Also, I just searched for "transgender" on nih.gov, and got lots of hits [2], the first one being a publication on PubMed [3].
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/NIH/comments/1j28ytk/comment/mfs14d...
[2] https://search.nih.gov/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&affiliate=nih&q...
https://search.nih.gov/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&affiliate=nih&q...
Adding an extra word to censored searches appears to defeat the effect for now. For example, “diversity” is censored but “diversity a” works.
The transgender censor seems to be simple string matching (if query == "transgender"). Just putting the forbidden word in quotation marks makes it searchable, too [1].
I wonder if the filter was intentionally implemented in a shitty way by NIH staff so that they formally comply with an internal order but offer easy ways to circumvent it.
[1] https://search.nih.gov/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&affiliate=nih&q...
This isn't a 'search problem'; searching for 'gender' and 'transgender' always and immediately redirects back to the main page. I also tested several unrelated searches without any issues (HIV, genome, public, potato).
Given that the service is still partially operational (albeit not in a useful way), it's difficult to say from the outside what is going on.
Thanks for pointing this out. This makes it much more likely that someone messed up a server/firewall configuration than that Musk is ripping out network cables at NIH.
I worked on the underlying infrastructure that powers PubMed in the 2010’s at the National Library of Medicine.
I was all up in that thing converting legacy pneumatic Johnson Control systems to Siemens PXC’s, and didn’t actually realize its historical importance online. That’s pretty cool to see this comment.
We had full access to the Datacenter at the National Library of Medicine, and as a young apprentice I really had no idea what PubMed was at the time lol.
I only realized how important of a system it might be when we saw the realtime traffic analytics on the screens outside of the data hall.
And there's a lot more functionality made available to scientists by the NIH.
If this was a Chinese cyberattack, it would be the scandal of the decade. But it's on purpose.
Doing some more looking around, it seems like NIH has a department/group/structure called Center for Information Technology, which is the IT support side of NIH and are the operators for the DNS servers.
Stuff happens - maintenances have unintended consequences, people typo stuff, etc. Don't freak out about every event - save your powder for the real outrages (like 18F).
Another important part is the excellent moderation that try to insure civil discussions.
The other day, I had a chat with a friend (IRL) and he told me his friend told him that planes are falling from the sky because Trump had fired all the air traffic controllers (which, as Trump would put it, is fake news, driven by irresponsible headlines). The commentary here is on that, very low, very misguided, tribal (not even partisan, worse) and very unhelpful level. That's not the kind of plurality of opinion HN needs, in my opinion.
The reaction is completely different because the reality is completely different. People are "hysterical" because we grew up with the explicit agreement that we wouldn't let these things happen again and now the systems which we built to prevent it are rapidly falling apart. When facism comes knocking at the door the time for plurality of opinion is gone, there are only two sides here and only one of them is in any way a moral choice.
Firstly, that is not fascism and I do wish people would stop misusing that word. The Doctrine of Fascism[1] is an interesting and elucidative read. I'm sure that tyrannical, authoritarian or any of the other more appropriate (yet still inaccurate, in my view) words would be a much better choice. The thesaurus lists arbitrary, which might fit Trump much better than any of them, but fascist, no. That would be a risible choice. Fascists don't cut the size of government for start, and they certainly don't fight for the right to do so in court. What a thought!
> the opening of mass detention centres outside the US
Are you referring to the Guatanamo Bay detention camp? That was opened in 2002 and has run continuously till now. Two Republican presidents, two Democrat. I was against it in 2002 and I'm glad people are finally noticing, but its use as a processing centre for migrants goes back even further to the early 90s (and less officially, the 1970s)[2].
> executive orders to place himself above the courts
That is not what the executive orders do, nor is that how the system works, and even if you think the executive's ignoring of court orders would be a crisis, Andrew Jackson ignored them[3], almost 200 years ago, America didn't descend into fascism (and not because it hadn't been conceived yet).
From[4]:
> The Trump administration is still entrenched in legal fights in the lower courts and, so far, has not defied any orders from the U.S. Supreme Court, the nation's highest court, she noted.
So, as I noted, hysteria.
[1] https://archive.org/details/doctrineoffascis0000muss
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Migrant_Operations_...
[3] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Worcester-v-Georgia
[4] https://www.npr.org/2025/02/12/nx-s1-5293132/trump-vance-con...
It is facism. The treatment alone of the trans community is enough to earn it that title. If you want to make an argument from your book then please do so but linking to it alone is not an argument.
> Are you referring to the Guatanamo Bay detention camp?
Are you deciding to pick and choose from the list I gave you? The Nazi salutes mean nothing?
I'm referring to the directive to house 30,000 people there, up from a current population of zero. Coupled with dehumanising language like "illegals," the "delegation of immigration authority" to untrained officers, and the careless attitude to false positives make these developments very much incomparable to anything that's gone before (at least outside of places like Nazi Germany). Do ask yourself as well how easily the use of these facilities can be broadened in the future once there there to house other types of "illegals."
