[unsui]

This is what frustrates me to no end, re what's going on with DOGE and the indistriminant shutting off of legacy systems.

As Joel Spolsky once commented, , all non-trivial abstractions are, to some degree, leaky.

This is because reality itself is leaky. Or another way to put it, reality itself is non-trivially complex.

And any sufficiently long-lived production system that works at scale necessarily has to accommodate that complexity, to some degree.

Yes, some of these systems are sub-optimal, but nonetheless, they work, to the extent that they are production systems.

And, as anyone who has worked on legacy production systems, that complexity is itself mired in complexity, often due to weird edge and corner cases that reflect the complexity of the world that the system is attuned to.

And then, to come in with the mentality of a cocky intern with delusions of grandeur and simply shut off these systems indiscriminantly.....

and yes, I am asserting that this is being done indiscriminantly.

It is foolish on a scale I can't fathom, as an engineer who appreciates the complexity of systems beyond my level of comprehension. Organic systems that have grown to accomodate reality, warts and all.

And to simply shut things off, indiscriminantly, is beyond foolish. It is reckless, and eventually, as the body count rises, evil.

[zanellato19]

Yeah, Chesterton’s Fence is simply not a principle that people like Elon pay attention to. Sometimes for the better, mostly for the worse, specially when taking over something that's already there.

[paulddraper]

> Organic systems that have grown to accomodate reality

No argument.

But is that reality public service? Or something else?

[investguy1]

In 1800, the government of the USA spent 2% of GDP.

In 2020, the government of the USA spent 30% of GDP.

In 2024, the government of France spent 57% of GDP.

Are the people of 2024 France really getting 28x the value from their government as 1800 USA?

It is not evil to ask these questions or to experiment with government,

And more people should consider backing off from political-media consumption as it is clearly toxic to the soul.

The reality that counts most is the one around you, and I see far too many people destroying their relationships with family, friends, and colleagues over national politics when there are much bigger fish to fry in one's own garden.

[radiospiel]

> Are the people of 2024 France really getting 28x the value from their government as 1800 USA?

oh but certainly. Healthcare, social security, education, … just to name a few

[bluGill]

The question was 28x though. Not just are you getting more value, but is the value 28 times more. This is not clear, and probably answerable. Health care is very different between now and 1800 (in 1800 your lifespan was measurably better if you didn't go to a doctor ever - this was before handwashing and antibiotics). Even if you compare today, France and the US have many differences in the current system and so you can argue things either way and we learn more about your bias than any truth (there are pros and cons of both systems so all conclusions). Both todays are very different from either in 1800, and we have no way of knowing how either would be different.

[BobaFloutist]

I think probably the slaves in 1800, whose experience of the government was its violent enforcement of their sub-human status would probably find the protection of their civil rights in 2024 France to be quite a bit more than 28x as valuable, yes.

I think the women who couldn't independently own property, had no protections against marital rape, being beat by their husbands, or most any other form of abuse would agree that even the comparitively tepid protections offered by modern France are priceless in comparison.

I think children forced to labor without pay, homosexuals forced into hiding, Native Americans kidnapped from their parents and forced into boarding schools, and any number of other now-protected classes would also agree.

Sure, if the government only serves a small fraction of the population at the expense of all others, that small fraction can debateably get comparitively good value. But it sure sucks for literally everyone else.

[peterfirefly]

How much of that required a bigger state?

The end of slavery was really due to slavery being uneconomic. That's why the Northern states didn't have slavery. It would have ended in the South as well, even without the Civil War (which was a kind of big state thing, of course).

Children forced to labour without pay -- also an economic issue.

[nuancebydefault]

Even though US is more wealthy than Europe, the average European seems struggling much less than their US counterpart. Just have a look at poverty, homelessness, health figures, even of educated people.

The latest votes, and your comment, only seem to indicate that US people on average find that to be fine enough, the price for a (for me weird) kind of freedom.

[gerardvivancos]

Asking the question with the provided data is too simplistic to even argue about.

"Here's the non contextualized percentages, what do you think of the difference between this two percentages which are more than two centuries apart, and from different countries?"

[immibis]

Percentages don't really work like that. 56% of one number isn't 28 times 2% of a different number. And it's not even the right number. GDP measures rate of number flow, not rate of benefit flow, or amount of benefit.

It's also noteworthy how people ask this question about the government but never ask it about private corporations.

[jebarker]

> It is not evil to ask these questions or to experiment with government

I don't think anyone has a problem with the question being asked. It's the non-scientific method of experimentation that is troubling people.

[kimixa]

And the clear bias in the presentation of numbers in the "question".

What people called the "Government" provided rather different things 200 years ago, let alone issues with defining a comparable "GDP" in such different environments.

[jebarker]

Did you mean to reply to me? I don't see how this counters what I said. If you mean to imply that the questions use of statistics is a comparable problem to the current "government experiment" then I don't agree.

[kimixa]

No, I was intending to build upon what you said that the question likely isn't actually being asked in good faith, instead an attempt to "anchor" readers into the assumptions it makes rather than really examine the answer, and people may indeed then have issues with it.

