Two things that frustrate me about this line of argument is a failure to recognize the scale being discussed and an implicit assumption that something that isn't trivially obvious doesn't exist.
On the scale- We're talking about millions of checks a year. You've effectively proposed to ask every congressperson to spend all day signing checks. By doing so, you've also eliminated the time they spend working with constituents on issues, understanding the facts or background of decisions they've made, or even working to find compromises.
On the assumption- There isn't a dollar figure, but there are quite thorough rules. (https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R46497) This spells out how the rules are established and what governs it. You can quite easily look up the authorizing legislation for USAID and see the allowed purposes for funds. Definitionally- that makes it not slush funding.
You ade alleging that. What you do with an allegation, is you prove it, and then you make the cuts. You don't make the cuts in dark of night and then say, "trust me, receipts coming later." This isnt the shoot-fucking-first-ask-questions-never wild west, its a goddamn democracy.
First- Many of the cuts haven't been legally conducted and, rather, represent waste themselves as they are going to disrupt activities and create litigation. So we, the people, will pay at least as much and have less productive results and have to pay for legal fees.
Second- Federal contracts are usually bid on the free market. There's an RFP, bidders, and the best fit wins. It's usually lowest cost while meeting requirements. I'm not sure why selling to the government is not a "real customer."
Third- It's reductive and inflammatory to say that not detailing out the contracts were for was because you would have seen it as wasteful corrupt spending. How would the prior commenter have even known what you see as wasteful and corrupt?
Can we at least agree that NGOs like Chelsea Clinton's Difficult to Verify Third World Orphan Feeding Service should be audited?
The argument from the right, which I have not seen anyone on the left address directly, is that a very large portion of government spending is laundered to well connected people by way of contracts to NGOs and other kinds of organizations where there is little or no verification that the money is actually being used as claimed. Often tax filings reveal that by its own admission, the organization in question is spending nearly all the money on overhead like travel and administration. Combine this with the fact that so many people go into government jobs with modest salaries but come out being worth 10s of millions of dollars and I have a hard time believing that anything but a wrecking ball is going to fix the system.
We are adding trillions to the national debt every year so we don't have money to waste.
Many politicians go into office promising reforms but until very recently it was always just slight nibbling around the edges, if anything.
Can you provide a basis in fact for the argument about a large portion of government spending? I'm asking because I think the argument is specious.
First- 49% of national spending goes to Social Security, Medicare and interest payments. The first is a direct payment, the second is very heavily regulated and has a bounty program for fraud waste and abuse, and the third is paid directly to bondholders.
Second- I'm almost certain that most, if not all, government contracts have auditing rights included. So we could audit them if we want, in fact almost every government agency has an inspector general to do just that.
Is it the one where you posted the dogegov.com website? Because that's the wrong website and not affiliated with the US government. That's probably why it got flagged. The real website is doge.gov, though that site isn't exactly great; it's basically a mirror of the @DOGE account on X. The "savings" section of the site says "receipts coming soon, no later than Valentine's Day," which is today.
Edit to add: doge.gov is exactly the site we're talking about here; it was offline a bit earlier, presumably while they cleared up the mess from their unsecured DB.
I think it's just time for you to stop digging. Every post is more inane than the last, and the last was you posting a link to a scam site and claiming it's an official government outlet. Just consider that if you can't tell the difference in that, you might be in over your head here.
> I posted a link to where DOGE is publishing their cuts in response to the comment you are replying to and it was flagged and removed instantly.
You posted a link to a non-official crypto meme website that contained no useful information about what is actually happening with DOGE the government agency.
Definitionally, at least in the US, Autism is a disability. It's a qualifier for the Americans with Disabilities Act.
The specific definition: "A disability is a physical or mental impairment that makes it harder for a person to perform certain activities or interact with the world around them."
For many ASD makes it harder to interact with the world around them, whether that's overstimulation, communication challenges, or something else.
It's reasonable to wonder if the disabilities were caused by brain damage post-partum or are symptomatic of his autism. At the same time we shouldn't forget the many others with ASD and similar disabilities who lack another explanation. Some of the population with ASD have limited communication skills and cannot pass as neurotypical.
One needs to be all but infallible to not match that definition, but normies are far from infallibility, they have difficulty with responsibility, technology, monopolies, network effect, propaganda, peer pressure, i.e. they can't interact quite well with either world or society.
You appear to have invented your own definition of disability and put it in quotes. A google search for your quoted definition only turns up this very web page. Odd.
I suspect it might not be an accident, but the AI made a mistake. I'm not the only one who notices strange content. Absurd crimes with absurd outcomes.
A series of articles about a fraud which side with the fraudster, and the comment page is filled with bots siding with the fraudster, even when you cite the law that is clearly at odds with their explanations (in a way that it shouldn't even be possible to commit such a fraud) they insist on "explaining" it to you.
>For many ASD makes it harder to interact with the world around them, whether that's overstimulation, communication challenges, or something else.