They are already ignoring the courts [0]. What the Executive Order does "legally" does not matter to someone who claims "he who serves his country breaks no law." The only thing that matters is intention. You're thinking about this from a legalist perspective but those days are gone.
0: https://www.npr.org/2025/02/10/nx-s1-5292342/trump-federal-f...
From[1]:
> "The Doctrine of Fascism" (Italian: "La dottrina del fascismo") is an essay attributed to Benito Mussolini. In truth, the first part of the essay, entitled "Idee Fondamentali" (Italian for 'Fundamental Ideas'), was written by the Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile, while only the second part "Dottrina politica e sociale" (Italian for 'Political and social doctrine') is the work of Mussolini himself.
Please, ignorance is natural, but brazen and wilful ignorance in support of an argument based on nothing but pejorative and performative tribalism is something for Twitter or Reddit, not here. If it were Twitter I’d definitely add a facepalm emoji instead of babying you through this.
> The Nazi salutes mean nothing?
If we’re referring to Musk then I must say that I don’t agree that it was a Nazi salute. In my country, we grew up with the war as a constant cultural reference so I’ve seen thousands of Nazi salutes, I’ve never seen one like that. Wishful thinking for more fodder for those performative pejoratives does not a Nazi salute make.
> The only thing that matters is intention.
Let me know when you do the Show HN for your mind reading device.
Yes, I'm referring to the Nazi salutes he gave. I can't help you see what you refuse to see right in front of you. Even Hitler gave it that way. I grew up in an apartheid conflict zone and have seen this othering before so let's not get into appeals to authority based on our backgrounds.
Calling me a baby is not an argument and I'm not sure that saying "I would totally emoji you but I'm too mature for that" is actually indicative of the maturity you're claiming. I want to point out as well that the tone of the conversation was set by yourself when you started it all with misogynistic accusations of hysteria.
2) If you knew what the Doctrine of Fascism was then you wouldn’t respond as you did. It contains the definition of fascism by the two figures that brought it to fame, one of whom was called “the godfather of fascism”.
3) Hitler did not salute that way and Musk did not make a Nazi salute.
4) I didn’t call you a baby, but I am having to baby you through basic knowledge. “To baby” is a verb, not an adjective.
5) I would use the facepalm emoji if this were Twitter. Have you noticed it’s not? Misquoting other users is not for HN.
At the time I was there they had a budget to die for, and Pubmed was in the top 300 websites in the world (both are probably still true). NLM pushed so much traffic because of Pubmed that they had their own internet connection to avoid DoS'ing the commodity desktop traffic of the rest of the NIH.
PubMed is self hosted in a datacenter located within NLM on the NIH campus.
They also have their own fiber connections as you mentioned.
There is also a legit storage vault located within the building that houses non digital records. We were told that there were medical records going back thousands of years kept there; and possibly as far back as the Egyptian era.
I can't ping 130.14.55.128
The most accessible tool I would recommend is zonemaster.net, a tool developed by AFNIC and The Swedish Internet Foundation. Go to advanced and type in nlm.nih.gov as domain, and then the two nameservers listed above and their ip addresses. Run the test and it will present a status summery of the domain and its name servers. (or just use this link: https://zonemaster.net/en/result/4a7d593dce6e167b)
Alternatively you can use the tool dig command tool which is the industry standard for dns debugging and probing. Installing it on windows/mac is a bit of work, but is very easy and convenient on linux. The command here would be "dig @130.14.55.128 nlm.nih.gov". The @ sign is for saying which nameserver to use, and the last part is the domain name you are looking for.
Therer was a time when BLAST-ing a DNA and protein sequence you have is like doing a Google search on it: it simply tells you where the sequence might come from. This is useful especially when your research is to figure out what that specific sequence is doing. It won't give you the answer immediately (otherwise why bother doing the research at all), but it certainly gives context: sequence similarity often hints at similar / related functions.
As an analogy: imagine if StackOverflow is suddenly down and you don't know *if* it's going to be up again.
Of course, yes you can run these things locally, other providers (such as EBI Europe and Japan) have them, etc. It's still a bad sign on the pile of other bad signs, IMO.
Denmark's ecosystem is definetly a North Star for this.
