Posted by rbanffy 4/15/2025
Meanwhile, his attempts to raise concerns internally within the NLRB preceded someone "physically taping a threatening note" to his door that included sensitive personal information and overhead photos of him walking his dog that appeared to be taken with a drone, according to a cover letter attached to his disclosure filed by his attorney, Andrew Bakaj of the nonprofit Whistleblower Aid.Seems way more obvious to me that Thiel/Vance/Musk would have Trump whacked... probably in the 2nd or 3rd year so that Vance can take power during a Reichstag fire with enough time left till elections in order for them to consolidate power.
Trump is primarily an actor pretending to be a gangster/president on TV to serve as a front for the real gangsters pilfering our government, at some point he will better serve those people by becoming a martyr in a way which transfers his power to someone else they control.
The tariffs are a “reichstag fire” lighter - assume extra powers as things go down in flames.
Trump's been trying to be political for decades. It's no coincidence that it only started working when they brought in social media teams.
His supporters will continue to parrot whatever their preferred influencers insist, even after he is gone.
Because that's the background, it explains Trump's prominence. He is trusted by Russia in ways a Musk or Thiel can never be, so if we're talking mysterious falls from balconies, it would be Musk, Thiel et al who are more in danger. They have to work with Trump, because Trump is the one Russia trusts, and that's because Russia made him. His wealth has never been real: he's an op from way back.
The Kremlin absolutely will not trust Elon Musk, nor should they. He's more capable, but he is most certainly scheming against them or even looking to supplant/eject Putin and replace him. Thiel is on less drugs and has the sense to stay out of the spotlight, so he will be trying to offer eternal life to Putin or something like that. Whether there's any truth to that is moot: it's whether Putin believes there is.
None of them are safe replacements for Trump, because they all hold power of their own. Trump stays so long as he lives, because he doesn't hold power of his own, and is therefore safe to use as the puppet.
But you're out of patience with the wrong sources.
https://fortune.com/2025/03/27/a-doge-staffer-working-as-a-s...
It makes some sense to hire a former blackhat to secure your computers, with appropriate supervision. It's a lot less reasonable to hire a former blackhat to get into your own computer and treasury systems to run audits. I could almost buy an argument like "If you have a legal right to get in but the door is locked, you hire a locksmith to crack the lock. So they needed hackers to take control of the systems away from obstructionists." But you would then send the locksmith home, not have them root through all the records in the building and decide who to fire.
> At one point Obama had then-VP Biden in charge of government efficiency efforts utilizing USDS to do it: literally the DOGE playbook with a different name, except the person in charge now actively wants to have fewer federal employees.
Could you provide more information on Biden's nominal assignment, and what exactly he was supposed to make more efficient? I couldn't find it by Googling, as everything is about DOGE now.
Anyway, on USDS in general. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Digital_Service:
> It provides consultation services to federal agencies on information technology. The agency's 2014 mandate was to improve and simplify digital service, and to improve federal websites.[7][8][9] The mission of the agency is to "deliver better government services to the American people through technology and design."
I could agree that these could be termed "efficiency", but clearly they are very different from the goals of DOGE. USDS had a 2016 value statement that included "Hire and empower great people." So yeah, they didn't reduce the government headcount, as it wasn't their goal and that's not the only way to deliver "efficiency" or government improvement.
The Obama origins are a historical footnote and possibly done this way by Trump for legal expediency reasons. But USDS and DOGE have basically nothing else in common. Most of the USDS staff were fired, their mission statement is replaced. You're holding USDS accountable to DOGE's goals, when USDS didn't share those goals. In 2024 USDS reported "$285 million in projected estimated savings over five years in infrastructure expenses for the Social Security Administration" according to Wikipedia, so it's not like they were allergic to saving money, they just didn't do it by axing the bureaucracy.
You can think DOGE is better or more effective than USDS if you want, but it's partisan distraction to claim they are nominally doing the same work.
Here's some more information about the differences between the original USDS and DOGE: https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/03/05/trump-doge-obama/
Well, right now, the flagged one was "Oh, you guys are adorable.", which didn't try to make a substantive argument or convey information. At least the Cheeto one did. "Adorable" is the least-civil and least-useful comment, so it's not only ideology that explains why it got flagged.
I'd love it if partisan comments regardless of affiliation were more aggressively pruned and the accounts behind them more aggressively moderated, but what we have currently is... not that.
