There's so much partisan noise about DOGE going around -- At this point, I don't know what to believe anymore. Elon lies constantly, abuses employees, backstabs partners, and is probably a racist; At the same time, his companies have created seemingly impossible/fantastic technologies/tools that have changed the world forever.
Is DOGE a genuine effort at desperately needed reforms to save America from bankruptcy?
Is it a secret plot to take full control of the federal government like a dictator's coup?
Is it a mix of both at the same time (ie; recent Saudi and Chinese 'anti-corruption' campaigns)?
I get ya, but if one could apply some kind of Occam's razor is hard to defend DOGE's approach after all the mishandlements, false discoveries, bullying,and dangerous firings.
The one common thread with elons companies and their success is that it strongly appears the more he is prevented from having direct control, the better they do. He has direct control of doge so it's going pretty poorly.
Well, we know can't be to "save America from bankruptcy" because as a currency issuer, the federal government of the USA can't go bankrupt the way a currency user like a corporation or state government might.
It can go bankrupt in the same way that Zimbabwe did with hyperinflation... even losing the USD as the world currency would be catastrophic. So yes, we can very much go bankrupt.
Respectfully, this is not accurate. Zimbabwe's debts were not denominated in their own currency. You are repeating a claim which has been debunked for decades, and is based on a misunderstanding of how our monetary system works.
Yes. But an important key fact here is that this is true as long as the USD is the world currency. It's the world currency since the US is the global super-power both in international support and military strength.
By cutting spending on foreign countries the US is forcing these countries to turn elsewhere for aid which will come in the currency of the new provider and with strings attached. This can cause a domino effect which will significantly weaken the USDs standing and force the US to take up "real" debt.
DOGE could very well bankrupt the USA if they aren't careful. They don't seem careful or self-aware.
Considering the COBOL Metre date screw-up, it's pretty obvious that the folks doing this don't understand the most basic underpinnings of the systems they're poking and prodding.
For those who missed it, DOGE claimed there were tons people who were about 150 years in the system. In actuality, the the default date in COBOL is May 20, 1875 (the date of the Metre Convention) which works out to about 150 years old.
Elon Musk publicly stated: "cursory examination of Social Security, and we got people in there that are 150 years old. Now, do you know anyone that's 150? I don't know. They should be in the Guinness Book of World Records... So that's a case where I think they're probably dead."
That's how little Musk understands about computer systems he's supposedly responsible for analyzing. And Elon has publicly stated he'll often be wrong wrt DOGE.
EDIT: Elon also posted a Tweet showing age buckets, but according to other Social Security Association folks, they didn't filter out dead people or non-recipients. When you do, only 89,106 are aged 99+. Less than the number of living centenarians in the US: https://x.com/justinwolfers/status/1891678450487841007
That whole thing was debunked AFAIK. Well, it kind of self-debunked since the original tweet that was posted as a reply to said "over 150 years old", not "exactly slightly under 150 years old", and "a number in ISO8601 format", but see e.g.: https://iter.ca/post/1875-epoch/
DOGE has plenty of ways to demonstrate ineptitude without us making some new ones up.
"And here's the number of RECIPIENTS of social security in each age bucket with the death field set to false (and recipient set to true). A mere 89,106 are aged 99+, not the tens of millions suggested by @elonmusk."
Also Elon's other Tweet is: "Yes, there are FAR more “eligible” social security numbers than there are citizens in the USA. This might be the biggest fraud in history."
Lawful permanent residents (LPRs), asylees (noncitizen who has been granted asylum in the United States), refugees, some temporary non-immigrants, etc all get social security numbers. Elon doesn't appear to research much before posting and has publicly stated that he'll often be wrong with respect to everything DOGE.
Yeah this is the part I find hard to suss out. If they said we have people who are 104 and the next oldest is 150 holy shit. That's case closed, but the link you sent makes me suspicious of the bias on the other side...
I agree with original comment. I just don't know who to trust to do a deep enough dive to give me good information.
News for you. Elon Musk is not an engineer. Elon Musk does not know computer science. Yes, he's able to read books and learn subjects but he has never worked as a software engineer in any professional setting. You attribute competence to him in so many areas where he does not deserve it.
What “impossible goals”? It’s easy just to randomly fire people, act illegally and not to think of the downstream consequences. Any private CEO would have his head handed to him by handling things do ham fistedly
As an ethnically Syrian person, Elon Musk has posted enraging racist epithets about me every single day on his Twitter. I strongly dislike him as a person for his firehose of slander against helpless refugees who aren't so privileged/fortunate as me. Look at how he is speaking towards poor Ukraine!
Despite this, his companies have without a doubt changed the world. His investments into e-banking, reusable rockets, mass market EVs, ChatGPT, Starlink, green energy, etc. sound like something from a comic book into how outsized an impact they make.