That said, BLAST seems to be up [0]
Perhaps "unreachable" in the title is a figure of speech
I have no problem reaching these websites and can provide IPs to anyone who needs them
For example,
www.nih.gov 23.41.4.71 (Akamai)
www.nih.gov 2.22.31.155 (Akamai)
www.nih.gov 60.254.143.7 (Akamai)
www.nih.gov 95.101.74.96 (Akamai)
www.nih.gov 88.221.24.17 (Akamai)
www.nih.gov 184.51.148.226 (Akamai)
www.nih.gov 54.235.145.223 (Amazon)
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov 34.107.134.59 (Google)
blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov 130.14.29.110
Usage example
echo 130.14.29.110 blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov|busybox sed -i -e 1r/dev/stdin -e1N /etc/hosts
echo 34.107.134.59 pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov|busybox sed -i -e 1/r/dev/stdin -e1N /etc/hosts
NIH/NSF pages have always gone down periodically for maintenance or otherwise, where this tends to happen over the weekend. It seems like this reaction by the HN community is a bit hasty. I've been reading HN since 2008 or so, and I feel like the comment quality is not what it once was....
which is unreachable
23.41.4.71 shows the following text
"Invalid URL The requested URL "[no URL]", is invalid.
Reference #9.47532217.1740935192.27b71986
https://errors.edgesuite.net/9.47532217.1740935192.27b71986"
Cloudflare's 1.0.0.1 DNS resolver seems to still have cached the records. Google and most others I tried did not. This probably explains why some people on social media could access the sites while others couldn't.
Workaround via /etc/hosts :
156.40.212.210 nih.gov
96.17.96.9 www.nih.gov
34.107.134.59 pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
130.14.250.10 ftp.wip.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
130.14.250.10 ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
130.14.29.110 blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
While ns.nih.gov, ns2.nih.gov, and ns3.nih.gov do not respond, the nameserver at lhcns1.nlm.nih.gov (130.14.55.72) does.
One can only hope this is not intentional.
"At some point"? That point was a few weeks, like when they blindly purged the folks that did maintenance on nuclear weapons:
* https://time.com/7225798/doge-fires-national-nuclear-securit...
Or when they purged people dealing with bird flu:
* https://apnews.com/article/usda-firings-doge-bird-flu-trump-...
"These are not the acts of people who expect to lose power any time soon, or ever."
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/02/pu...
or
Biden has just transferred power peacefully and gracefully, his supporters didn't initiate any coups.
And after Trump's 2020 loss, Biden basically enacted a bunch of sensible policies, including continuing some reasonable Trump policies (some specific tariffs, for example). Trump in 2025 instead decided to ban paper straws (!!!!).
The only thing we know is their intent is never to benefit the majority of the people they are meant to be serving.
They know what they are doing is illegal. Or, if they don't, it's because they are actively insisting on not learning it, what shouldn't make any difference.
The incompetent people were hired / appointed[1] as a form of malice against the "Deep State" (read: civil service) specifically, and government and civil society in general.
> but an intentional plan to visit each government department and giving it a stab wound to let it bleed out and die over the course of the next year or two.
If your argument is that they're trying to make agencies die, and you're using the above as evidence for this, then you'd have to convince me that they want the government to lose control of nuclear bombs or bird flu.
I'm saying they want to get rid of government:
With their families.
Their security detail: fired. Their logistics team: fired.
No water, no power, no fuel.
Look: sufficiently advanced incompetence and/or carelessness is equivalent to malice.
I don’t care if you WANT to attend to the nuclear weapons, if you are so unserious, or understaffed, or incompetent, or distracted, or whatever to fail to actually do the thing.
Intent is irrelevant. Outcomes are everything.
Sure, criminal negligence vs murder, but do you really care if it’s your kid?
You have been desperately attempting to defend the “intent” of the perpetrators.
That might rub folks the wrong way, huh?
If someone consistently drives extremely recklessly, refuses to service their brakes, allows their tires to become completely tread worn, removes their mirrors, etc. etc.
What could one reasonably infer about their desire to get into a car crash?
Would loud and repeated claims of a desire to drive safely convince you? Moreover, would you consider such claims to be in good faith, especially if said reckless behavior continues?
Besides, the GOP has said time and time again: let’s make the government so small we can drown it in the bathtub.
What private sector entity would find it profitable, or even be able to, control the bird flu or manage the nuclear arsenal.
Much less, do you want there to be a profit motive in those places?
Murder, manslaughter, intent, accident, purpose, neglect. We have many words that try to put a degree of malice on the act of taking a life, but the life is still gone.
At some point, you need to draw a line in the sand and say "They're going where I can't follow.". Right now, it seems like you're drawing the line right after they come out and tell the world that they specifically intend to burn America to the ground and auction off the remains for their personal profit. Where you draw your line is your own personal choice, but it's worth thinking about ahead of time.
What I see is a ham-fisted approach to slashing the Department of Energy. That's the actual goal. Plenty of anti-Trump outlets report it that way. The idea that they actually want the nuclear weapons to lapse is a pretty bold implication, assuming I'm not misunderstanding the argument.
