Hopefully it won't be at all. Seems pretty relevant to the tech-industry if entire departments of competent tech-industry folks are getting laid off by the federal government.
While it might be political, it is also economic and directly relevant to the hacker/startup ecosystem.
Ok however, the blame for toxicity really needs to be redirected more towards the people making these decisions and less toward the people complaining about them. This is destroying people’s livelihood and will continue to do so for many years to come.
> the guy who has been at the bleeding edge of technology for the last two decades
In what way does working on the bleeding edge of technology qualify someone to make sweeping decisions in a completely unrelated problem domain? Especially when those decisions impact literally the entire world?
His strength is leading and believing people who do. Lately however, he’s shown he is not mentally fit for that role. He’s on a crusade more for personal reasons than altruism.
His past accomplishments have been seeing opportunities in failing products that seemed impossible. We're not talking about moonshot startups that really don’t affect a ton of people if they fail.
We’re talking about long established programs that are helping people or keeping people alive. He has ZERO experience with managing this.
I’m just as in favor of cutting bureaucracy as anyone else but I assure you the people making these decisions are not interested in cutting bureaucracy, they’re the ones who created it.
Like idk how long I need to hear about all the great things in tech he’s done when I see his handiwork in an actual tech company over at X. Maybe he was a grifter all along?
> The presumption of course is that everything Elon Musk is doing is stupid
Not stupid. Evil.
The man took pleasure in gutting a major pillar in the world's fight against tuberculosis[1]. This is mass murder, and it's just one of the ways they're causing mass death, likely in the millions over the years to come.
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities," said Voltaire. Musk operated one of the biggest misinformation machines in history, got unchecked power of the US government, and now he's moved on to the atrocities phase.
> The presumption of course is that everything Elon Musk is doing is stupid
Really? My perception is that everything I've seen him do is on its face stupid, even though my perception was that he might do useful things.
Let's take just one data point: he stood up and smirked that he fired everyone working on Ebola response, and of course that was a mistake. Yet those people are still fired. Do you have any counterexamples where he did something not stupid?
Do you think there is a role for the federal government to employ engineers for any purpose? 18F was a general purpose engineering group that built software for many agencies instead of having those agencies pay vast amounts of money to Deloitte/Accenture/Booz Allen etc for a worse quality product.
Why do we need to do this? Let me ask it another way, do you think Russia and China are happy with cutting the fed bureaucracy to the bone? Or just the Heritage Foundation?
You have a stance that would be unfair to ask you to explain via HN. Instead I’ll just ask, what’s a good starting point for understanding why you think the government needs to be unraveled? Libertarianism or something akin to anarcho-capitalism?
I would say with regards to bureaucracy, no one has put it more succinctly than Trotsky, though complaints about the bureaucracy harken back to the Ancient Greeks.
