If you’ve read Project 2025, which is the blueprint being followed to the letter, you know this administration intends to fully dismantle US government and it’s democracy as quickly as possible. Ideally, so fast there is no time to mount a defense, resistance or even general understanding that it’s happening.
Purges of anyone who would object in the government, open defiance of any checks and balances, mass arrests, full penetration of nearly every significant and highly secure digital infrastructure, and the head of state literally referring to himself as the king.
Most AI startups, like most startups in general, are in the business of selling futures. Much easier to get new seed $$$ once there’s a real hype around your demo. Not saying they aren’t being honest, just pointing out the logic of starting here and working your way up to a huge valuation.
Right. As I point out occasionally, Tesla, as a car company, is overvalued by an order of magnitude.
If they can find suckers who accept that valuation, it's much easier to exit as a billionaire than actually make it work.
Visualize making it work. You build or buy a robot that has enough operating envelope for an Amazon picking station, provide it with an end-effector, and use this claimed general purpose software to control it.
Probably just arms; it doesn't need to move around. Movement is handled by Amazon's Kiva-type AGV units.
You set up a test station with a supply of Amazon products and put it to work. It's measured on the basis of picks per minute, failed picks, and mean time before failure. You spend months to years debugging standard robotics problems such as tendon wear, gripper wear, and products being damaged during picking and placing. Once it's working, Amazon buys some units and puts them to work in real distribution centers.
More problems are found and solved.
Now you have a unit that replaces one human, and costs maybe $20,000 to make in quantity. Amazon beats you down in price so you get to sell it for maybe $25,000 in quantity. You have to build manufacturing facilities and service depots. Success is Amazon buying 50,000 of them, for total income of $0.25 billion. This probably becomes profitable about five years from now, if it all works.
By which time someone in China, Japan, or Taiwan is doing it cheaper and better.
It's interesting to see someone who seems to describe themself as anti-woke try desperately to convince the generally anti-academic movement to fund academics. Sadly I don't think he'll succeed in this.
I don't agree with many of his posts but I think the blog is interesting in how personal it feels. Often I feel like all media is very cultivated but he seems very willing to put his own anxieties and foibles on the web.
FWIW, it's unclear how the NSF ends up. Musk needs scientists to make rockets go. The defense industry needs a broad spectrum of scientists to make all kinds of things happen. Scientists (and especially the schools producing said scientists) need funding to operate, or there will no longer be accredited scientists.
Does Musk understand this? Maybe not. It's not evident so far. He certainly lives in a fictional world of the right wing's devising. Will someone else be able to penetrate that bubble to make him understand it? Will he care if they do? Guess we'll find out.
Why do all schools need public money? The big ones have huge endowments, why not use those? They also make a ton of money from students. Much of it is wasted on layers of administrators, but the administrators will just fire the scientists for not bringing in grants
> For most of my professional life, this blog has been my forum, where anyone in the world could show up to raise any issue they wanted, as if we were tunic-wearing philosophers in the Athenian agora.
I think we both know the answer. Most of these DOGE people wouldn’t have been allowed in the building, much less the system root a couple of months ago because they’d never pass a clearance check.
technically, a clearance and background check have never been done on political appointees. the fbi openly says so. at least this is not new... the new thing is the low level of petty criminals being apointed.
Political appointees don’t get root, and they still had to get clearance for sensitive materials (as it’s legally required for the people securing a SCIF not to allow anyone who doesn’t have clearance in the door). Part of why the new administration is trying to bull through the process is that his first term had many delays due to appointees failing those checks.
Yes, there’s a database and people who audit access, ensure that permissions are periodically reviewed (i.e. just because you needed access 5 years ago doesn’t mean your current duties still require the same access), and other events can trigger reviews (e.g. a large amount of personal debt could make someone a greater risk).
The Office of Personnel Management runs a lot of the standardized stuff, including the system which people use to submit the standard forms, but agencies have their own offices and variations:
appointees are interviewed, not vetted by the fbi like federal employs. the dowvote brigade could read the article since im rentioning a literal quote from there.
Political appointees typically work on policy, they’re not shelling into servers and moving data around. This is especially true of the “special government employee” category Musk is using where it’s short-term (not more than 130 days in a 365 day period) and intended for consulting type expert advice rather than bypassing the normal hiring rules.
> the dowvote brigade could read the article since im rentioning a literal quote from there.