Here's a quote from the conservative political operative and self-described Christian Nationalist Russ Vought, who is both the current and former head of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump:
“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can't do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.” [1]
This is a visceral and radical statement which has gotten some airtime on the news recently. However, it's interesting to note that Project 2025, which Vought helped lead and authored key sections of, does not advocate for the dismantling of USAID, rather recommending that its mission be narrowly aligned to national security goals[2]. In 2025, however, Elon Musk wanted USAID shuttered, and Vought was happy to oblige in his position as "the nerve center of the federal budget."
However, Project 2025 advocates for eliminating or defunding the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Education, EPA, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and other government agencies. It's likely that these will also come under fire.
Finally (and this is my opinion), I believe it is impossible to understand this current administration's policy agenda without at least a surface level understanding of the writing of Curtis Yarvin, a software developer and reactionary political blogger. One this topic, Yarvin says the following:
“What is government? A government is just a corporation which owns a country. Nothing more, nothing less. It so happens that our sovereign corporation is very poorly managed and there’s a very simple way to replace that, which is what we do to all corporations that have failed. We simply delete them.”
[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/video-donald-trump-russ-v...
[2] https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FUL... (pg 253-255)
[3] https://apnews.com/article/trump-doge-russell-vought-project...
Curtis Yarvin isn't a libertarian (anymore), he's a monarchist. I also don't think he would advocate for the government to lose control of the nukes.
I am making the argument that the current administration is trying to make government agencies die, but that it isn't one centrally orchestrated conspiracy. I am using different evidence than the parent comment to make that argument.
More importantly, the purpose of my original comment is to inform readers of the thread on highly influential second-tier actors (Russ Vought is well-known, but he's not Elon Musk) and help foster a more nuanced discussion of the current administration, its motivations, and its actions.
Being overly reductionist makes one easier to reject as partisan.
What is new is the MAGA/2025 hijacking of the Republican party to enact its goals. To the extent that the current Republican leadership is essentially a different party than it was 6 years ago.
For most of its history, the Republican party was fairly anti-populist (defined by whatever populism was at the time).
The Republican southern strategy from 1980+ was predicated on attracting southern white votes by attacking civil rights (explicitly or implicitly), but ultimately focusing on business priorities (with some headline-catching red meat).
However, in the decades since, the explosion of hardline conservative talk radio then dragged the party to answer to its more egregious populist demands.
Hence Trump.
It mightve been a hijack at one point, but MAGA owns the whole airline now.
It should be handled in the way all >4 year payback US problems are: by empowering a commission to do the neccessary unpopular things and give members longer-than-4-year terms.
The entire platform of the GOP is that the government is the problem.
The ACA would have been much better had the GOP not tried to stop it any way possible. Suing to remove critical aspects of it, voting at every turn against it, arguing that there would be death panels for grandparents.
Even once it was law, no attempt to improve, or replace.
A good faith effort would include an alternative health care plan. Where is it?
Two options: either incapable of producing a plan or are at best indifferent to the suffering and death of hundreds of thousands of people, if not more.
The GOP has only tirelessly worked to ensure that the ACA would be less effective than it could have been.
Note: not repeal it. It’s entirely too popular and effective for that.
The most recent thing I can think of was getting Clinton to balance the budget, and he was a democrat.
Had they not, PEPFAR or something similar would have existed a decade or more earlier.
Lotsa people died because of that.
By 2003, it was no longer tenable to refuse to fight AIDS, plus, notable GOP family members got AIDS.
Just like Nancy Reagan’s 180 on gay people once her daughter came out.
What happened next is that various chancers marched into state institutions, usually with private security details made of low-grade armed thugs promoted from street crime, and said "This is ours now."
The US aristocracy saw this and apparently thought "Perfect - let's make that happen here too."
The fact there's been no significant state or media push back against Musk's takeovers is all anyone needs to know. The aim is a kleptocratic imperium drowning in gold, drugs, delusion, and corruption - which is exactly what Russia turned into.
And if report on this, the president orders you to be behaded
I included a link just below to at the exact timestamp he talks about this:
How Brooks sees Trumpism: not conservative, they don't have a conservative or positive vision for society, they just want to destroy the institutions "dominated" by left. In his words, this means, they are astoundingly incompetent. "Elite Narcissicm" leads to the destruction of every thought system it encounters.
I worry that the solution is a race to the bottom. As long as this shit helps only one party it won't get fixed.
This is such a big tech "move fast and break things" thing to do. The cancer has now metastasized and reached the executive function.
They simply lie to their supporters, and are believed because republicans are indoctrinated throughout life to believe that "government bad, corporations good, taxes bad, money good, collective power bad, individual power good"
trump said before the election he didn't know what project 2025 was. He lied, pure and simple.
There is a secret runbook that goes much further than P25 which the same authors ensured was never printed or emailed anywhere which could be susceptible to FOIA. That is the runbook they have been using since day 1, which likely contained all 74 of his day 1 orders pre-written.
The concept of "electoral fraud" is enshrined in law, so I guess more lawsuits are coming.
No large government in the history of the world has ever perfectly spent its money.