Yes, he threw money to build up teams to solve hard problems. According to this Wikipedia article he was a co-chair of OpenAI when it was founded in 2015: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI#:~:text=A%20total%20of%... I'm open to being wrong on that though.
DOGE may be genuine but while the fed exists and money is a commodity, it’s really kinda moot. Yes there’s awful wasteful spending in the government but it’s peanuts compared to devaluing your labor by ~3% annually to enable a debt based economy. Try to pull off fractional reserve banking in any other context and you’ll be called a cheat and a thief.
DOGE is yet another distraction to keep the left and the right bickering while the billionaires continue to grow the wealth gap. The dollar is the global currency and its monetary policy is set by private entities that don’t care much about the other 99.99% of us - just enough to keep a revolt from happening.
I mean, SpaceX has revolutionized satellite launching, but that's about it. The rest of Phony Stark's success is mostly about being a hype man in the right place at the right time.
For years he coasted on the reputation of being a dorky, space/environment obsessed autist, but in the last few years it's become obvious that most of his admirable traits were just him masking. Now that he doesn't feel that's necessary we're seeing what happens when the richest man in the world swallows the red pill and it ain't pretty.
You should believe what your eyes and ears tell you, after corroborating multiple sources and reading accounts of or speaking with people who have been directly affected by what's happening. Read Project 2025, the playbook is out in the open.
All of this is going to require critical thinking skills and unfortunately you can't gain that by reading tips. Assuming you do gave critical thinking skills, it's pretty clear what's taking place and that soft truths are often used to hide deep lies.
Only believe what you can verify with your own two eyes; otherwise, you leave yourself open to manipulation from propaganda. We live in a post-truth era. Embrace it!
For one thing, do not blindly believe what you read here on Hacker News, where there is a clear anti-Musk slant. I'd recommend more rational places like https://www.themotte.org/ where these topics can be discussed in a relatively calm manner. You are likely to come up with more informed opinions than otherwise.
A sledgehammer doesn't need to be able to turn a screw. Perhaps states might take advantage of this, but the incompetency of toadies at technology won't impact their competency at wreaking destruction.
My read of this post is it's just this guy's word vs doge's. Doge says they allow nulls for TAS, author says they don't. I'm pretty sure in the author's example, though, the payment _could_ be created with a NULL vendor, as I'm pretty sure NULLABLE is default for int in PostgresSQL. Depending on the scenario, this may be "bad" or it may be intentional. What would really matter is "does the system actually transfer funds or cut checks without a TAS". In ERPs I work with, a payment without a vendor is allowed in a draft state, but to get an actual check, you need a vendor.
Most of these types of articles I'd imagine will be right but there is some truth in the argument that "Ah, you see, the system is merely so complicated and murky that you can't understand it!" is damning too
When seeing the approach to how Elon/DOGE applied themselves to air traffic control after the incidents, I'm not falling into the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. This group is just incompetent and going to re-learn all the mistakes within each domain that led to industry getting to where it has through a series of hard won lessons.
One would hope so.. they've already begun blaming things like "DEI" so I find it unlikely. It will probably be decades (if ever) before the lessons are relearned and implemented.
When a foreign key field is left empty, that implies that no foreign key relationship was claimed. By definition a primary key cannot be no. But a foreign key, which is a representation of another table's primary key, can be null. It merely means that no foreign key relationship is claimed.
I'm glad I don't work with this guy. I've had co-workers who routinely talk to me in this way, treating me as an infant so they could feel superior. I wonder if he'll regret this post going viral.
Musk isn't sending his best and brightest to the frontline. The DOGE bros are legal cannon fodder. The mission must be to stop them first--it's why we spread the power to issue arrest warrants across the feds, states and even municipalities.
I'm simply saying that this form of communication isn't helpful and often has the opposite effect. Anyone working in an office environment who has had someone talk to them like this would agree (unless they have a fetish of being infantilized?). Outing yourself as someone who engages in it on such a public platform probably won't come without professional consequences.
I mean, happy to hear counter-arguments that this style is actually the most effective. Maybe I'm crazy in thinking I wouldn't hire this guy into my team after seeing this interaction.
i think this already happened to some extent, with the Social Security Administration. unless something's changed it's all stored in IMS, i.e. pre-relational. perhaps there's some relational view on top of it but to my knowledge it hasn't been overhauled to anything more modern.
In this tweet, Elon Musk (and DOGE?) have come to the conclusion that $4.7T in spending was blank, "making traceability almost impossible." This is because the TAS is used in many tables, and is used as a primary key in others tables using a foreign key constraint.
What his team has seemingly uncovered is not waste. It's a little thing I like to call, "Extremely routine database architecture."
This maintains referential integrity between the two tables. It works exactly the same way with TAS in the IRS database. I checked for myself. It's not optional.
