EPTUS Politics Mega-thread - Page 4785
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Now that we have a new thread, in order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a complete and thorough read before posting! NOTE: When providing a source, please provide a very brief summary on what it's about and what purpose it adds to the discussion. The supporting statement should clearly explain why the subject is relevant and needs to be discussed. Please follow this rule especially for tweets. Your supporting statement should always come BEFORE you provide the source. If you have any questions, comments, concern, or feedback regarding the USPMT, then please use this thread: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/website-feedback/510156-us-politics-thread | ||
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ZerOCoolSC2
9059 Posts
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JimmyJRaynor
Canada17578 Posts
"I’ll be calling our great American Hockey Team this morning to spur them on towards victory tonight against Canada," he said, adding that he won't be at the game because he will speaking with governors in Washington. "We will all be watching, and if Governor Trudeau would like to join us, he would be most welcome," Trump said. LOL, Trudeau and Freeland spoke with substantial disdain about Republican voters for years. This is return fire. https://www.tsn.ca/nhl/trump-wishes-team-usa-good-luck-ahead-of-4-nations-final-1.2254803 Both of Canada's major sports networks are talking Trump rather than hockey. LOL. A sign of the health of the USA's middle class is the growing #s of youth hockey participants in the country. Hockey is a very expensive sport. For the first time ever, the USA has more youth hockey players than Canada. If the USA wins tonight it'll be very far from a "Miracle On Ice". It'll be expected. On February 21 2025 00:58 KwarK wrote: It's like their repeated claim of people over 100 years old receiving social security. The SSA uses COBOL, an older coding language, that stores dates using an epoch system with 0 being an arbitrary point in time with dates counted forward from then. If there is invalid or no data on the birth year of an individual then they're going to show up as hundreds of years old. That doesn't mean the SSA believes they literally are hundreds of years old, it's just if you calculate age by "current day sequential number minus sequential number on day of birth" then that's just what 2025 minus "" looks like. source? It is amazing how much easy money there is modernizing COBOL and xBASE systems. For almost 20 years I've been living off of a compiler I made in 2007 that compiles Foxpro/Clipper/Visual Objects/dBASE3 into C#. | ||
KwarK
United States44047 Posts
On February 21 2025 01:34 Sadist wrote: oBlade the point is Musk and his team are lying. The point is that they’ve turned absolute power over government databases to a team that has no experience with databases. | ||
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JimmyJRaynor
Canada17578 Posts
On February 21 2025 01:42 KwarK wrote: The point is that they’ve turned absolute power over government databases to a team that has no experience with databases. a good computer scientist can easily pick up any legacy database technology. | ||
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WombaT
Northern Ireland26971 Posts
On February 21 2025 01:07 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote: And then the simpletons run with it and it grows into this huge conspiracy that's harder to get them to understand because Musk said it and MTG and her idiocy propogated it. So it just doesn't die. Therefore, when even a miniscule amount of errors are found, that have no real impact on anything, people think there's widespread fraud going on. Rinse and repeat with everything. From the FDA, CDC, IRS, etc. Each agency was created for a reason. There are more delicate and easier solutions than just firing wholesale and trying to recover those people once they realize "oh shit, we need nuclear scientists and admins to monitor nukes. Who knew?!?!?!" or "Well, I guess we should have a sizeable amount of people overlooking the food that Americans eat and the drugs they take because who knew XYZ would cause ABC and death?!?!?" It's a fucking nauseating headache to watch this go on. The aggravating shit is it’s not even hard to understand, you can convince anyone who isn’t a myopic lunatic in about 5 minutes with no facts or figures whatsoever and just basic logic. Facts and figures help of course. Actual technical expertise, even more so. Benefit/welfare fraud is a classic one. You either fund ways to catch it, or you massively reduce financial privacy and automate it. Just arbitrarily cutting programs ends up fucking legitimate claimants more than it catches any kind of fraud. But people who advocate for such programs don’t want the state to spend more in doing it, nor sacrifice their privacy in such regards. Likewise fucking DOGE. If you’re not auditing properly, or indeed setting benchmarks on what systems are supposed to do then you’re just arbitrarily slashing things, some of which may indeed be actively inefficient. These folks are just ideological zealots, or self-interested pragmatists who want to fuck average Joe and Jane. The US already has endemic obesity rates as it is, and a level of opioid addiction that is completely atypical amongst comparable nations. But sure let’s further slash regulation, what could possibly go wrong there? | ||