We can at best aspire to good government spending, not perfect.
Therefore the current dog and pony show of 'look at these excesses and get mad' is just a distraction to functional cuts that would be less popular.
Elon Musk, Russell Vought, and Donald Trump are lying. They know exactly what they're trying to do: impair the operation of the US government.
Any claims about fiscal justification are ridiculous from a financial standpoint -- if they cared about US debt, they'd be making these spending cuts, and not passing tax cuts.
- indiscriminately fire people who have been in long term positions but recently got promoted and so were considered “probationary”
- dismantle the CPFB which was a net gain for revenue
- dismantle 18F which has a track record of improving government efficiency
- fire people who were involved in managing nuclear weapons and bird flu and then try to bring them back
- share spreadsheets on Twitter about really old people in the social security system making people think there’s tons of fraud without learning about the 2023 OIG report that already existed that explained this data
- make a bunch of noise about cutting a bunch of contracts including a third of which were already fully spent and will save nothing
Does this give you confidence that they are genuinely focused on reducing inefficiency and waste? It seems to me like they are rushing in, not bothering to learn what has already been done, arrogantly making assumptions, randomly breaking things and causing chaos, and all for what… a few billion in real savings which is not even a fraction of the proposed increase in spending by the current budget resolutions being worked on by the Republicans in the house?
Why should we have ever thought that an operation literally named after a dog meme was serious about anything?
All of this makes everything more expensive in the future: new contracts are going to have higher overhead to account for new legal and accounting costs, and unless the government will never hire anyone again they’re going to struggle to get skilled employees at all, much less at the same salary, when it’s clear that they’d be signing up to be treated like this. The direct cost is bad but the productivity cost will be even greater and last for decades.
You're probably correct about the employment law. That will take more legal finesse to keep them from having to pay a ton of money. Fortunately for them they also own the judiciary. It's not 100% reliable, but they've for 4 out of 5 needed votes locked in at the top level
And expecting lower federal courts packed with conservative judges to vote in favor of ignoring contracts?
We'll see, but I wouldn't take that bet...
The difference being the overflow after wastes gets spend on society instead of shareholders.
It's not that obvious to me, and is such a broad assertion that I'd require more than an "Everyone knows it. Just look at history" explanation to accept it as fact.
It also implies 2 things that I would disagree with
1) That the inefficiency and waste increases over time. It's likelier to me the ratio of those things stays the same, but it's more apparent as it scales - a company "wasting" 2% of its budget is vastly different than the US government "wasting" 2% of its budget.
2) That it's inherent to "human organizations" themselves - this doesn't seem to explore any other possible explanations. Given the nature of the discussion, I would think it's worth discussing whether other factors (like capitalism) might have an effect
(We'll ignore the vagueness of terms like "inefficiency" and "waste" with regards to government spending; not everyone agrees on what things are efficient or not. There are also many ways of measuring efficiency for both long- and short-term outlooks.)
Nail them down to specifics. Not just improvements, but perfect efficiency.
Guaranteed they will soon start to flounder, because "inefficient government" is a propaganda talking point, not a fact that can be established with any workable economic definition.
And "the deficit" is the difference between what government chooses to spend and chooses not to tax.
A huge proportion of government spending is either/both an investment and/or a direct driver of beneficial economic activity. That includes "unworthy" spending like welfare.
It's no worse for government than any other large organization. Better than expected, given it's size.
It costs money to save wasted money.
Sometimes, that equation is net positive and other times net negative. But it's never financially efficient to reduce waste to zero.
I don't think they're reflexive responses by stupid republicans, I think billionaires don't like paying taxes (to pay back into the society that made them fantastically rich in the first place) so they purchase Republican politicians to both obstruct government and vote for tax cuts. They obstruct the government to make it inefficient and then they use the resulting inefficiency as evidence that the government needs to be "starved".
And that's just politics-as-usual stuff before the literal cabal of billionaires in the Trump admin began working expressly to create an oligarchy.
> Everyone should watch the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, speak on government workers:
Russell Vought is the architect of Project 2025:
* https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c977njnvq2do
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025
You know, the thing that Trump publicly said he wasn't part of.
"I haven't read it, I don't know what's in it."
"I know nothing about it."
I absolutely believe he never read it during the campaign, probably hasn't done more than skim a summary to this day. He doesn't need to. None of that matters to him.
Keeping his distance gave him "plausible" deniability...kinda. Anyone who actually thought Trump wasn't going to let Heritage Foundation people take over substantial control of government should take a long hard look at their sources of information, internal biases, and critical thinking capability.
The sheer incompetence of it all is disqualifying by itself.
In my experiences arguing with MAGA, the incompetence argument lands a lot more convincingly than the evil argument.
It's like shouting that the bridge is going to collapse because you see a few supports buckle. Anybody with eyes can see the bridge is standing and heavy ass trucks are driving on top of it.
