Oh shit sorry though you were talking about a different post. Yikes, sorry again

Oh shit sorry, my bad! Thought you were replying to about a different post. Yikes, sorry again

Is there is a list of employees of DOGE? I would like to write them letters.

Imagine a junior dev called "Big Balls" starting up Claude Code and telling it "Hey I need you to make this app great, remove all unnecessary code" and then just accepting whatever it proposes. This is an app with no unit tests, no dev environment, running in production, and if it crashes people die in concentration camps.

Literally vibe coding a country.

The People Carrying Out Musk’s Plans at DOGE

I think several of them have quit by now, but I'm sure they would still appreciate your helpful feedback.

There's one who's dad is a professor at a university. You could write to the university about it. They would like that a lot I think.

I think we could do better than letters. maybe a few packages.

This is reminding me of those pc optimizer tools like CCleaner that promised to find a bunch of things to uninstall and redundant/trash files to delete and make your pc 3000x faster, but ended up breaking your system.

Of course they are, the tool is the excuse and the "unforeseen consequences" are the goal.

🤨 CCleaner never failed me. Even ran it on non-critical servers to see if it would break shit. Not one time did it introduce a breaking change. Maybe it's different now?

Because DOGE is still running on Elon Musk's strategy of "move fast, break things, and don't fix anything until shit's on fire". People won't be dying in concentration camps because of DOGE, they'll just be homeless and probably half-dead of starvation (because of the repeal of the PFDA).

Maybe ccleaner was fine, there were a bunch of these tools and ccleaner is the one i remembered the name. Wasnt really trying to criticize ccleaner specifically

CCleaner actually worked as intended for a long time until it enshittified. It's also less relevant in the age of fast as fuck SSDs over HDDs to need to clean up temp files and stuff to make the PC faster. Also Disk Clean Up is essentially what CCleaner did already built into Windows.

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Fuck them all, I hope they get cancer and die a slow, agonizing death.

Or target them.

Absolutely the second. Once something has been destroyed, it takes years or decades to get it back. They're purposely banking on going overboard, knowing full well it will collapse all the institutions and that repairing that can't occur at the same pace.

Anyone who says “regulation is bad” is attacking the problem with too blunt an instrument.

I agree.

The urge to get rid of regulations is either driven by corrupt profiteering or by an ideology that’s too crude for the real world.

It might also be driven by the feeling that it hits your enemy more than it hits you, but that was back then. Now it doesn't, because the enemy has converted their regulations into real-world power and can scrap them all and still have it.

BTW, I agree about "too crude", actually ancap as it is itself doesn't pretend to be anything else. That's why I like it very much - most cases of marxism etc are directed at some imagined and idealized real world, or a miraculous solution allowing to introduce them in the wild and let them work. Ancap (just like left anarchism) explored mechanisms which can never be made 100% pure in reality, but benefit everyone when created. It's more about designing new social systems than about ruining existing ones.

Which is why I don't like people making an association between ancap and Ayn Rand, Ayn Rand is a fan of monopolies and hereditary oligarchy. Ancap in its pure form has no levers for an oligarchy to maintain itself. It defines finite non-human-created resources as common, so its treatment of oligarchy is no different than left anarchism's treatment of oligarchy.

Getting back to regulations, I've recently had a wonderfully simple idea which doesn't even seem that crappy. Separate all law into the constitutional part (and maybe some intermediate kind requiring longevity and not too complex) and the usual part, and scrap the latter and start anew with a bunch of referendums every 10 years. One can devise a system where representatives are elected into councils (ranked choice voting, proportional system), a few dozens of them with a few hundreds people in each, and each council decides on its own part of the laws (of course, using advice of invited lawyers and such), and then a referendum approves or rejects those projects. Where those are rejected, the process is repeated until there's an acceptable variant.