- When Biden did dumb stuff, pointing that out was "right-leaning"
- When Trump does dumb stuff, pointing that out is "left-leaning"
Honestly, the greatest improvement to discourse would be stopping trying to apologize for current fuck-ups by pointing at past fuck-ups. That only leads to all fuck-ups being excused.
'Well the last guy...' -> Doesn't matter, not what we're talking about (and will even out in the long run)
They could have done the exact same thing in the middle of the day when nobody was home and everybody would be alive today.
They could have waited until daylight and knocked on the door with their warrant and walked right in.
They could have worn body cameras as ATF policy and common sense demands.
"Arms trafficking" is a funny way to say "buying guns legally and reselling them at gun shows" but let's say every single thing said about him is 100% true. If you think someone is a gun runner why wouldn't you take their house when they're not home to get all the evidence without having to worry about what they're doing? Why wouldn't you arrest him at the airport, where he almost certainly isn't armed, and police presence won't raise any alarms?
Among many other points that are wrong - everyone involved agrees there was plenty of knocking.
> They could have waited until daylight and knocked on the door with their warrant and walked right in.
Search warrants almost always begin at 6am - and when weapons are involved, they almost always execute them soon after.
> Search warrants almost always begin at 6am - and when weapons are involved, they almost always execute them soon after.
I'm not making any comment on whether or not this itself is standard practice, but it seems pretty obvious to me that if this raid was conducted 4 hours later Malinowski would be alive today.
It likely could've been resolved if they'd just sent him a letter asking to meet him at the Federal Building but who wants to be a desk jockey when you can play dress up like GI Joe?
But kick a door down in your sparkling clean body armor and perp walk some guy who makes a quarter million dollars a year out of his mansion and you're well on your way.
This is the form you fill out when you purchase a gun[0]. Please let me know where on this form you "promise not to resell" a firearm you purchase.
Straw purchases are illegal. Reselling firearms is not.
[0] https://www.atf.gov/firearms/docs/4473-part-1-firearms-trans...
Plenty of people here can have a problem with this administration and Vance himself, or not, without those who disagree pretending that we're a week away from goose stepping down 5th Avenue in NYC.
Your lack of paying attention to this or lack of understanding how bad that is is not a problem in the rest of us.
Before you give me this nonsense of "they are criminals", number one this is still an inhumane way to treat convicted people, and number two they have not been convicted of anything, number three there have been tons of reports of the accusations made against these people being total BS.
Earlier this week, Trump was on microphone telling El Salvador's president that he wants him to build five more gulags and that we will send American citizens there.
At this point it simply looks like DOGE is yet another attempt to use a popular trope (Govt fraud and waste) to push through changes specifically designed to give unchecked power to one individual.
This much concentrated, unchecked power opens up vast opportunities for fraud and corruption and there are pretty much no instances in history where it turned out be to a good thing in retrospect.
Also, very surprised this story made it to the front page. Typically, stuff like this gets flagged off the front page within minutes.
Why would that be, because it's too "political" for tech news? Or are there actual DOGE sympathies within the HN population?
I wouldn't mind that so much, except they're minimally-active in the comment section and instead use flagging. At least defend your beliefs.
Switching to https://news.ycombinator.com/active (/active) with showdead is a better HN experience, nowadays.
From what I see, even good comments with facts and sources that go against the prevalent narrative are either downvoted or flagged a good chunk of the time, which discourages people from commenting(as it's meant to be) because of lack of visibility. It can also make the commenters unable to post comments for hours because HN's rate limiter kicks in, so they are effectively silenced.
Also, many times they're attacked personally and those comments violating HN's etiquette are not downvoted or flagged. Not to mention very low quality Redditesque are also not downvoted or flagged, but are upvoted, which lowers the quality of HN as a whole.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43710265
It happens all the time.
Here's an example of my comment on the same topic.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43256114
The tone policing one has to do has to be done only by one side, the other "side" can write very low quality comments with personal attacks and not get downvoted or flagged as frequently. It's same on Reddit too. Absolute misinformation and FUD gets voted up if they favor the prevalent side and countering comments are downvoted creating a chilling effect to reduce visibility and discourage participation of folks that don't agree 100% with the political narrative.
That is exactly how Reddit became more and more extreme leading to popular subs becoming full of death threats at one point. And HN is on it's way there.
I can't change other people, but I can change myself.
Sometimes, it is what it is. But often I can find a way to more effectively say what I was trying.