No it doesn't. They get frustrated by the other's inability to do so. They need to live in a society, and instead are surrounded by individuals who hardly interact, and hardly any culture, as everything has degraded to what the brain damaged majority can deal with. The music has simplified to a simple beat, the movies have simplified to beasts screaming half sentences at each other, and beating each other up, or, whatever.
Can you clarify what you mean by "social politics?"
I ask because rural health is effectively its own subspecialty in family medicine. There doesn't seem to be a locality equivalent for other geographic subgroups. This implies, to me, an extra level of focus on the needs of a population.
The claimed support for this (Cicero Institute) is a right-wing libertarian policy group that is rather notorious for is attempts to criminalize homelessness at the state and municipal level. I would take any policy suggestions they make with a giant grain of salt. In almost all cases "loosening of <X> regulations" involves screwing the poor and disenfranchised as much as possible with regards to X.
There's no shortage of it and there's a highly visible few ... but I wouldn't go so far as to say that HN is "full of" either far-right extremists or (US) libertarians.
Just in this little sub thread run there's clear push back on "far right libertarian nonesense" which is more the norm, there's always a few trying to run particular flags up some pole or another and there's generally many more pointing out issues in idealogical positions.
Various topics do devolve into attracting a small cluster of actively vocal shared bubble comments but these tend to disappear from ranking quickly as the comment noise outweighs the post vote and it sinks.
>but I wouldn't go so far as to say that HN is "full of" either far-right extremists or (US) libertarians.
"full of" can be interpreted many ways. I don't mean to say that the vast majority of people here are like that, but there are some very vocal members here, and I don't see them being down-modded to oblivion as I would in more moderate venues. In a forum full of college-educated Europeans, for instance, I would not see any of that nonsense.
It's a predominately US site, that brings a high tolerance for peculiarly US PoVs.
Many political comments on HN carry an implicit belief that only "free market" (for some variation of) capitalism OR extreme authoritarian "communism" exist as systems, many of the older coders grew up with Heinlein as teenagers which carried forward as influencing their thought, etc. Gun control and free speech are other topics that centre on a primarily US PoV, and so on down the line.
I'm neither North American nor European and always find it amusing | fascinating picking out the various implicit positions that comments carry.
I'm from the US myself, so I'm familiar with this kind of thinking, but it's just frustrating and annoying to me because it's really so juvenile. But it's basically the national religion for a significant (but minority) fraction of the American population.
And yeah, the gun control thing is really annoying too. Whenever a discussion thread here gets into guns, the Americans jump in and then it's always the same BS arguments about "gun control only keeps honest people from having guns". Americans are extremely myopic and have absolutely no idea what life is like outside their country, and can't even imagine what it's like in a developed country where gun ownership is extremely uncommon, among many other things. Despite the internet promising to bring the world closer together, it really hasn't, and as I've gotten older and more worldly, it just annoys me that Americans are so unable to see past their own borders.
I like how the article did its best to bury the lede that the crux of the discussion was how to better understand and manage these new technologies. To quote the panel prompt "[T]here are some real-world fears and ethical questions that need to be asked. Just because we can, should we?"
Isn't this exactly the type of discussion we want happening in a public forum?
There's a perverse incentive here where the military industrial complex is constantly pursuing more profits/contracts. That almost always means inventing new, terrible weapons. So the ethics end up taking a back seat to corporate greed.
The recent curative hepatitis treatments have paved the way for this. There are a variety of different approaches including statewide cost sharing funds that pool the cost across all the insurers in the state.
IIRC, single-payer health care systems like the NHS do functionally the exact same thing, which allows them to negotiate significant discounts. I remember reading about a gene therapy for a type of leukodystropphy that was in the millions of dollars, but got negotiated down. [1]
Paperclips and Crude Oil value, relative to another paperclip or barrel of oil, can be based on well-defined, finite, measurable standards that can be measured indeterminate of their location. That allows pricing to be indexed based on location, time, and quality relative to the standards.
A house's value relative to another house is an almost infinite number of variations of measurable and immeasurable variables. One example-- Traffic noise. Maybe the amount of noise is an issue for you, maybe the time of day of noise is an issue for me, maybe noise in one room vs. another. Moreover, there are very expensive switching costs for me
I would argue that the cost is less in setting up than in running and maintaining a site at the scale of Recreation.gov. That includes aspects of customer support.
Many of these agencies are forced into uncompetitive compensation structures which means contracting out most, if not all, of their technical work.
A major part of the issue is the government contracting system. In an attempt at fairness, it has massive amounts of oversight burden. That is, in turn, a barrier to additional competition for the work.
On the scale- We're talking about millions of checks a year. You've effectively proposed to ask every congressperson to spend all day signing checks. By doing so, you've also eliminated the time they spend working with constituents on issues, understanding the facts or background of decisions they've made, or even working to find compromises.
On the assumption- There isn't a dollar figure, but there are quite thorough rules. (https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R46497) This spells out how the rules are established and what governs it. You can quite easily look up the authorizing legislation for USAID and see the allowed purposes for funds. Definitionally- that makes it not slush funding.
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