To really design experiments we really need to be asking meaningful questions about comparable metrics, after all.

[jebarker]

Ah, I see. Yes, I agree.

[marcosdumay]

> Are the people of 2024 France really getting 28x the value from their government as 1800 USA?

Very likely, yes.

Who was the last person close to you that died after buying poisoned food?

[kelnos]

> It is not evil to ask these questions or to experiment with government

Asking these questions is fine -- good and necessary even. But the evil comes when one of your reckless experiments shuts down an agency that's providing medical care to HIV-positive pregnant women in Africa, and when their babies are born during the disruption, we find that they have contracted their mothers' HIV, because of that missing medical care.

This is just one example among many. It's not hyperbole to suggest that people will die because of what DOGE is doing.

> Are the people of 2024 France really getting 28x the value from their government as 1800 USA?

I think that's a very easy "yes".

[GuB-42]

It is not the right question to ask. 28x is a number that doesn't make sense.

For example, you are in a restaurant, you can drink tap water for free, or sparkling water for $3, is sparkling water infinitely better than tap water? Infinity doesn't exist in the real world, but the real world has plenty of people drinking $3 sparkling water, which tells us that the reasoning is broken.

A more sensible reasoning would be: would you get better value by paying 55% (57%-2%=55%) of your income to "upgrade" from a 1800 US government to a 2024 France government, or you are better off doing something else with that money.

[Trasmatta]

> there are much bigger fish to fry in one's own garden.

Here's a pretty large fish to fry: the breakdown of democracy, and a shift towards autocracy and dictatorship.

This is a fish that affects everyone's gardens, like it or not.

[daedrdev]

France has a massive welfare state and pension system (which is causing a crisis as they cant afford it in the long run). People probably are getting 28x more from the government than before those existed.

[codr7]

I'm pretty sure they're paying for it though.

[peterfirefly]

Yes, but they are mostly letting younger people pay for it. Younger people who are unlikely to receive similar pensions at such an early age.

[codr7]

True, I have yet to witness a generation who get what they were promised.

[jspash]

Yes, everyone pays taxes into the system. But don't think for a moment that when musk et.al. are done with their purge that your tax rate will magicaly plummet to 2%. It's going to either stay the same or go up. Unless you are in the 1%. In which case, you can start your celebration now.

[myrmidon]

I'll bite. Lets break the highest number down, Fermi-style.

=> 30% social services

=> 10% military and education

=> 10% healthcare

Leaves 10% for infrastructure (road/rail), governmental services (police, regulation of trade, traffic, construction), damage-control for innovations like leaded gas, CFCs, asbestos. And of course overhead to run the whole thing.

I'd honestly say thats not really a bad deal. Are there gonna be inefficiencies in the whole apparatus? For sure! But getting rid of those services, and trying to do this personally with the taxes you saved strikes me as completely infeasible.

edit: forgot research (CERN, ITER, etc.), which would be particularly tricky to fund privately.

PS: I was initially skeptical myself, and expected double digit percentages of unclear worth. But actually breaking this down gave me strong Monthy Python ("what have the romans ever done for us") vibes, and now I think that your point is much worse than it looks first glance (still don't understand why it would get flagged, though).

[PhasmaFelis]

> And more people should consider backing off from political-media consumption as it is clearly toxic to the soul.

Destroying the government services that allow disabled people to get healthcare and other basic needs is toxic to my literal, physical body.

You're talking like this is all a genteel philosophical disagreement. People are going to die.

[fumar]

What are you comparing from 1800? You listed zero qualifiers?

[BoiledCabbage]

> In 2020, the government of the USA spent 30% of GDP.

Interesting that you specifically chose a covid year. In 2024 spending was 23%. The 50 year average of spending a percentage of GDP is 21%.[1]

Yet again, anyone who believes that we have some crazy out of line spending right now is in a media/propaganda echo chamber.

And if anyone believes that hacking apart our country under the guise of "cutting spending" again is falling for the same playbook. What is being done is not at all driven by cutting spending, that's just the justification bring put forward - any amount of looking into what's being done, vs what's is claimed is being done makes that obvious.

The echo chamber that had been created is out of control at this pointas somehow a significant number of people believe what is being said.

[1]https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60843/html#:~:text=In%20tota...

[EGreg]

Poverty dropped tremendously in the 20th century, perhaps that has to do with government spending?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare%27s_effect_on_poverty

There are diminishing returns, though

[peterfirefly]

Or vastly increased productivity -- that also had increasingly less to do with land ownership? Life used to suck if you didn't own land (or were one of the lucky few who could work as a merchant, a craftsman, a priest, a government official, etc). Effectively all of Europe had too little land for all its recorded history.

[vlunkr]

I’m sure there are optimizations to be made, but DOGE is acting like an insufferable greenie dev who wants to slash and burn without understanding the system or having acquired any wisdom about maintaining and refactoring complex systems.

[bbddg]

Thanks for your input "investguy1"

[zht]

yes? is this a serious question?

[gchamonlive]

That question isn't being asked, though. And if you think the DOGE is being transparent with this reform you are either naive or misinformed.