sort of thing.
> The biggest concern with DOGE is that much of the spending is just going to come right back during the next election cycle
In many cases, because they're slashing things that we are realizing that we do need, and we're going to pay even more to reconstruct the things they've destroyed.
The only way to effectively reducing spending and waste is by doing things slowly and carefully, evaluating the impact of the changes you are going to make carefully. This happened successfully in the 90s, but DOGE is not doing things that way.
The OMB has been trying to slowly and thoughtfully cut spending since the 70's, and they've struggled to see success. I think in terms of cutting spending, the slower it happens the less likely anything productive will come from it. It's why companies tend to cut whole departments at once, and the government desperately needs a way to cut funding from things that aren't working to reallocate it where the money is needed.
From what I've seen the DOGE cuts have been incredibly efficient in isolating poorly spent (or corrupt) money. Lots of corrupt foreign programs or government donations into partisan political groups. Most of the time when someone says they shouldn't have cut money, they're talking about an NGO or some research that benefits their particular partisanship at the cost of fairness or scientific rigor; which is exactly what we shouldn't be funding.
The Clinton admin was successful in the 90s. They cut costs enough to pull the US entirely out of the deficit. They did things slowly and methodically over 5 years, making sure the things they cut were unnecessary before cutting them. They also followed the law, avoiding the legal issues and consequential costs that DOGE is incurring.
Federal spending is up during this administration, the deficit is at modern-day averages, and the bills recently passed by this administration are going to increase it even further. The slash-and-burn style of cuts that DOGE is sloppy and ineffective. They are Chesterton's fencing themselves -- cutting things that they later find to be important. And on the other hand, not spending the time to actually seek out waste that is hard to find. A tech company works very differently than the government does, and they are slowly starting to discover that the hard way.
Another incredible thing you maybe didn't study in civics class is that the US had an "exorbitant privilege" it's now pissing away. The ability to borrow at extremely low rates from the rest of the world, because the US was so productive. We will miss it when it's gone.
>People like to criticize DOGE for going after smaller amounts (like hundreds of millions instead of tens of billions) but those are still hundreds of millions that could be put elsewhere, or even returned to the taxpayer or put towards federal debt. The biggest concern with DOGE is that much of the spending is just going to come right back during the next election cycle
Right. And those hundreds of millions went to tax cuts/benefits for the wealthiest (top 10%) among us, and less benefit to the bottom 10%, as well as trillions (3.8, in fact[0]) more in debt to actually pay for those cuts.
This is a tangent, but one untapped source of energy savings that seems to be invisible to climate activists is Microsoft Windows' constant drain on resources relative to Linux and MacOS. It's shocking how energy inefficient Windows is even when it's doing absolutely nothing noticable for a user.
This seems unlikely to me. Most of these machines are laptops nowadays. While my Linux system idles at 4W, the plug is only capable of going up to 60W. So even if Windows brought it to the point of nearly overheating the power brick (I’m no Windows fan, but I’m pretty skeptical there!), it would only be 1/10’th of a typical 600W window air conditioner.
The untapped energy savings is, IMO, getting people to run their climate control less. We should toughen up a bit, tell our brains that 50F-80F is the comfortable range. (Depending on humidity and your workload).
I compared to air conditioners though, which would also be multiplied by that several hundred million factor (well, maybe the laptops get an additional factor of, like, 4 because a room can fit multiple people with laptops, and you don’t need an air conditioner in every season).
If we’re looking at choices a person can make, every choice is multiplied by millions when applied to the entire population of a country, so the 1W differences are swamped by the equally scaled 10W differences.
It doesn’t make sense to talk about “adding up” unless we define what we’re aggregating over. Residential energy consumption, for sure, is a significant chunk of energy consumption.
If we’re looking at the things we can do to reduce our individual consumption, it absolutely makes sense to prioritize the things which are large relative to our other individual contributions, first.
Fine, but I have already upgraded to the most efficient heat pump, and so I'm at the end of where I can go there. Likewise my insulation cannot be improved without a major remodel (My house is not built to modern standards so there is a lot of improvement, but those require thicker walls and a higher attic ceiling) and so while I'd like to do them they are not possible. What is left is the smaller things.
It's true. There are more Windows desktops used in enterprise environments and households than linux and there are so many insane design choices like making the taskbar clock slider thing be written in react. How many useless clocks does that waste? That is a very easy optimization that can be remediated instead of being lazy and waiting for the next node from Intel or AMD.
Computers use up extremely small amounts of electricity. Most people don't actually know this. Your washing machine is a good ~100 computers. A lightbulb? If it's not LED, that's a few computers. For one lightbulb.
Of course it depends on the computer, but if we're talking laptops or corpo computers it's like 25 - 50 watts. Supercomputers, like those used for AI, are different of course.
I can pretty much guarantee you that the typical Windows desktop machine uses much less energy than the typical Linux desktop machine of similar capabilities. Linux power saving basically never works out of the box unless the user has carefully selected the platform to avoid the Linux kernel's numerous defects. By contrast every computer that comes with Windows has working energy-saving features from the factory because that's how Dell and HP get those Energy Star ratings.
I wholeheartedly agree. Software bloat is a hidden energy drain on corporate America as well as the general public no different than how landlords only leech rents from firms and individuals while providing nothing of value. There is no need to politicize by yelling at climate activists though.
Because it is the exact opposite? Power management and drivers are a shitshow on Linux. When I want my Lenovo (RIP IBM) Thinkpad to last more than 2 hours, I have to boot Windows.
But is is no question: the Apple Silicon chips sip power. If you're looking to minimize watts consumed, a MacBook Air is still on top (or bottom), even if OS X has many pain points too.
Prior to ACA all my colleagues in my peer group had employer provided health insurance that cost us very little, and it paid for virtually all medical bills except prescriptions. A HDHP was an option, but it only saved maybe a hundred or two a month, if that.
Today for most employees a HDHP is the ONLY option, and the cost is much higher than the old standard health plans were.
Your company is passing the ever-increasing costs (which, again, have been on a steady sloped increase both before and after the ACA, since the 1970s; https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/health-expenditure-and-fi...) along to you, yes. This is a significant problem with our system; people think they get healthcare for $50/month, but it's really coming out of a reduced salary.
You're getting fucked (as am I!), but the ACA isn't what's doing it.
> The Affordable Care Act requires employers to report the cost of coverage under an employer-sponsored group health plan. Reporting the cost of health care coverage on the Form W-2 does not mean that the coverage is taxable. The value of the employer’s excludable contribution to health coverage continues to be excludable from an employee's income, and it is not taxable. This reporting is for informational purposes only and will provide employees useful and comparable consumer information on the cost of their health care coverage.
So, it went from "I pay $50/month for healthcare" to "my paycheck says they're taking $2k/month! what the fuck?!" in folks' minds.
Your peer group consisted of working people who could generally wake up in the morning. Generally healthy people.
Your insured pool now includes people who don't take care of themselves and treat the emergency room like a private doctor's office.
Other countries with government-controlled healthcare introduced wait times to encourage people to consider whether eating that extra donut was worth the health risk. I suspect we'll follow that path, too.
"According to a recent study by the Consumer Choice Center, the average wait for a GP appointment in the United States in 2023 was around three weeks, two to ten times longer than in Europe. For example, in that year, the average waiting time for a medical consultation was two days in Switzerland, six days in France and ten days in the United Kingdom and Italy."
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