Exhibit A: avoiding the dangling ad hom after an otherwise solid point. Seductive but unproductive.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43710568
Zero ad hominem or anything else.
And I see this all the time. Not to mention only one "side" is subject to this suppression so it's no surprise that they prefer to(or are forced by the site mechanics to) disengage from commenting.
If sourced verifiable facts stated in a neutral way are punished, what chance do opinions or personal takes have? It's a textbook example of an echo chamber.
Anything Musk related on here has always been prone to less constructive conversation, even before he became a part of the partisan political circus.
It was downvoted for a while.
> In general, many of your comments have a slight bitter, combative air to them that probably hampers your communication effectiveness
Comments that are much more bitter and combative than mine and without sources are upvoted all the time, because they fuel a certain political narrative.
I think retaliating like this just makes HN worse. If you stop flagging perfectly good stories, HN will be a marginally nicer place for discussion. I'll say the same to anyone here who admits to blanket flagging of comments.
Please keep trying to discuss your views. Sometimes they'll get smacked down unfairly, but other times they'll stick around. The more you try, the more they'll stick, and hopefully it can shift the tone of discussion here.
What a way to live.
> Yeah, we elected Trump to fuck up the ball of worms that your left cherished so much, and Trump is following through.
Perhaps you ought to look in the mirror.
Or just drive-by up/down according to if they agree with you or not.
Sorry that was your experience, and hopefully we can all be less... that... together.
AFAIK a small number of them is enough to hide stuff from the front page. I don't know why is this the case, honestly I don't see any benefit over full time-moderators hiding problematic stuff, only negatives. Like why should a small political group be able to distort the news on the front page?
Politics are everywhere. It’s how we negotiate consensus and make collective decisions. From what a government should do down to what features will be worked on this sprint and where are we having lunch today.
Tech being apolitical is an illusion, and a very dangerous one.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Gumroad is not a YC company and its founder has no influence over HN or YC. Joe, whilst being one of the most successful, is still just one YC-backed founder out of more than 10,000, and doesn't represent YC. Paul Graham, YC's co-founder (who, whilst retired, is still actively involved and is very influential at YC) heavily criticises the current U.S. administration almost every day on Twitter. The other figures named in the GP comment have no involvement or influence on YC, and indeed some have had very hostile disputes with YC partners and notable founders in the past.
This is not to claim that we moderators are perfectly impervious to every influence and incentive at every moment. Awareness of our own potential to be biased and influenced is essential to being able to do this job effectively.
I just think it's important to point out that things are not nearly as simple as the GP comment purports.
There are worse places on the internet, but HN's role first and foremost is to serve as advertising and a job board for YC. There's a structural bent away from anything that might be seen as harmful to that core purpose.
It's unfortunate.
It's important that HN give things back to YC in exchange for funding it. Otherwise the lack of balance would eventually make the site, and thus the community, unsustainable. For all of us who care about HN, this is the way to ensure its long-term survival. But there's no reason not to be transparent about what those things are, which is what the FAQ does.
For example, there's a startup launch on the front page right now which our software placed there this morning:
Launch HN: mrge.io (YC X25) – Cursor for code review - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43692476 - April 2025 (89 comments)
One nice thing about startup launch threads is that, to judge by the comments and upvotes they receive, the community often (though not always!) finds them interesting. They fall off the front page more quickly if they're not resonating.
I watched the steady decline as the bros slowly took over. I tried commenting, only to be flagged and downvoted. I tried sharing articles, only to have them flagged. Starting with Gamergate, and then accelerating with Musk's purchase of Twitter, and metastasizing into its current form when leaders in the community (Andreesen, Thiel, Sacks, Rabois, Calcanis, Horowitz, Palihapitiya, Maguire, Zuckerberg, Altman, etc) decided that fascism was worth protecting their crypto deals. And it's time to accept that this is the reality of Hacker News today (and it's time to forget what it once was).
This is quite literally one of the most significant cybersecurity fails of all time.
And yet, right now, it's not on the Hacker News home page. But an article about how many supernova explode per year is. An article about how to "win an argument" with a toddler or similar set-in-stone-thinker is. The number one submission is about a "back-of-a-napkin" probabalistic calculator.
So let's just say it like it is...
If you're going to be forgiving, you can say that Hacker News is consistently gamed by the bros who have taken over the tech industry. If you're in a less forgiving mood, you can say that Hacker News is the Pravda for the bros of the Venture community.