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WombaT
Northern Ireland26971 Posts
On February 21 2025 01:43 JimmyJRaynor wrote: a good computer scientist can easily pick up any legacy database technology. Then hire them? DOGE aren’t doing that, or migrating old legacy systems to something easier to maintain in 2025 are they? | ||
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KwarK
United States44047 Posts
If I said Today I saw a snake and a parrot. It was such fun to see the snake running around, jumping, sniffing other snakes at the snake park. and it turned out that it was a dog, not a snake, would you have absolute confidence that I also saw a parrot? | ||
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DarkPlasmaBall
United States46041 Posts
On February 21 2025 01:31 oBlade wrote: It's a huge relief to know the government might not actually be actively paying benefits to a bunch of people it literally believed are 150 years old, and it's just a simple case of the government not knowing the age associated with millions of SSNs or knowing whether they are alive or not. My confidence in government competence is no further shaken. There are plenty of government agencies that are flawed and inefficient, but Trump and Musk are literally just lying and making up nonsense. Every day there are unvetted reports (especially on Twitter) of Musk/Trump/Republicans claiming that they discovered some other clearly-fabricated-bullshit that they're going to clean up and should be celebrated for doing so. Tens of billions of dollars magically found here, hundreds of billions there! How nice it must be to just invent daily heroic deeds and never need to worry about any accountability, because remember that Trump already fired all the watchdogs, lifelong civil servants, and independent, third-party assessors who could have potentially called out Trump's lies. In fact, the only - rare - corroborating stories are when Trump and his underlings fire necessary workers and try to eliminate necessary jobs, like the ones that keep our nuclear arsenal safe... because the important employees losing their jobs are the ones able to corroborate. | ||
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oBlade
United States6205 Posts
Luckily after the acting commissioner resigned, she was replaced by a career public servant from specifically the fraud department, one who shares the administration's goals, until such time as Trump's SSA nominee clears the Senate. On February 21 2025 01:47 WombaT wrote: Then hire them? DOGE aren’t doing that, or migrating old legacy systems to something easier to maintain in 2025 are they? It's been all of 4 weeks. People have had decades to fix this. The indignation is wildly misplaced here. We are still getting pictures of the issues. There is nothing wrong with being trusting and thinking oh there are surely people taking care of things, my government couldn't be that bad. When people show plainly what's broken, the answer should not be "no I'm sure that's on purpose, that's just how things work, it's like that for a reason." The answer should be oh interesting, I never knew that, let's fix that incredibly uncontroversial thing. It's not a judgment to just admit that. Everything the government does can be correctly understood as a "benefit" if it's an enormous ship with nobody running it and nobody who cares enough to evaluate benefit versus cost. For example a hamburger is a nice benefit, we enjoy a good hamburger. But not at $1000. Unless it's not your money, of course? On February 21 2025 01:50 KwarK wrote: Also Oblade why are you unquestioningly accepting everything else said in the same statement by the man who, in that statement, demonstrated that he has absolutely no clue what he’s talking about. If I saidand it turned out that it was a dog, not a snake, would you have absolute confidence that I also saw a parrot? What are the audited and verified rates of SSA fraud, identity theft, erroneous benefits, etc...? I don't give a fuck he saw a salamander or a porcupine, if he says he saw something I'm going to take the binoculars and have a look myself and not intentionally gouge my eyes out then blindfold and eyepatch myself for good measure just to spite him for being muh fascist. | ||
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KwarK
United States44047 Posts
