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Yep. From the article:

> This lack of transparency could become a greater issue under the Trump administration, which has vowed to ramp up the government's cyber offensive operations, suggesting that the government demand for zero-day vulnerabilities may increase over the next four years. If this occurs, the government’s previous statements that the VEP favors disclosure and defense over withholding and offense may no longer be true. ...

> “The VEP and that number of 90 percent was one of the few places where the president and the White House could set the dial on how much they liked defense vs offense,” says Jason Healey, senior research scholar at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and former senior cybersecurity strategist for CISA. “[The Trump administration] could say we’re disclosing too [many vulnerabilities]. If the default [in the past] was to disclose unless there is a reason to keep, I could easily imagine the default is going to be to keep unless there is a reason to disclose.”


An actual answer (linking to archive.org since usaid.gov has been taken down): https://web.archive.org/web/20250117221701/https://www.usaid...

> The information about USAID’s development and humanitarian assistance programs is intentionally open and public; to perform the agency’s mission, USAID employees work directly with non-government organizations, contractors, United Nations organizations and host country governments. However, in order for USAID employees to effectively and efficiently carry out the agency’s programs, they often must have access to sensitive and sometimes classified information provided by other federal departments and agencies. Such information may pertain to U.S. foreign policy and relations as well as security conditions and threat data.


Many in the GOP are generally opposed to federally-funded free tax return filing: https://pennsylvaniaindependent.com/politics/irs-direct-file...

> In December, however, Kelly and 28 House Republican colleagues wrote to President-elect Donald Trump to ask him to end the program: “We write to urge you to take immediate action, including but not limited to a day-one executive order, to end the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) unauthorized and wasteful Direct File pilot program. The program’s creation and ongoing expansion pose a threat to taxpayers’ freedom from government overreach, and its rollout and structural flaws have already come at a steep price.”


All the dramatic language they use to dress up their claims is completely ridiculous.


The argument (if you take it in the most charitable light) is that reducing barriers to paying taxes will make people less averse to paying taxes. So they fight any effort to bring sanity to the tax code or tax payment process.

So even taken charitably I think they are wrong. But I do believe it is simply just corrupt and malicious.


You'd think the threat of having your bank accounts frozen and armed law enforcement officers showing up at your door were the most significant factors in making people "less averse" to paying taxes. I doubt reducing the barriers to filing your taxes correctly makes anyone happier about having to pay taxes either.


You should see the crazy shit they say about the IRS hiring 80,000 more employees that they desperately need.


What the actual fuck. Simplifying government paperwork = government overreach. Got it.


I think they mostly started with geolocation-dependent names in the early 2010s, e.g. Kashmir and Palestine.


that's different, they had location-dependent names at the time of this article too, the issue is specifically about the fact that even if you have location-dependent names you'd use the name that is commonly used in that location, not an arbitrary regulation name.


I thought they used the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) from the USGS. If this buffoonery does pass, it will reflect in the government official data source - and thus on Google maps?


And nobody outside of the US cares about what's inside those official databases. If Trump changes the name of China to "Smelly Food Country" it might be required to change this in US Google Maps But if this propagates to Google Maps in other countries people will just laugh at them and might stop using it.


But they should see what their home country calls it? I am totally against this, but don't really think Google is bending the knee or hard-coding a name here.


I don't think Google is required to change anything, since it's not a government agency.


> There was an open letter in 2020 summer from a lot of "prominent scientists" that claimed that suddenly social distancing didn't matter because BLM.

If you're referring to this letter, that characterization is pretty much the opposite of what it says: https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/05/health/health-care-open-lette...


>While everyone is concerned about the risk of Covid, there are risks with just being black in this country that almost outweigh that sometimes.

Does it?

>White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19.

>However, as public health advocates, we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission. We support them as vital to the national public health and to the threatened health specifically of Black people in the United States.

Do you think that anyone that has put his name under such idiotic sentence deserves state money in any form - except payments under ADA?


> Does it?

Sure .. All the risks of being black in the USofA and the additional risk of being even more likely to contract COVID while black.

https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/28/11/22-0072_article#:~:t...


Prediction: The US deficit will be higher in 2028 than in 2024.


As long as we fire all the people who measure these things, they won't exist. /s


How much do you think the deficit will be reduced by the digital information-scrubbing described in the post?


> Genuine relationships, rooted in empathy and a steadfast commitment to the good of the other, are essential and irreplaceable in fostering the full development of the human person.

This reminds me of one of the main themes of Neal Stephenson's 1995 novel "Diamond Age": being "raised" by an AI agent, with vs without a caring human in the loop.


It's kind of odd that blog post doesn't mention that the biographical assessment it's talking about was only used between 2014 and 2018.


It says "In 2016, Congress passed Public Law 114-190, which among other things banned the use of biographical assessments as a first-line hiring tool for air traffic controllers."


> Considering that the head of the FAA and TSA were forced to resign

For context, the heads of the FAA and TSA are supposed to serve 5-year terms. The FAA Admin (Michael Whitaker) who was forced out started serving in Oct 2023. The TSA Admin (David Pekoske) was first appointed in 2017, and then nominated for another 5-year term in 2022.

As far as I'm aware, this is the first time those positions have ever been told to resign by a new administration.


I've been avoiding the typical outrageous statements from the current POTUS for many years, but his comments at his press conference today, about how DEI hiring could be responsible for this accident, are just unbelievable. And all of a sudden it seems to have made him to decide that the FAA needs a director today.


Yeah same here. Somehow these latest today by T have gone overboard and struck a chord. What an absolute bozo he is.


[flagged]


Citation needed. "DEI did it" is just the new conservative buzzword for everything.

You should be clear what you mean by saying this is DEI: you (and POTUS) are saying "they hired too many female and/or black air traffic controllers, passing over superior white male applicants, thus leading to this accident".

Air traffic controllers go through objective standards-based training and testing. Are you proposing that the FAA is applying lower standards based on gender or skin color?

There is and has been a shortage of applicants for the past few years. Many controllers are over-worked with excess hours and little to no vacation time. Shifts are often under-staffed.


Update: I'll retract part of this. I'll stand by the part about conservative buzzwords and the dogwhistle of "you hired too many women and blacks".

But it appears the FAA did have some kind of "biographical questionnaire" that was not objective and standards based. I'm 100% against that kind of system or anything else that seems like a quota. Making an effort to recruit from all communities and making a welcoming environment is good. Lowering standards is not.

The other thing I'll stand behind is the ATC pipeline has not been fully-staffed for a very long time, pre-dating COVID and the even earlier biographical questionnaire. It appears both of those things made it worse (independently).


With all due respect, Hacker News is not the place for making blanket assertions with no references. Please post a citation if you have one. Otherwise please don't waste readers' time with unfounded rumors.


Poster may be referring to the complaints about the devaluation of the standardized CTI process https://ojs.library.okstate.edu/osu/index.php/CARI/article/d...

There was also a lawsuit against the last Sec of Transportation which I believe was related but not too sure.


"People are saying"

What reports, specifically?


The same ones Trump hears, probably.

FAA ATC has been underfunded and understaffed for years. That has nothing to do with DEI.


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