"Oh... it's hard with an algorithm!!!" Total BS. Hacker News is making a choice. Hacker News made a choice a long time ago. Hacker News continues to make the same choice.
For what it's worth, I also made a choice and walked away from this place. You all can do the same.
Let me assure you: the trash can bully vibes were default here far before you were.
HN is fine for what it is, but it's never ever been good.
I've stopped commenting here. I've made it a personal rule to only speak out against this tyranny and never talk about tech fluff, which is 100% of the front page of HN. I don't give two solid fucks about SQLite when the US government is throwing people in death camps in El Salvador.
This site is straight tech bro fascism. People are finally realizing that Elon isn't the guy his PR team created. He's not Tony Stark.
Founders are (generally) not hackers and not your friends. They are money men and will always follow the money.
And the admins/mods are still refusing to admit it.
Things have stabilized on roughly one thread on the evils of Republicans per day. Unfortunately they're managing a lot more evil per day than that.
1. there's a tsunami of intense (and important) political stories right now
2. HN has 30 slots on its frontpage
3. HN is not a current affairs site
In other words, the fundamentals themselves are twisted in a knot. I don't see how one gets around that.
The current problem is that news that are critic of the current administration are suppressed. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43462783 (U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat) was off the front page for like ~24 hours?
You are describing the problem that there are too many actual politic related news on the front page. That is not a problem right now.
If you find that hard to believe, see these lists:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43227619
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43168527
They are a couple months old now, but the point hasn't changed: the most-discussed (by far!) topic on Hacker News gets perceived as totally-suppressed-and-silenced by the passionate portion [1] of the audience that wants more of this material. I call this the "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded" theory of HN threads. [2]
This is not a new phenomenon [3]. Here's an example of the same thing from 5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23624962. That was me responding to someone complaining that the most-discussed-by-far topic on HN was being "aggressively removed from discussion".
Meanwhile, the audience that wants less of this material perceives the site as being completely-overrun-by-politics. To these we have to give the inverse of the current explanation. You can see from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869 how far back that goes.
Both of these perceptions are wrong. Both are consequences of the fundamentals I listed in the GP comment. And both are special cases of a more general phenomenon: for anyone passionate about topic X, the HN front page never contains enough X.
The most passionate users rarely express their preference as "I would prefer more X on HN". Rather they say: "It's unbelievable how X is completely and utterly suppressed and censored on HN".
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... I use 'passionate' or 'passion' a lot to describe these segments of the audience (on any topic and/or side). This is not intended disrespectfully. People have legitimate reasons for feeling passionately, and often the topics are far more important than most stories on HN. However, mitigating the power of these passions to shape HN is critical to keeping this the kind of site that it's supposed to be. If we didn't do this, HN would turn into a current affairs site overnight.
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[3] The reason this is not a new phenomenon is because of what I said in my GP comment: it follows from the fundamentals of the site.
p.s. The thread you linked to spent 15 hours on HN's front page. That's a lot.
Particularly the argument "these types of posts don't warrant good discussion and turn into flame wars" or generate too many comments per up-votes, a signal for bad thread quality - this has really none of that. If this remains flagged after a time it is a statement.
If this story is true, this is potentially the biggest breach of all time. It's tremendously relevant and that's why I'm annoyed.
The other day on /active, there was a story about a French politician being banned from running for office, due to being convicted of outright fraud for the second time. Absolutely nothing to do with technology or business, nothing to do with the USA. Pure politics in a foreign country. Not flagged.
There was a story directly below which involved the USA, technology and business, but had an uncomfortable narrative for some users. Flagged.
As someone who still likes this site a lot, this just makes me laugh at this point. I don't know how else to react.
If you assume that rhyme or reason is involved, then of course the results seem bizarrely inconsistent and the only models that fit will be Rube Goldberg or Ptolemaic ones. Simply understand that randomness plays the largest role, and the mystery goes away. (But I know that's less internet fun.)
In terms of all these political stories getting flagged: it's a simple consequence of there being a huge influx of intense political stories while HN's capacity remains "30 slots on the frontpage" (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). If these stories mostly didn't get flagged or otherwise moderator, HN would turn overnight into a current affairs site, which it is not and never has been.
That still leaves room for some stories with political overlap, though not nearly as many as the politically passionate would prefer. Btw, this is a special case of a more general principle: there are not nearly as many stories on any topic X as the X-passionate would desire. The front page, in that sense, satisfies no one!
