CDC Data Are Disappearing

As far as things like ending EV tax credits musk noted it would hurt his competitors more than him.

It’s all obvious corruption.

I really hope you're being sarcastic.

If you look back at Germany in the 19th century, nations like Prussia and Austria had this sort of power struggle between the merchant class and the nobility at the advent of steam power.

in this case the de-facto US nobility (rank-and-file career politicians) are being usurped by the bourgeouise (billionaires like Musk) at the advent of AI and tech by promising the working class a combination of culture war policy and relief from the very capitalist excess they themselves endorse. by reducing congress and senate to a simple debate team (conversely similar to the German National Asssembly) the tech-elite are able to seize power once reserved for the crown.

the question will be, after four years, will they abdicate their power or concentrate it?

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Musk is not the richest man in the world. Those lists exclude royalty and other individuals who do not want the extra publicity. The Rothschilds are far richer.

I cancelled a Model 3 order and went with a different EV a few years ago. I was starting to soften my stance, and considering a Tesla for my next, but at this point, I have a hard time accepting the idea that buying one wouldn't send a message of implicit support.

Indeed it is, but maybe is time that we detach a person from their proposals. I wonder how that would be achieved.

As it so happens he did not appear on any ballots. But Musk (his aides more specifically) have locked federal employees out of their own systems

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/musk-aides-lock-government-...

Evidently set up an on-prem email server at the OPM to send out their emails asking disloyal employees to resign

https://gizmodo.com/federal-employees-sue-agency-over-new-em...

And is attempting to do the same at the US Treasury (edit: I meant to gain access to/control of, not the email server thing)

https://www.finance.senate.gov/chairmans-news/wyden-demands-...

The twitzkrieg seems to be working.

Not every person in the government is elected. Some positions are appointed. Not one judge from SCOTUS is elected. None of the members of the president's cabinet are elected. They are all Senate confirmed though, which is what's going on now with the current clown show. Somehow, Musk has created a role for himself where he even gets to bypass the Senate confirmation stage. That's the most disconcerting thing to me. Not that I think he wouldn't get confirmed, but the fact that he has this much power totally unchecked.

The US is undergoing a fascist takeover basically.

The trouble is, to talk about WHY Musk is attempting to seize control of parts of the US government and why the Trump administration is attempting to censor mass quantities of data would be a political conversation.

Hacker News isn't designed for this. The point at which it becomes mass censorship that computer hackers (in their capacity as The Internet) might take an active role in routing around, is more or less this point: you're quite correct that this is worrying, but up to this point it's been a deeply political conversation and only as it becomes mass censorship and control by technological means, does it become really on-message for Hacker News.

Musk was appointed as the administrator of DOGE, itself a subordinate "temporary organization" under the United States DOGE Service (formerly the United States Digital Service).

All of this is happening within the Executive Office of the President, which is essentially fancyspeak to mean the government employees working the Executive Branch of the federal government. Those government employees serve at the pleasure of the President; Congress only has very limited influence (namely budgetary influences from the House and certain positions that require Senate confirmation).

So Musk, being appointed as a part of the Executive Branch, derives authority vested in the President of which Trump has delegated some to Musk for the purposes of implementing and enforcing DOGE policies.

Musk for his part also serves at the pleasure of the President, so whatever he does is ostensibly what Trump wants regardless of who actually does it.

I see these kinds of comments regularly and am curious: what is your thought process? What makes you think that it's not illegal? What makes you think that legality matters here?

Anything the president does is legal so says the supreme court

It's only illegal if someone enforces the law

Laws are just words

Roberts will go down in history as a worse Justice than Taney for this.

“It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be REDUCED to twenty grammes a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it.“

To be fair, media consumption is broad and even in the deepest red retirement communities of Darkest Appalachia, no one subsists only on Fox.

In fact there is an active community of very Trumpy libertarians on this very website who pop up in the handful of political threads that make the front page. They seem to be silent here, one hopes maybe they've been given pause.