On February 21 2025 02:01 oBlade wrote: The 1875 "debunking" does not mesh with the numbers in the publicly shared buckets. There are notions that since there are safeguards to prevent payouts over certain ages, the database is not an issue. That's nice except that means you're inevitably paying some dead people under the cutoff age. What's the size of that? Okay, if the database says they're alive, but they're dead, and not getting benefits, what's the problem? Identity theft. You can still have nice fake credit scores, loans, also everything an illegal immigrant needs with someone else's SSN. Luckily after the acting commissioner resigned, she was replaced by a career public servant from specifically the fraud department, one who shares the administration's goals, until such time as Trump's SSA nominee clears the Senate. It's been all of 4 weeks. People have had decades to fix this. The indignation is wildly misplaced here. We are still getting pictures of the issues. There is nothing wrong with being trusting and thinking oh there are surely people taking care of things, my government couldn't be that bad. When people show plainly what's broken, the answer should not be "no I'm sure that's on purpose, that's just how things work, it's like that for a reason." The answer should be oh interesting, I never knew that, let's fix that incredibly uncontroversial thing. It's not a judgment to just admit that. Everything the government does can be correctly understood as a "benefit" if it's an enormous ship with nobody running it and nobody who cares enough to evaluate benefit versus cost. For example a hamburger is a nice benefit, we enjoy a good hamburger. But not at $1000. Unless it's not your money, of course? What are the audited and verified rates of SSA fraud, identity theft, erroneous benefits, etc...? I don't give a fuck he saw a salamander or a porcupine, if he says he saw something I'm going to take the binoculars and have a look myself and not intentionally gouge my eyes out then blindfold and eyepatch myself for good measure just to spite him for being muh fascist. But you’re not looking for yourself, you’re taking it at face value. He said that there were people who are hundreds of years old getting SS and people who are dead getting SS. The first one was him and his team literally being unable to read the records they were looking at. You accept this but presume that somehow they learned to read halfway through the sentence and therefore the second assertion is legit. | ||
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WombaT
Northern Ireland26971 Posts
On February 21 2025 02:01 oBlade wrote: The 1875 "debunking" does not mesh with the numbers in the publicly shared buckets. There are notions that since there are safeguards to prevent payouts over certain ages, the database is not an issue. That's nice except that means you're inevitably paying some dead people under the cutoff age. What's the size of that? Okay, if the database says they're alive, but they're dead, and not getting benefits, what's the problem? Identity theft. You can still have nice fake credit scores, loans, also everything an illegal immigrant needs with someone else's SSN. Luckily after the acting commissioner resigned, she was replaced by a career public servant from specifically the fraud department, one who shares the administration's goals, until such time as Trump's SSA nominee clears the Senate. It's been all of 4 weeks. People have had decades to fix this. The indignation is wildly misplaced here. We are still getting pictures of the issues. There is nothing wrong with being trusting and thinking oh there are surely people taking care of things, my government couldn't be that bad. When people show plainly what's broken, the answer should not be "no I'm sure that's on purpose, that's just how things work, it's like that for a reason." The answer should be oh interesting, I never knew that, let's fix that incredibly uncontroversial thing. It's not a judgment to just admit that. Everything the government does can be correctly understood as a "benefit" if it's an enormous ship with nobody running it and nobody who cares enough to evaluate benefit versus cost. For example a hamburger is a nice benefit, we enjoy a good hamburger. But not at $1000. Unless it's not your money, of course? What are the audited and verified rates of SSA fraud, identity theft, erroneous benefits, etc...? I don't give a fuck he saw a salamander or a porcupine, if he says he saw something I'm going to take the binoculars and have a look myself and not intentionally gouge my eyes out then blindfold and eyepatch myself for good measure just to spite him for being muh fascist. People aren’t saying that though. People are somewhat suspicious of a partisan quango with little to no oversight apparently finding all these savings in 4 weeks. Part-headed by someone with obvious massive conflicts of interest. If DOGE lacked basically all of those factors, people don’t have some innate issue with trimming the fat where it’s found. | ||
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ZerOCoolSC2
9059 Posts
