[michaeljx]

Having a young optimistic uncynical person, untainted by years of painful lessons and bitterness, attempt to fix these systems with raw speed and brute urgency, might be the exact shock a system like the public sector needs.

People complain about Facebook's move fast and break things philosophy whenever something bad happens, completely ignoring the fact that they are a trillion dollar corporation that 20 years ago did not exist.

Sometime you just have to get rid of the guardrails and YOLO it

[UncleMeat]

"Move fast and break things" may work well when you are making an entertaining website and selling ads. It works vastly less well when "break things" means people depending on the government for medical coverage die.

There's a reason why the people constructing bridges and nuclear power plants don't "move fast and break things" even if the people building a fundamentally unimportant website can do that.

[redcobra762]

...not when the consequences are "people die of starvation because their EBT didn't go through."

Moving fast and breaking things only works when the things you're breaking are low stakes. Grandma not getting her daily pic dump of her grandson is not the same as grandma not getting her groceries.

[djmips]

People are going to die of starvation from this administration.

[uLogMicheal]

People tend to forget that move fast and break things also includes move fast and fix things. No one will starve from this.

[UncleMeat]

How much are you willing to bet on this? Will you be willing to pay into a fund to mitigate suffering caused by this nonsense?

[michaeljx]

Well,it didn't say anywhere that they are stopping grandma's checks. And if the system is so fragile that grandma will die before getting some human person to resolve her case, then we've got bigger problems than a 25 year old having r/w on the system.

[yummybear]

That's a rather cynical take on what may amount to actual human suffering.

[alaxhn]

I think the claim here is that more actual human suffering is coming out of the status quo which we think needs to be fixed with fairly drastic action.

The Mexican cartels for example do provide aid in predominantly poor parts of the country but there are still many who would say that overall these organizations provide more harm than good.

The US is providing some resources for causes that you and other's support (presumably with a much higher "success" rate than the cartels) but they have also historically funded and perpetuated things that many are not happy with (various conflicts in the middle east come to mind).

Some of us wanted to see dramatic reform and we feel that claims like "grandma is going to starve because she won't get her groceries" are really just an attempt to connect with emotions around the ordeal rather than an honest attempt to point out flaws or discuss potential drawbacks with the current approach.

[djmips]

So shutting down USAID isn't going to cause human suffering?

[uLogMicheal]

The alarmist take is jumping to the conclusion that people will starve from efforts to improve the code behind this system. We can still print paper checks, probably with a simple script in the worst case.

[redcobra762]

Concern over even a low possibility of a catastrophic event is hardly alarmist.

And what if your assumption about printing checks is wrong? I find no basis for that assumption, by the way.

[uLogMicheal]

We're talking about payment system code, not AI targeting for drones. Changes can be reverted, transactions can be stopped, payments can be made other ways.

[redcobra762]

It won't say on the tin what the negative consequences of breaking what's in the tin will be, it's never that simple in my experience.

There are substantially better ways to solve this problem, so the fact that those better methods aren't being tried screams ignorance and inexperience, which is a problem for critical payment systems.

[UncleMeat]

USAID is being burnt to the ground. Those are "grandma's checks" to a lot of people.

[thejazzman]

so to be clear, you think world governments should be YOLOing it?

and you justify this because a platform for serving targeted ads has popularized the idea?

and you don't see a difference between a social network and our countries payment systems?

i'm just kind of shocked and disappointed by this, as i'm sure you're not the only one who perceives the world this way..

[michaeljx]

I am saying that a government,and any other system, operating in an environment of abundance without external pressures to improve, ends up accumulating year's of cruft, inneficiencies, unproductive bureaucracies and 4-eye principles everywhere .

Sometimes a system needs a good shock to improve. And at the end of the day, what is the absolute worst that can happen? Cause the upside of this working is definitely worth the risk in my eyes.

[nickthegreek]

> the upside of this working is definitely worth any risk in my eyes.

then your eyes aren't open. a moment of thought would easily produce outcomes that dont match the risk.

[sundaeofshock]

> what is the absolute worst that can happen?

Bond payments to major bond holders are not sent out. At that point, the US can no longer be trusted and the dollar stops being the de facto world currency.

Is that bad enough for you?

[cozzyd]

If you approve of this, perhaps Marko Elez can find some efficiencies within the payroll system of your employer?

[patchymcnoodles]

What is the absolute worst that can happen? People not getting their money is nothing bad for you?

[quickthrowman]

Respectfully, the fact that you can’t think of any consequences that exceed the risk means that you don’t understand what is at stake.

One single missed interest payment to Treasury bond holders would be a default, something that has never happened to the US before. Our credit rating would be downgraded, investors all over the world would liquidate their US Treasury bonds, and our borrowing costs would skyrocket, both for government and commercial/consumer loans.

This instantly causes a recession, far worse than what we saw in 2008. A US Treasury default would have catastrophic consequences.

This is one of many catastrophic scenarios possible when messing with a government payment system that handles trillions of dollars in payments.

Any money saved by cancelling payments is going to be used to give people wealthier than you or I a tax cut. Is that really worth the risk?

[philk10]

millions die, wars and famine? why isn't DOGE in the DoD accounting their systems?

[johnpdoe123]

Respectfully, this is such a Valley attitude that one would be hard pressed to find anywhere else. The fact that this approach "works" on software and tech in general, does not make it a philosophy to live by IMHO. And I quote "works" because it doesn't always work, and even when it does, it produces a subpar experience for the end user, that sometimes the user has no option (or escape energy) but to withstand.

This might work when the thing you are constantly breaking is optional for me to use. I will keep using as long as the value it gives me outweighs the breakage pain. If you break it enough times, I might just get fed up with it and not use it anymore, or go with a competitor. It is a risk that YOU are taking with your product, that sometimes will work and sometimes will not.

In the case of the government social apparatus being handled by techie kids in crunch time, THEY are not the ones taking the risk, but the population that depends on those systems. There is a reason why those systems are analysed ad infinitum before replacing them or changing them. And yes, they evolve slower than modern tech systems, but most of the time there is good reason for it.

They might be ok with a release in production with a couple of bugs and come back on Monday and say -oops- on your morning standup. This is something that should not be acceptable when we are talking about services that millions of people's livelihoods depend on.

They can YOLO it all they want, in their private endeavour, with their (optional to me) product. They do NOT get to YOLO it with my life's critical things.