The last sentence, "It's not optional," is the crux of the argument. When he says it's not optional, I assume he means the payment.vendor_id FK is defined as NOT NULL. When doing exports like he is referencing, if it's an (inner) join, it wouldn't export the nulls. Here is an example of an inner join that if used doing an export wouldn't export the NULL vendor_id payment rows:
select * -- for brevity
from payment p
join vendor v on p.vendor_id = v.vendor_id
To get the payment rows with null vendor_id, the export would have to be done using an outer (left) join like so:
select * -- for brevity
from payment p
LEFT join vendor v on p.vendor_id = v.vendor_id
We don't know how it's exported, so if the author only has access to the exports and not the actual schema, he wouldn't know either.
In his example he even has it as nullable:
CREATE TABLE payment (
payment_id SERIAL PRIMARY KEY,
vendor_id INT REFERENCES vendor(vendor_id),
payment_date DATE NOT NULL
);
Notice the payment_date is defined as explicitly NOT NULL while the vendor_id (the FK he is talking about) is not defined as NOT NULL (implicitly NULL). If the vendor_id is NULL, that would represent a payment with no vendor.
Now regarding Musk's tweet:
In the Federal Government, the TAS field was optional for ~$4.7 Trillion in payments and was often left blank, making traceability almost impossible. As of Saturday, this is now a required field, increasing insight into where money is actually going.
To make an existing NULL field required (NOT NULL) in a RDBMS database, you have to first populate it with something. When it's a FK like vendor_id, you have to populate it with a vendor_id that exists the vendor table. With the amount of rows I would imagine is in that database, this is no easy feat. To make it required, the would have to:
1. Update each NULL row to the actual vendor it was supposed to be (probably impossible to figure this out)
2. Update each NULL row to a new vendor_id named "Unknown" or something to that effect.
3. Update the application(s) that write to the database to make it required, leaving it NULL in the database.
4. Maybe something else
One more thing, all this assumes the system is using an RDBMS. If it's a mainframe or something (which it very well might be), all bets are off.
Oh 100%. You should listen to a call he had with twitter engineers where he talks about software as if he's never written it before. Then when someone merely asks questions, Elon calls him an asshole.
I'd be curious to read the true account of how his personality has changed in the last 25 years. He clearly has more wealth than his persona suggests he deserves, and I wonder from where he started. At this point, he clearly doesn't have to care, but was there a shift into that?
I'm not sure why you'd think he _would_? Like, he's not a software engineer, and everything he's ever publicly said about software engineering seems profoundly confused.
That's like saying Physics was mostly invented by people who didn't have an education background in physics. But smart people like Newton and Leibniz figured this out. Sure, with knowledge being so readily available anyone smart and motivated enough can figure out almost anything. But it doesn't make formal education redundant.
It could be that, a big misunderstanding of normal database design, or it could be a legit error. No one has offered direct evidence of either case. What I'll say is that working in legacy industries with legacy data, all bets are off as to whether anything is well posed. My first company's "database" was a folder of 100 excel files. OP is making a massive assumption that the federal government is using modern SQL database design principles in this specific application, or a modern database at all.
I've seen about a dozen of these "GOTCHA!" posts in the past few days, ranging from COBOL epochs to SQL types and queries to FoxPro internals to "it's all on paper in a cavern". People are desperate to have something shiny to show off to their friends and in most cases, they're really not concerned if it's true or not, just that it's plausible enough to gain social cred. In the end, it accomplishes nothing when it comes to the actual functioning of DOGE but I'm sure there are lots of up votes gained.
Most of all I haven't seen any of the federal employees working directly on this application backing up this "billionaire dumb" speculation. They all hate Musk and haven't been shy about bashing him for other reasons; why aren't they jumping on this?
Ah, yes, the very safe endeavor of publicly criticizing a group of powerful people known for open revenge on their critics. I’m sure folks are lining up to be the first.
As Morgan Freeman put it in The Dark Knight:
Lucius Fox: [to Reese] Let me get this straight, you think that your client, one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the world, is secretly a vigilante, who spends his nights beating criminals to a pulp with his bare hands, and your plan is to blackmail this person?
> Ah, yes, the very safe endeavor of publicly criticizing a group of powerful people known for open revenge on their critics. I’m sure folks are lining up to be the first.
They are. There are endless tweets about this bashing him. Pics of park rangers, wildland firefighter losing their jobs and blaming trump publicly. People resigning because of it. Like I said:
> They all hate Musk and haven't been shy about bashing him for other reasons; why aren't they jumping on this?
And then you quote a comic book movie? What's next, quote the Matrix or something?
> The USAspending SQL Database Downloads page includes instructions and links to help download snapshots of the USAspending database as a PostgreSQL archive. This resource is intended for advanced users. The full database is over 1.5 terabytes and will continue to increase in size. The process to complete a full database restore can take many hours to complete.
Is DOGE a genuine effort at desperately needed reforms to save America from bankruptcy? Is it a secret plot to take full control of the federal government like a dictator's coup? Is it a mix of both at the same time (ie; recent Saudi and Chinese 'anti-corruption' campaigns)?
What should I believe?