This is moving very fast, and the sheer amount of chaos they're creating is successfully stymieing the potential responses. The important initial challenges here are the legal ones. And there are already some temporary decisions that should stop some of the blocks on funds.

Now comes the part where we see if the administration abides by those legal decisions or not, and how the final legal decisions here turn out once these cases inevitably land in front of the Supreme Court.

At the point where the administration ignores the courts and laws and continues on with their illegal impoundment, that's the point where you have to protest.

Protest doesn't do anything. I marched plenty and it accomplished nothing except letting like-minded people blow off a bit of steam and feel like something we did mattered. If anything it was just a distraction.

I've been monitoring online discussions with some interest and the complete lack of self reflection in left-leaning US population is interesting. People who were writing very nasty things about Russians too scared to destroy their lives by protesting against a brutal dictatorship not that long ago now sit on their asses and do nothing, because "what can we do?". Maybe at least some of them now understand what it's like. My sincere sympathies in any case, we understand you very well.

They’re just salivating for anyone to protest. Any protest will be a pretext to use violent power, start some marshal law and move ten steps closer of totalitarianism.

We've done the protest thing. In the past decade, millions of people have protested, repeatedly, trying to change parts of this trajectory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_protests_and_demonstra...

A bunch of Americans have been taught that protests only "count" if they don't inconvenience anyone. Laws have been changed to make effective protest impossible. It's legal to ram protesters with your car in Florida, for instance. The cops use force to suppress protests and the media tells everyone your protest was invalid because it broke the law.

If we press the point more aggressively, we'll probably start another civil war. The right holds Rittenhouse up as a hero, and that's not an isolated thing. For decades, average, rank-and-file GOP voters have made jokes and jabs about shooting liberals. It used to be a few tasteless blowhards, but it's commonplace now. See also comments from Kevin Roberts about how the "second American Revolution" will be "bloodless if the left allows it."

There are resistance movements extant and forming, but it's a wicked problem. The size and population of the US requires more resources and participants to make an impact. The speed at which the situation is changing makes it hard to find purchase to do so.

What do you propose? The only way to change is either voting, money, or violence. I'm generally lost as what to do.

That's not how that works. The situation is set up to attempt to produce 'wild crazy radicals' who can be acted against super-aggressively. Failing to run about throwing rocks is a refusal to provide the guilty parties with exoneration for their acts. In effect, 'grassroots movements' directed by adversaries is what got us here, and is overwhelmingly unlikely to get us out.

It's accurate to say more than half let this happen. You can include the people that didn't vote.

Those that can vote, but don't, don't count.

A lot of federal money goes to state and local health programs. For example, consider mammograms. A state will be given a budget to spend on mammograms. The state doesn't do those screenings itself, so it solicits bids from several healthcare organizations. Those organizations create proposals with estimates of the number of residents eligible for free screening in their area, the burden of breast cancer among that group, and whether those potential patients fall into underserved or high risk demographics. All of that comes from high quality data published by the federal government. Those groups pull data from these online data sets.

Your grandma might have gotten free mammograms because of that data.

Luckily, we live in a society of specialists, and while you are laying bricks, public health orgs are generating reports and taking interviews and making these data accessible and meaningful to you.

So, yes, your grandma relies on a data "supply chain" but, nevertheless, it benefits her.

It's a bit like asking whether road signs are effective for Americans who can't read. The signs are there for the people that are using the road, and if you're not using the road you can safely ignore it.

That's why this is more of an attack on the Hacker News demographic, not Grandma.

If you had a real startup doing real things in healthcare, this is an intentional spoke in your wheels.

I'm sorry to tell you this, but the sign was lying to you. It is already too late to "turn back the clock" on climate change. The droughts, the floods, the fires: we are already paying the debts of past inaction.

That’s an art project by Gan Golan and Andrew Boyd and has nothing to do with governing.

I sure as fuck wish we had four years. Unfortunately it is already too late.

I think the benefit is not just from regular people having access - but other researchers who do need/trust the data.