But back to the politics thing—here are some links to past explanations about how we deal with that:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978389 has a good list of more.
For those who are up for a more complex explanation, this is really how I think about this problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42787306. The basic idea is to avoid predictable sequences: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
But of course there's no rhyme or reason to "users" either, since that's really just a statistical cloud (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
(Also, if anyone is weary of my inveterate self-linking: sorry, I am too. It's just somehow the only semi-efficient way I've found to give enough background information on various points of HN.)
Now that dang has confirmed it's incorrect, maybe stop sticking with it.
Case in-point: a US-based family member employed at a FAANG just told me that his Canadian coworkers now reset their phones prior to entering the USA, then restore from backup. This is somewhat similar to what happens when they go to China.
This is terrible for business. This kind of information should not be ignored.
The problem isn't that the major stories are deleted; it's that even if a story spends hours on the front page, the set of users who actually see it still has measure zero [1]. Then inevitably a few of the rest assume that they didn't see it because it was sinisterly suppressed, whether by mods or user flags.
Where this ends up getting us is the 'nobody goes there anymore it's too crowded' theory of HN threads! [2] It's always been like this—it's baked into the fundamentals of how HN works (the limited frontpage space, the dynamics of the internet, the fact that most people don't use HN Search). It's just showing up more intensely these days because the times are more intense and we've been in a tsunami phase for a few months now.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
---
Edit: I found these ones. Admittedly most weren't on the frontpage for all that long:
EU issues US-bound staff with burner phones over spying fears - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43680556 - April 2025 (46 comments)
How to lock down your phone if you're traveling to the U.S. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43630624 - April 2025 (338 comments)
Cell Phone OPSEC for Border Crossings - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43555597 - April 2025 (36 comments)
How to protect your phone and data privacy at the US border - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43480730 - March 2025 (98 comments)
Is it safe to travel to the United States with your phone? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43452474 - March 2025 (164 comments)
EFF Border Search Pocket Guide - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43441895 - March 2025 (32 comments)
Ask HN: Are you afraid to travel to US to tech conferences? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43422350 - March 2025 (198 comments)
I am really not complaining about moderation, just attempting to appeal to the users who I have assumed are doing the flagging, in general.
You are funding and dang is running a forum for curiosity while the basis for curiosity is under attack.
Your dilemma is to support free inquiry and a platform for curiosity resulting in you being an enemy of the administration or to obey their wishes in order to protect yourself and your assets. What happens when everyone in every position of power rationally protects themselves in the short term by selling out their values in the long term, when they bury their head in the sand and stay in denial, or they run away to another safer country?
How many of your peers have any form of integrity? How many of them wouldn't sell out their mother for a dollar? How many of them fund and participate in building a world anyone would want to live in instead of a world where they are the supreme rulers of the ruins. Concentration camps were built by business men excited by cheap labor.
You cannot have curiosity without solidarity against forces that would submit reason to power. You cannot have curiosity without a consent based society. Curiosity fundamentally challenges power, because it elevates reason above authority. Curiosity presumes that reason is the ultimate form of legitimacy.
Hacker news has a goal of staving off Eternal September, when new students, people uninitiated to academic rigor or professional social conventions, would flood Usenet every September when they received credentials from their academic institutions. Those very same universities which helped build the type of culture you hold in high regard are under direct attack.
Curious environments won't survive neutrality. Curious environments won't survive lack of solidarity with other institutions that inspire curiosity. Systems, like authoritarianism, that demand obedience rather than reason are the default, and they require active maintenance to prevent. Neutrality under these conditions is neglect of curiosity.
You've got me confused with someone else cause I ain't funding anything beside my burrito habit.
As to the rest of this stuff... I don't find it terribly persuasive, personally. We do all have all sorts of moral responsibilities, individual and collective ones and it behooves us to meet them. We do not have a responsibility to turn every single facet and corner of our lives into some instrument of political power and expression - those are important individual (and group) choices and there's a name for disregarding them and imposing them on others - totalitarianism.
That is... other than sensationalism, which appears to be the story here.
That FAANG employed Canadians are suddenly taking these precautions when entering the USA, as standard practice, when coming to a meeting. Nobody can gaslight me into believing that this is a not a new thing.
Some people, who happen to be employed at a FAANG corp, have recently decided to protect their smart device during a border crossing, and this is cause for alarm?