Trumps first term was relatively neutered because people just refused to do what he asked. Those supports are gone now though and like the bridge collapse the observable changes happened slowly and then suddenly all at once.
I think warning about Trump fascism was appropriate and legitimate, but I think using the label as a lazy cudgel to get liberals and progressives to toe a poorly-conceived line did a tremendous amount to erode the term's significance and rhetorical power.
https://www.ft.com/content/02217acf-ac64-49c2-acd5-ef4f107f0...
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/techno-fas...
There can be incompetence and malice together in all this. The malicious often leverage the incompetent to further their goals.
One way to get more people on board with destroying government structures is to render the government structures as ineffectual and incompetent as possible.
The goal is to convince other people, not to rah-rah the already-believers.
Trivially: these websites go back up in a few days, is that more convincingly malice or just “these people don’t know how to operate a government?”
If it’s malice then it’s an attack. You have react differently to an attack than to incompetence.
The EU made the same mistake with Trump‘s appeasement to Putin. They hoped it’s some kind of clever negotiation tactic but they learned it’s not. It’s just two autocrats teaming up at the expense of Ukraine.
Meh, feel free to disagree. How many MAGA voters do you talk to on a daily basis?
Online? More than enough and they show the same kind of malice like our own type of MAGA: AfD voters
There were many dems who remembered Trump as the funny orange man, didn't really care to turn out against him, and fell for the "both sides bad" messaging that was absolutely rampant on the left (esp with regard to Kamala and Palestine). So no, I don't think the most important rally-the-base rhetoric was to ratchet up "Trump is Fascist" so much as suppress "Both Sides Bad" while we had an election to win.
Agreed the "both sides bad" messaging was a huge factor here. But that's exactly why we should talk about these fuckups as questions of competence. They are unambiguous evidence of a difference in both sides' ability to actually operate a government!
What was Kamala's 2024 campaign slogan?
I saw that slogan and cringed immediately.
Although I agree with others' sentiment that focusing on incompetence can be more persuasive to certain segments of society.
If you're in the US, it's time to start asking yourself what you are going to want to be able to say to your kids or grandkids when they ask what you did about it when the constitutional republic was falling.
Alongside these budget cuts, the GOP is proposing massive tax cuts and massive increases in funding for parts of the government related to law and immigration enforcement that will massively outweigh any savings from DOGE destroying entire programs overnight. DOGE is also demolishing organizations that are revenue positive and Trump has fired Inspector Generals, who are responsible for identifying waste and inefficiency in government operations.
It isn't a possibility. It is very very clear.
Also, half of the “law and immigration enforcement” budget increase is actually going towards deploying the military inside the US, which is illegal.
> DOGE is also demolishing organizations that are revenue positive
The revenue will be still be there when the re-org is completed. Are you worried about competitors?
The thing is, almost no one was used to politicians actually following through with their plans and promises. Trump is the first Western leader since I'm alive (other than the current Spanish government) to actually do what he has promised, and I fear this image of him being an "accomplisher" will send him for a wave of support in both the midterms and the next election (and yes, I also believe that there will be no one left to enforce the "two terms" regulation).
The same place they were when Breonna Taylor was summarily executed by government agents retaliating for Kenneth Walker exercising his second amendment right to home defense at night (the exact type of scenario they continually grandstand about!) - following the twisted logic and misdirection of their mainstream media so they can continue lazily attacking a strawman of their fellow citizens ("oWn tHe lIbS!1!") rather than reflect on what it would actually take to live their purported values.
At this point the only real question for so-called "conservatives" is when will they realize their leaders have betrayed us and given away our country's future to China?
I don't want to suggest what Trump himself suggested: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-2nd-amendment-folks-st...
I think that's a bad option.
What I am saying is: Every single time I've seen a headline about school shootings, someone suggests gun control.
Someone reacts that guns keep the government from becoming despots.
I said then, no, the military are the ones who decide such things. Militia don't make a dent, despite their self image.
And yet, Trump, who just narrowly avoided being killed, signed more support of the 2nd amendment.
https://www.nraila.org/articles/20250207/nra-statement-on-pr...
Did he sign because he's afraid, or because he's not?
AND if they are doing this to NIH, imagine what they are doing to food and drug inspection for safety
just assume all regulation is gone or being ignored without penalty, now scale that out for four years
Forget "great depression" it's a dark ages of sorts with smartphones for distraction
I certainly don’t know any that require they be run by the state.
Did you hear what Russell Vought said? “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,”
Anyone genuinely interested in efficiency should start with why the Pentagon has failed audits and is unable to account for tens (hundreds?) of billions of dollars
They're going to a lot of effort, and exposing themselves to a lot of risk, if this is all likely to be undone in a few years time. My worry is that they won't be able to resist trying to permanently lock-in these changes, even if the most obvious way to do that is to abandon democracy.
