They rarely even provide the projects either or even the type of project. I'd like to see all these awesome results that are build with AI (preferably not web related).
Interesting. Do you have any sources for this 60/40 split?
And while I agree that the infrastructure has a long shelf life, it seems to me like an AI bubble burst would greatly depreciate the value of this infrastructure as the demand for it plummets, no?
> Doing an audit starting with the treasury department seems like the right first step.
That's complete nonsense.
Imagine you're trying to track spending of departments at a massive company.
You wouldn't start by looking at a giant list of wire transfers from/to the company's bank accounts and work your way backwards to find what each payment refers to would you?
That would make no sense. Not only would it be practically impossible to do but plenty of resources might be shared between departments and lumped into single payments to a single company for many services, some payments or reimbursements might span several transfers, some things might be paid upfront, other bills may be only due later etc...
That would be a ridiculously bad way to go about it.
And then imagine someone starts canceling random wire transfers that they think "look suspicious" lol.
Not if the company had up-to-date audited financials, no. You'd start with those.
The problem is agencies that haven't been audited in a decade. The agencies literally don't report how much money they get, their current balances, or where it goes.
I’m all for better accounting practices and better tracking of government spending as well as eliminating waste. Absolutely.
But pretending that Musk and co are doing an audit by accessing treasury records and payment systems or that it will help with government waste in any way is laughable.
Again, literally no one would be able to make any kind of credible department spending audit out of the bank records of a mid-sized company.
This is the US government’s treasury we’re talking about here! This is several orders of magnitude bigger and more complicated!
Not to mention an audit would not require any write access.
If only there were a part of the government whose job it was to proactively and continuously crawl the interiors of the bureaucracy to identify opportunities for improvement...
If only they had a standing list of more than 5000 such improvement opportunities...
> a top DOGE employee, 25 year old former SpaceX employee Marko Elez, has not only read but write access to BFS servers
> One senior IT source can see Mark retrieving “close to a thousand rows of data” but they can’t see the content because the system is “top secret” even to them. No source I have has knowledge of what DOGE is doing with the data they are retrieving
You think the treasury doesn’t have a metric ton of procedures, and laws, on data management, integrity, access, backup and retention?
Breaking these protocols by giving unfettered write access to this data to ridiculously inexperienced and ignorant goons exponentially increases the risk of data tampering and corruption…
It makes any kind of audit LESS likely to be accurate.
But they’re very obviously not doing any kind of credible audit. As mentioned, that’s literally impossible and nonsensical to do this way.
I mean, with the extreme politicization of DOJ and FBI already under way by Trump and his cronies, and the dismantling of safeguards like inspector generals there's literally no chance that these people get indicted or even investigated under this administration.
> is he going to pardon everyone who has a hand in this?
How can anyone have any doubts after the jan 6 pardons?
Clearly it's not happening tomorrow, but eventually Democrats (and maybe even Republicans who want to uphold the constitution!) will be in the majority.
Yep. For all of these sensational headlines we're seeing recently, we need to keep in mind that we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg of what's happening, and that we are seeing exactly nothing of what's happening behind closed doors. In fact, the fiascoes may be specifically intended to keep the public's eye off the ball.
I would be very surprised to learn that there are not teams working in every state to weaken the integrity of the electoral process.
If that were the case then no dictatorship anywhere would ever get embedded. Contrary to the widespread cultural belief in the US, people everywhere like freedom and integrity in public life; they're just not as individualistic about it, because most countries were settled many centuries earlier, and there is not an ethos of pioneering based on the idea of infinite free land and resources.
The problem with dictatorship is that of first-mover advantage; once a dictatorship becomes embedded it's hard to dislodge. There's de facto control of the legal, electoral, and cultural infrastructure which the regime can use to (ostensibly) re-legitimize itself every few years, while in the meantime suppressing dissent through violence and fear. That would be very much in line with the stated goals and actions of the administration so far. And I don't mean this hyperbolically; Trump stated that he would be a dictator on day one, and while his supporters brushed this off as a joke his autocratic behavior since entering office is wholly consistent with that.
Barring abrupt reversals in the next month or two, I think this is going to become a long-term situation, and there is simply no way the US can go back to two party pendulum politics after this. It would be like getting out of hospital after a stroke or a heart attack and heading straight back to an all-you-can-eat steakhouse.
The main problem is the Democratic Party has proven itself to be absolutely useless at preventing this sort of perversion of our systems. They are too happy to rely on process, decorum and the status quo to build defenses into our systems. Democrats still pretend like it’s the late 90’s / early 00’s political climate where boring neoliberals can beat boring conservatives reliably and that’s the only defense our nation needs. During my lifetime the only persistent democratic plan is to just not lose elections ever and things will be fine. It’s frankly
amazing how much awful shit conservatives are able to inflict on the country while being in the minority and how little liberals are willing do with a majority. It all feels very performative from democrats which I guess makes sense since they have mostly the same donors to appease as the conservatives do.
There are more details on the french wikipedia article but basically Michel Becker did everything he could to make money out of the success of the treasure hunt, doing things that were either unethical or deemed contrary to the true creator's original intent.
This included taking possession of the solution which wasn't meant for him to get, trying to sell the prize for himself and releasing new clues to renew interest in the hunt which he was still profiting from in different ways.
I’m sorry but I don’t believe this for one second.
And unfortunately that makes me distrust the entirety of the article.