Alternately, consider that they’re recognizing that the scope of this situation is different both in terms of the level of access and nature of the work and unwillingness to follow policies. For example, when they tried to barge into the SCIF at USAID the staff who tried to stop them were under a legal obligation to do so - they’re charged with requiring everyone who enters to have a clearance. Historically, people got those and so it was never codified into law that they had to. Similarly, if people were requesting the access needed to perform their official task and using agency accounts and equipment to do so, you didn’t need an “auditor” to get approved at the level needed to be a system administrator. This is turning into a big scandal not just because it’s so highly politicized but also because bulling through so many process protections dramatically increases the potential risk.
As a simple example, reports have these guys getting admin access and using personal email accounts and equipment. Consider what happens if someone emails them a PDF saying it has evidence of fraud and it has a nasty payload. If they have unnecessary levels of access or have demanded that restrictions be removed, the fallout for that will be much worse than it would be if they were following the rules. Every federal agency has people employed specifically to prevent all of those layers of failure from happening.
Background checks have always been done on political appointees. They aren't a requirement for getting the position but historically they've been done prior to appointment so that leadership knows if they are a security risk.
And for appointees that require congressional confirmation the checks have been giving to congress prior to hearings for the same reason.
They weren't required but they very much have been done for political appointees in every admin in recent history except this one.
This comments section is getting wild. Do you have any proof that DOGE team members have been granted "system root" (whatever that means)? When I Google, it is unclear how many DOGE team members have security clearance and at what level.
> When I Google, it is unclear how many DOGE team members have security clearance and at what level.
They are flooding the zone. That's by design. At one point they had "read-only access" to records. Then later people say they had full access and have backups.
The only definitive proof we have publicly Is that a federal judge made two orders; One to restrict access to the treasury for all of DOGE except for the 2 people allegedly already working in treasury. And One to order deletion of any records they have backed up. All other reports come from first or second hand sources. AFAIK, no one truly knows DOGE did in the Treasury, and we won't know until a court proceeding later this month.
Interestingly Frank Herbert wrote about the hidden value of slow and measured bureaucratic processes. His essential argument was that a slow bureaucracy has time to review not just the letter of laws and policies, but the impact that they will have after enacted which may not be part of the conversation to get them passed. The story he writes on this is borderline satirical with a government agent called a saboteur, whose sole job is to slow down and muck up an incredibly efficient future government which is able to pass laws which have sweeping impact across the nation in hours, and in some cases seconds.
While most of us corporate drones often laugh at the speed of government, considering the lightning fast decision-making often made in the world’s top companies, that book always made me think about the fact that government operations often have far more riding on them than any private enterprise ever will. So maybe that time is being spent more effectively than you assume.
Personally, this whole scenario makes me very wary. Though I understand the complexities of the infrastructure we’re discussing here, I’d be super nervous to have my Internet lifeline to the rest of the world governed directly by Elon Musk.
That's an argument for a small government. Private entities are both much faster than current governments, and more careful with their money. And when they fail, you basically get free infrastructure (as part of the bankruptcy process) instead of a black hole in which public money keeps getting sunk.
Reading the rest of the comments in this thread it seems like the original decision was at the very least sane: you need major investment in telecom infrastructure, and to facilitate this the government offered a monopoly to incentivize said investment. Makes sense, at face value. Problem is that technology advanced, and now a centralized solution is worse than the state of the art (Starlink). So instead of the infrastructure provider living or dying on merit, you have regulations sustaining it artificially, and no incentive to have them upgrade or become more efficient.
I'm not sure private entities are more careful with their money. More importantly, it's their money, it doesn't necessarily flow back to the public.
The danger is in monopoly. Then you're left with no choice and also no vote. At least with public infrastructure you have a vote.
The situation in the Falklands sounds like a mess, and I'm not faulting anyone for using Starlink in those circumstances. But I suspect if the island becomes dependent on Starlink they will find themselves with other problems later.
These private-public arguments are misguided IMHO because the real issue is choice versus monopoly. Public services provide choice to those who might not have it otherwise, and give a nonmonetary mechanism for feedback. But they can become monopolies as well. Private services can provide options but when they become monopolies you have no options for feedback other than to withdraw from the service, which sometimes isn't a real option. Also, the moneys aren't necessarily redistributed back to the community, which can be an opportunity cost.
reply