What exactly is on their smart device they are afraid CBP might be interested in? Why did they not protect their device before? Why now? Are there occurrences of FAANG employees having their devices taken during border crossings? For what purpose?
Unless you have something definitive, this sounds like some alarmist individuals deciding to take their own personal security to the level that was already recommended of them.
Do you wonder why Canada has been issuing travel warnings for people travelling to the US? Or why they've been treating the US as a hostile power given that the current admin has threatened to invade Canada and make it the 51st state? All of which are leading to a massive drop in tourism to the US?
As an example, as a European, price a round trip ticket from Prague to Seattle, for around 2 weeks from now. The price is currently <60% of normal. It's ~$420.
These are the facts on the ground.
I did some fact checking on your ticket prices - you are quoting ultra-budget carriers that are normally in that price range. Normal tickets are $1200+, as you would expect.
There's plenty going on right now that you don't need to make stuff up to back up your narrative. Use something real...
Of course this is fucking cause for alarm. You are either cluelessly naive, or gaslighting.
- Peter Thiel
- Elon Musk
- Marc Andreessen
- Curtis YarvinI'm mostly convinced a lot of stuff is flagged and the mods work overtime to pick and choose what to unflag. On what metric? No clue, if I'm being honest.
edit: and to be clear, I was not originally critiquing the modding here.
But maybe the far more appropriate term has been there all along:
> The Knights Who Say "Ni!"
Many forums (including this one) have bans on "politics" or topics that are "inflammatory". 95% of the time what constitutes either is simply "things I disagree with".
For US politics in particular, as much as the right-wing cries about being censored, social media in particular bends over backwards not to silence such views whereas anything critical of those right-wing positions gets flagged or downranked as being "political" (eg [1]).
Typically this process isn't direct. ML systems will find certain features in submissions that get them marked as "inflammatory" or "low quality" but only on one end of the spectrum. For sites such as HN, reddit and Tiktok, right-wing views have successfully weaponized user safety systems by brigading posts and flagging them. That might then go to a human to review and their own biases come into play.
As for France vs the US, I'm sorry but France is irrelevant. As we've seen in the last 2 weeks, what the US does impacts the entire world. All the big social media sites are American (barring Tiktok) so American politics impacts what can and can't be said on those platforms.
Twitter has become 4chan, a hotbed for neo-Nazis, racists and homephobes.
And which French politican are we talking about? Marine Le Pen? If so, the relevance is the rise of fascism in Europe between National Front in France, Reform in the UK, AfD in Germany and, of course, Hungary.
[1]: https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/leaked-data-israeli-censorshi...
Here on HN anti-musk/regime posts get deleted automatically, TERF and other bigoted posters are allowed to post through spam filters from freshly made accounts, and everything else that isn't clearly delineated as 'liberal media' but negative for the regime just gets flagged or deranked from listing.
HN has shifted into a lagging Reddit, and preemptively shutting down any discourse about the falling quality of discourse on HN is ludicrous and plain annoying.
HN has changed, and A LOT of Reddit does leak onto HN, and this absolutely deserves conversation.
> Yuri Orlov: [Narrating] Every faction in Africa calls themselves by these noble names - Liberation this, Patriotic that, the Democratic Republic of something-or-other... I guess they can't own up to what they usually are: the Federation of Worse Oppressors Than the Last Bunch of Oppressors. Often, the most barbaric atrocities occur when both combatants proclaim themselves Freedom Fighters.
For the sake of context, this is an old Soviet-era joke, that translates to about the following:
> In "Pravda" (The Truth, CPSU's newspaper) there are no news. In "Izvestiya" (The News, national newspaper of the USSR, under the control of the Supreme Soviet) there is no truth.
Technically, maybe you can squint and find small pieces that are more efficient but in the grand scheme of things they goal doesn't seem to be a smaller government.
Reducing headcount reduces labor costs and can be a form of financial efficiency. Reducing headcount also usually reduces the sheer number of people involved in any project, much like a small startup can move drastically quicker than a large, established org.
That said, there goal here doesn't seem to be clear as to what is being made efficient and they definitely aren't reducing the budget or size of government (outside of literal headcount, most people complain instead of red tape and regulations).
Their real goal is more likely a combination of grift and settling grudges.
Edit - typos
Btw. there is NO reason why they couldn't do all of that in a sincere way. Trump was voted in for 4 years.
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/02/teen-on-musks-doge-team-...