On February 21 2025 02:25 WombaT wrote: People aren’t saying that though. People are somewhat suspicious of a partisan quango with little to no oversight apparently finding all these savings in 4 weeks. Part-headed by someone with obvious massive conflicts of interest. If DOGE lacked basically all of those factors, people don’t have some innate issue with trimming the fat where it’s found. NPR recently (yesterday) posted this investigation with the charts and tables to back it up. Link below. Excerpt mine https://www.npr.org/2025/02/19/nx-s1-5302705/doge-overstates-savings-federal-contracts "There's no doubt that these young people [Musk] has working for him are very intelligent coders, genius coders, but they're limited," retired senior contracting officer Christopher Byrne said, referring to DOGE team members who have apparently been identifying cuts across government agencies. "They don't understand the processes, they don't understand how things work, they don't understand contracts, they don't understand grants," Byrne said. | ||
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Gorsameth
Netherlands22415 Posts
On February 21 2025 03:06 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote: Them not understanding how things work is by design. If they did they would recognise the damage their cuts do.NPR recently (yesterday) posted this investigation with the charts and tables to back it up. Link below. Excerpt mine https://www.npr.org/2025/02/19/nx-s1-5302705/doge-overstates-savings-federal-contracts | ||
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KwarK
United States44047 Posts
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oBlade
United States6205 Posts
On February 21 2025 02:13 KwarK wrote: But you’re not looking for yourself, you’re taking it at face value. He said that there were people who are hundreds of years old getting SS and people who are dead getting SS. The first one was him and his team literally being unable to read the records they were looking at. You accept this but presume that somehow they learned to read halfway through the sentence and therefore the second assertion is legit. There are dead people getting SS. Obviously. There are people hundreds of years old in the database. Not flagged as dead. I don't know whether he had explicitly said with certainty that meant those people were being dispensed SS benefits. It's not a statement in what I saw, so at the moment I'd be more inclined to believe that part is you reading what you want into it, because your baseline assumption is to find the wrongest interpretation to ascribe. The database is wrong. That's a problem by itself. That's what I take at face value and that's what SSA has admitted before. As to exactly how many dead people are cashing in? And for how many dollars? I definitely support looking further into it. Seems more important than splitting a hair about what exactly someone did or didn't say as an excuse to throw the whole thing out. Because I don't personally think it's a high priority to prove I'm smarter than one of the only people who is actually making a concerted push to fix something. On February 21 2025 03:56 KwarK wrote: I mean they reported $8m as $8000m in a number that went onto their official website and progress report and it was touted as their biggest success so they’re not that intelligent. DOGE wasn't around in 2022 when ICE recorded the procurement. This is the flawless US government in action. https://www.fpds.gov/common/jsp/LaunchWebPage.jsp?command=execute&requestid=239925922&version=1.5 | ||
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Velr
Switzerland10903 Posts
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KwarK
United States44047 Posts
Also for context someone should intuitively be able to tell whether they're canceling a $8000m contract or a $8m contract. For example if the contract is for a boat then this is about $8m + Show Spoiler + ![[image loading]](https://www.dcms.uscg.mil/portals/10/CG-9/Surface/RBS/RBS_011818_MainPage.png?ver=2018-01-18-163453-700) whereas $8000m looks like two of these. + Show Spoiler + ![[image loading]](https://www.seaforces.org/usnships/cvn/CVN-68_DAT/CVN-68-USS-Nimitz-195.jpg) If I told you the first boat cost $8000m you'd intuitively think something was off there. Similarly if I told you I got two of the second boat for a combined $8m you'd again have questions. | ||
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Acrofales
Spain18303 Posts