To make the laws used in daily life simpler and more democratic. Right now malicious parties can slowly skew laws in their favor over many decades. In such a system only the popular perception and shared knowledge will survive those many decades, while the actual law will be decided upon democratically. Thus a solution to one time's problem won't become a problem for another time. And the legal corpus will be compact, similar to that of western countries in 1950s.

A lot of today's problems is just legal legacy and sneakery. This way stuff that's obsolete and stuff that has been sneaked in won't have any effect on modern application of rights.

Soviet elites' idea of power meant that.

USSR in late 1980s sort of "resurrected" the Soviet system as something kinda democratic (well, democratic centralism is not exactly that, but decisions were made, and many true words were said, and the resulting course of action those elites didn't like), so those elites (Yeltsin was a Politburo member, a reminder) just decided to flip the board.

But yeah, I definitely think there's a connection.

And while considering them all-powerful may be wrong, Soviet propaganda had more levels than people thought. The fact that the narrative of many of those dissidents then is now similar to the narrative of ex-Soviet elites and their allies speaks for itself.

The "visible" propaganda had different layers for kolkhozniks and for factory workers and for engineers and for artists. Everyone thought they could read between the lines, but that was too just a layer.

After USSR "collapsed", plenty of sects and ideologies emerged, and mostly those too were defined by Soviet propaganda - from political (sincere, not like those participating in the election, but like Limonov people and Makashov people and anarchists and communists, all of them) to esoteric (I don't even want to list all of that), and of course the church.

And now the Russian population is slowly transitioning from intoxication with that cocktail right to dissociation like with PTSD.

So why did they decide to flip the board?

Because only fools think that covert and conspiracy-minded and backstage and back alley actions are more true and sincere, or even stupider - advantageous for the weaker side. That's exactly where smoke and mirrors work flourishes. The truest thing Soviet people had was the common public "official" set of institutions and rules, no matter how disgusting it was. By flipping the board they removed it, and the masses had no common point of reality anymore.

So, why did I write this - yes. I think that's what these people are doing in the USA, except the many-layered genius-class propaganda system is not existent there, but a few companies have been working hard for 20 years to create some kind of replacement.

Paul Weyrich and Robert Kriegel of the Heritage Foundation and Free Congress Foundation held mock elections in Moscow before the collapse to teach Soviet politicians about "democracy." Another Heritage Foundation member who created the State Policy Network (SPN) is quoted as telling Kriegel "You capture the Soviet Union, I'll capture the states."

They started sneaking in fax machines and electronic equipment to dissidents in the USSR, and once the coup happened, they were already established and ready to set up the first of its kind go between business for Russia-US relations (Russia House) in 1991.

Weyrich later said in 1996 that allegedly they had been tailed and intimidated by KGB while they were in Moscow holding the fake elections and spreading "democracy." Someone told him after the coup that Kryuchkov, the head of the KGB had gone to Gorbachev and asked him to crack down on Weyrich. Gorbachev just responded with silence, so Kryuchkov started organizing the coup the next day out of anger. That sounds like total BS, but I'm not sure if Weyrich made it up or if somebody else did and Weyrich believed it.

In 1999, Weyrich started writing about how he believed the moral majority had lost the "cultural war." So rather than continue fighting to take back institutions, the movement would need to follow the model of homeschooling and create their own institutions from scratch (bc if you just admit you're trying to overthrow a government people ask too many questions). Over 20 years later, the most recent version of the Heritage Foundation's Mandate for Leadership (Project 2025) is ready to deregulate and dismantle all federal government. Once it collapses, similar to the power vacuum in post Soviet Russia, they will be ready and waiting to replace it with a new far right government led by a small group of wealthy individuals who control local resources.

Similar to Russia, I'm not sure how much control they will actually retain once it collapses and is replaced, but they've used essentially the same strategy. Doing all of this out in the open, putting the pieces in place, training and recruiting people to be ready to betray their own country. Yet when you point all this out, people want to pretend it's just a conspiracy theory.