What has bound us together as a people is the massive ocean of cash we collectively float on. Abundance that's actively being slashed and burned as we speak. Apologies for the mixed metaphor.
On the bright side, this might also mean the end of rampaging around the globe in the name of democracy. I think that ship has fully sailed, alhamdulillah.
Could there be a world in the middle where maybe the government is bloated and irresponsibly spending money and republicans aren’t just myopic nitwits and do care for our country? And they’re executing on cleaning things up but in a way you disagree with?
Why is it always malice and ruin? It’s tiring. Twitter BTW pulled 1.25B in profit last year…
Non wasteful things... Such as? Says who?
"Different management" ffs the govt isn't supposed to pivot like a company every 4-8 yrs. That's an unthinking suggestion for a federal govt & heterogenous population.
"Insubordinate"... To a unitary executive?
We don't know the root cause, but the kinds of moves that Musk is pulling are straight from a sabotage manual.
The very fact that it takes such a battle to even get read only access to analyze where the money is going is evidence enough that there is insanely baroque levels of waste and unnecessary services happening here.
If it’s that important it can be put back.
Why is it so scandalous that conservatives want a smaller government, got elected, and are now making the government smaller?
The discovery part is what happens at the end.
If it becomes unavailable, my feeling is that the world will really enter in a dark age.
Login.gov is a most critical SSO resource for logging into services such as the IRS for tax payments. It’ll see peak usage next month for taxes. The teams maintaining these have been indiscriminately let go.
More of these online services will start to go down, rapidly.
If the point of DOGE is really to tackle the deficit, all these moves are incredibly shortsighted.
(Yesterday the 18F former employee put https://18f.org/ as a transparent warning of what’s to come)
The point is to shutter or kneecap every last government service. When it becomes obvious which services were/are mission critical, they'll be replaced with private solutions -- most of which will conveniently be on offer from X.
It is obvious it is not. The purpose of a system is what it does.
And if you search for "trans", you get search results, tho unrelated (e.g., "transnational", etc.).
If you search for "transgender", it just redirects you to the homepage.
The cruelty is the point.
We link to their pages: eg
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=24827528,%2020832466,%...
if you're comparing DNA and looking at every organism ever you might need such power, but if you do i'd hope you work at some institute that makes your own algo in house because blast isn't the end all be all
Same message is in the internet archive back in 2020 https://web.archive.org/web/20201009054447/https://www.ncbi....
RFK Jr. and Elon Musk gaining political power will be one of the most challenging disasters the human race has ever encountered.
how did they become so sociopathic and why did Americans let them have the most powerful jobs in the world?
Think about it this way.. when tech folk got hooked up to mainline net access 24/7, it wasn't exactly good for us. Think 1970s cocaine consumption.
When the rest of the population got Facebook, that's a refined and potent strain being sold into a population with no natural immunity or defensive mechanisms. Now it's 1990 and there's a crack dealer on every corner in poor neighborhoods.
Those politicians who were at the wheel in 2008-10 must bear a share of the blame. They could see this coming, or should have done. There was far too much complacency about what was festering online and how easily it spread.
Did none of our leaders hear about Gamergate in, what, 2015 and go, hang on we've got a BIG problem brewing here? Even GG wasn't really that much of a shock/surprise if you'd been paying attention since the mid 00's.
One is a convicted felon and the other one openly stated that he's going to prison if said convicted felon is not elected president.
WAKE UP AMERICA
trump, thiel, and musk also see how rich russia's oligarchs are, and want to replicate russia in the USA.
It's a viable explanation.
Russian state media were allowed into the Zelensky meeting while other traditional news orgs were not.
The use of tariffs and customs against trading partners to shape general foreign policy, via a compromised president, as well as other things, is strongly reminiscent of Russian interference in Ukraine pre-2014.
Even the Mueller report is best read as concluding there was obstruction of justice into the investigation.
Thiel has openly discussed disappointment with democracy and advocated for autocracy, and his companies have celebrated the current state of things in shareholder meetings.
russia owns trump. elon talks to putin regularly, and he was promised access to Ukrainian mineral wealth. The whole Panama canal, Canada, and Greenland sabre-rattling is so eventually russian oil tankers can traverse the world with impunity.
russia is dividing and conquering. They still dream of being a superpower, instead of a failed mafia state with nuclear weapons.
Our only hope now is that the American economy rebels against this insanity.
The Orange One spent a lot of time praising Zelenski before throwing him to the wolves. That had to be a jolt to everyone, admitted or not.
Published them, even. Many times. Bloody held conferences about them.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/21/curtis-yarvi...
They’re shutting down this government until it is just the police and military left. And then what?
Podcasts overtook them a long time ago; people like Joe Rogan are the new Mainstream Media.
ex. https://old.reddit.com/r/JoeRogan/comments/rvdcea/oc_joe_rog...