On February 21 2025 01:07 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote: And then the simpletons run with it and it grows into this huge conspiracy that's harder to get them to understand because Musk said it and MTG and her idiocy propogated it. So it just doesn't die. Therefore, when even a miniscule amount of errors are found, that have no real impact on anything, people think there's widespread fraud going on. Rinse and repeat with everything. From the FDA, CDC, IRS, etc. Each agency was created for a reason. There are more delicate and easier solutions than just firing wholesale and trying to recover those people once they realize "oh shit, we need nuclear scientists and admins to monitor nukes. Who knew?!?!?!" or "Well, I guess we should have a sizeable amount of people overlooking the food that Americans eat and the drugs they take because who knew XYZ would cause ABC and death?!?!?" It's a fucking nauseating headache to watch this go on. People used to trust the experts to know what they were doing. Now people with no brains and no schooling open up a notebook, do some bad analysis and post it on xitter as if they have just uncovered a huge conspiracy. Generally speaking, if this system has been in use and working "well enough" for a "long enough" time, if you are finding gaping holes in it, it's you, not the system, who is doing something wrong. I literally just ran into a case like this at my work. I was adjusting a threshold for a model, and in my query results I noticed that results are being flagged as true with a minimum value of 0 and a maximum value of 1. That is not good, as it's supposed to have a maximum value of whatever threshold I put. So I was starting to write up a report (end of workday after all) to tell people and be ready to pick it up again tomorrow, when I thought I should at least also check the reverse. And I saw that the system was rejecting samples with a correct minimum value. So I did a further check, and saw that the actual problem is, as it often is, between chair and keyboard. When I looked at how many samples the system was accepting despite being above the threshold, it was <<< 1%. So just some insignificant noise, probably caused by the system by default accepting stuff if some problem somewhere occurs. Now obviously I know the max and min are usually meaningless due to exactly that, but a max and a min are far easier to SQL than a 99th percentile, and I wasn't thinking very hard about it when I was writing this quick sanity check: my main task after all was to determine the new threshold to set. The system is working fine, has been working fine for ages, and just needs to be slightly tuned. So yeah, 15 minutes later, I had fixed my little data problem, and 5 minutes after that had determined the new threshold. I'm still not sure where the few weird values exactly come from, nor do I care. There are about a million little inconsistencies like that in any data I look at. Because real world systems are noisy and complex. Moreso if they include humans. So there are undoubtedly all kinds of weird inconsistencies in the SSA, FDA, CDC, etc. systems. Finding them doesn't mean you've uncovered a conspiracy. It means you've uncovered an inconsistency. Maybe one that 15 minutes of further checking would resolve, but not if the first thing you do is run to xitter about it. | ||
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Hat Trick of Today
201 Posts
Exactly the same thing is happening here. There’s a couple of people here who know databases are pointing out Musk is being a ridiculous idiot talking about databases in a way that even a 1st year university student wouldn’t and therefore shouldn’t be taken seriously while he’s doing baby’s 1st query search trying to find fraud. Which is irrelevant to these supporters who take Musk at his absolute word because they desperately want him to be true or are riding him so deep that they truely believe he’s the 21st century renaissance man. | ||
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Billyboy
1813 Posts
On February 19 2025 22:01 Jockmcplop wrote: The Guardian has an interesting article about left wing activists and their relationship to the rest of the political spectrum. The article and study are about UK activists, but I'm fairly sure it applies in the US too. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/feb/19/leftwing-activists-less-likely-work-political-rivals-other-uk-groups-study It does alot of stating the obvious, but also applies heavily to half the conversations that occur in this thread. Thanks for posting this, it got lost in the flood but it is great information. I feel like the message is going to be ignored, maybe partly because people like the uniqueness of being part of the special few. The moralizing and purity tests are also bad for brining more to the tent. The right has shown massive success with humor and telling people they are OK and correct. I also agree with you and others on the Racism and Nazi stuff. No one believes themselves to be racist, so when you call them that, they just think you are being insulting and they then think the others called racists are not that bad. There is also a significant group of the "MAGA" or whatever you want to call this populist movement across the world that know basically nothing about history and politics. Many believe that Nazi's were communists because they believe Left means more government control and right means less. | ||
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