I share your frustration with how someone could have voted for these criminals but I've also seen very well educated accomplished individuals — who are also not right wingers — essentially brainwashed into thinking Trump was a victim and his ramblings were meaningless showmanship or a media mudslinging campaign. I've also seen interviews with these people during the campaign, people who expected this to be like his last administration.
Trump openly lied about Project 2025 and people who refuted those lies were accused of "TDS", etc in these outlets. Even relatively centrist outlets were accused of sanewashing him.
You can be dismissive but I know people as I type this who are genuinely upset and feel betrayed by the GOP and Trump because they didn't believe they would do all this. Maybe it's a form of stupidity or weakness but the level of fraud and deception throughout cannot be forgotten.
There's a reason for propaganda.
The administration doesn’t see that the entire world order is built on many positive sum relationships and coalitions that the US has asymmetrically benefited from. And the same goes for social order. Wealthy people suddenly see themselves as victims(?) of their employees, and investors blame entitled tech employees for companies problems. When the reality is that employee and management - and social classes - benefit economically by supporting each other.
Thanks for this idea suggestion, this spin. Its a framing that, now that I see it, maps well & explain so much. The limited world view is collapsing our world, in horrible ways. Mankind became better than the animals because we grew to encompass more than short transactional views of ourselves, and it's so heartbreaking watching vicious dark side anger unmake the core of spirit that propelled us so far.
With server hardware, I can't think of real alternatives, at least x86. But then again, I guess they'll just continue to work once bought :P
Cloud hosting and PaaS: We have some major, reliable hosters (Hetzner, OVH etc), but it's a bit lower level than AWS or Heroku. This part I'm pondering the most, since I mostly want to use stuff you can easily find freelancers to work on. With anything closer to self hosting, that's a bit tricky.
Stuff like Google Workspace, Notion etc is non-trivial but possible to replace with stuff like Fastmail and the Atlassian suite. Not an "as good" replacement, but a workable one.
I still feel a bit paranoid even thinking about this, and I'll ponder it some more before I act. But I can't help but wonder how many European CTOs are in the same boat after the oval office meeting with Zelenski. Kinda brought it home to me that the US is a very different country now, and using anything made there is no longer the no brainer it used to be. If the actual government can't resist their commands, private companies most definitely can't. And with a trade war looming, it'd be easy to just take competitors that rely on AWS et al off the market quickly, spy on competitors in Google Workplace, and stuff like that.
Sounds naive I guess, but my tech choices are pretty heavily biased towards "can I quickly find someone affordable to work on it?". Makes the market leader the obvious choice, quite often. And that's currently usually a US company.
/s
They could also order assets frozen or something though (I think?) which I don't understand why they don't do.
TLDR; courts issue TRO (temporary restraining order), preliminary injunction, or permanent injunctions. Normally people comply. If the government does not comply then individuals can be found in civil contempt and the U.S. Marshals would enforce that. Civil contempt can't be pardoned.
There have been some TROs and injunctions issued but also some ignoring of them by the government (and also the supreme court has temporarily stayed at least one). I don't believe any contempt rulings (findings?) have been made, so not yet appropriate for the cops (Marshals).
[1] https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/LSB/LSB11271
Its a coup.
When half the people are fine with it and all branches of government are allied with them, there isn't much the rest of us can do except try to clean up the mess when we get a chance to.
I think a good chunk of the voters cast their choice assuming that there would be checks and balances.
Sure there are also many, many trump voters who really wanted exactly this. But they are not the majority of the people.
A fraction of people who voted for Trump thought he would be like Trump 1.0 and just wanted to stop the woke drift of the democrats and/or didn't feel represented by a non-white+woman president.
We can debate how small that fraction is but it likely affected the election results.
I don't think the average conservative grandma is really in favour of the chaos that Elon is unleashing.
The only reasons they voted for Trump is that they thought they were against total debauchery of the left and the trans activism and whatnot.
If that grandma could choose between an old school conservative and these clowns she will choose the old school conservatives.
Yes it's a winner take all system, yes that's how it works. But don't use that to justify that whatever the winner does is what all people actually wanted because it's just not true.
I actually find it a little bit sad that the DOGE angle is so prominent in this thread.
I suppose the good news is that there’s no report that this is malicious and it’s all just assumptions. That makes me happier than if there was some intentional shutdown.
And fortunately, pubmed is up and running as of 822amEST
I occasionally use the Unifi Wifiman app to quickly test my network, even though I don’t use Unifi gear.
One reason I like it is as soon as you open the app you see a bunch of latency metrics for various domains.
X is one of the default test domains. I don’t know when this happened but x.com does not seem to be running anycast in Australia anymore, I get 110ms latency to x (for many this would be 130 to 160 or higher, my provider uses premium transit). A traceroute shows the server I am hitting is in Japan.
Why? This is highly irregular, I can’t imagine any other major website not having a POP in Australia.