> Attempting to manage this as a parent is hellish.
Doesn't matter what you do as a parent so long as kids are allowed smartphones at school.
You can set up perfect filtering for your own kids, but that won't help when some other kid brings in a device loaded up with the most shocking content they could find on some unfiltered home connection.
Why on earth would they need something as visible and aggressive as DOGE to extract data?
Can't it simply be a case of aggressive and overoptimistic attempts to cut spending (especially spending viewed as ideological) doing far more harm than good?
Government salaries are such a small percentage (less than 5% is what I'm seeing in cursory searches) of spending that it doesnt make a lot of sense to me that DOGE was a genuine attempt at cutting spending. I work in defense, and at least a few times a year, I see government contract money that could pay a dozen salaries wasted on equipment that never even gets installed. We have a government bought tool that cost $2million 8 years ago, and we plug it in when senators come tour our facility so we can pretend we use it. If anyone in the government cared about reducing costs, I don't think they would care too much about payroll. Its the equivalent of taking all the appliances out of your house because your electric bill was $200 when you take home $5k.
I won't pretend to know what the actual motives were, but financial "efficiency" seems suspect to me.
Doge did far more than cutting salaries, the salary cutting was almost entirely voluntary and actually a tiny fraction of what they were cutting. Mostly it actually is third party contracts being cut. You can see all the contracts being cut here: https://doge.gov/
Please don’t cite doge itself as if it’s a reliable source.
Citing doge as a source shows that your viewpoint is built on provenly bad info.
And Frankly it’s insulting to HN readers that it’s being cited given how well published it was that their estimates were grossly inflated, unreliable, and kept trying to claim credit for cutting things that were already ended.
Doge has not been proven unreliable anywhere I've seen, if you have data to show that please provide it. I have seen the kind of anti-doge news articles you are referring to but if you viewed the authors of those articles it was always folks who post entirely anti-elon or anti-republican articles like they are an attack ad placed by the democrat party and were debunked quickly.
Okay… well it was extensively reported like everywhere so I don’t know what you’ve been doing but it’s sure not reading the NYT, NPR, CBS or the similar.
Okay so you somehow haven’t seen any of the many many accounts of doge being extremely unreliable but today you’ve seen people tell you they are unreliable.
After hearing that, to you, surprising new info did you consider googling it or cross check it in anyway before replying?
have you so much as tried googling “are doge estimates reliable?” After hearing other people call them into question?
Anyway here’s the AI google summary for you to get you started:
Based on analyses of the "wall of receipts" posted by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in early 2025, their savings estimates are not considered reliable by budget experts, government contractors, and media outlets. Investigations have revealed that the claimed savings are heavily overstated, often misleading, and sometimes factually incorrect.
DOGE already address all of those political hit piece articles. The claims made in them were spurious such as that they could not use the full amount of the contract. DOGE addressed this criticism by saying over 99% of contracts end up fulfilling their full amount. I'd be wary of what you read in the news especially when it relates to politics. Those news sites even thought Elon Musk was saluting a long dead genocidal maniac when he waved to the crowd - but specifically only Elon Musk and not any other person who made similar waves - why would that be?
Tesla is a meme stock and will one day explode like a game of hot potato.
Going online and defending every poor decision musk makes won’t change the reality that these days musk is a drugged out buffoon with a penchant for white nationalism who pays people to cheat at videos games for him.
His main selling point these days is how He has a loyal core group of cheerleaders that sticks with him no matter what. It’s prolonging the inevitable.
I was talking to an applications engineer one night at the bar in a restaurant. The company he works for makes equipment for mass producing the large armament shell cylinders. One of the clients that bought their equipment was a missile manufacturer. He went on site and found the machine had incorrect tolerance and was producing deformed products. They also lied about the thickness of the material they planed on using. Finally when the DOD general asked him point blank, "Will this help us produce X missiles a year?" he said no and why. Turns out the contractor directly lied about their capability and yet retained the contact because they are one of the few companies that produces missiles. He never got a call back from the company because they wanted him to lie to the general.
This is the actual waste that needs to be looked before the checks are even signed. No way in hell DOGE or anyone in the current administration will actually look at bad spending. Specially now this administration likes the name Department of War. These are the same companies that bribe ... I mean donate to politicians to retain this corrupt funding.
Israel wouldn't take the Bradley Fighting vehicle because this know it was bad just by looking at it but the Pentagon doubled down and flawed designs.
Reminds me not to get tunnel focused with-in a company and keep looking around to see what outsiders are doing.
The talk about the AR-15 being flawed but not why. 1) Sold as a firearm that did not need to be cleaned and maintained which is 100% false. 2) It was a gas based system that push the debris in the barrow into the chamber. This is why Vietnam solders would place condoms over the end of the barrow. It took years to move it to the gas piston system which people use now.
> Why on earth would they need something as visible and aggressive as DOGE to extract data?
I think this is obvious. It was one of many goals, that aligned under an umbrella of activities. Asking for specific data creates a paper trail and triggers regulation. Restricting access, taking outright possession of hardware, and firing people along the way, helps shield the activity.
> Can't it simply be a case of aggressive and overoptimistic attempts to cut spending
aka "Aww shucks, we were just doin our best."
No rational organization would take many of the actions that were taken, if one of their primary goals was accountability. It was a smash and grab (disorganized would be fair to say), with an ad-hoc rationalization that was never reasoned.
There definitely has been a pattern of shoddy behavior, but it's been difficult to find a smoking gun of DOGE exfiltrating the data at many agencies. I am looking to see if there are more revelations to come out of DOGE's activities at SSA for instance.
That said, lack of evidence isn't necessarily exonerating. DOGE's MO has often been to take over the CIO and/or front office of the agency to ensure there is nothing to monitor them. It's basically like if the CEO of the bank sends all the security guards home and lets robbers in through the side door. You can't prove they took anything necessarily (my bank metaphor falls flat here, because data can be copied but if money were stolen, you could count it), but also it IS often shady as hell too.
YouTube is social media first, even if it also happens to be a repository of useful content. Social media does not want you to navigate with agency. They want to choose what you see because it lets them keep you on the platform longer, which is the entire goal.
No, that's like calling Amazon a social media platform.
YouTube is a content delivery platform that has social media features. You can tell because if you shut off all the comments, people still visit the site in droves. But if you shut off the videos and left the comments then nobody would visit the site at all.
Now, it's possible that YouTube doesn't realize that, but I think they're just unwilling to make any changes at all if it doesn't give them any competitive advantages.
You should see me or my wife sometimes scrolling down this nine miles long single column list on the Roku to find a particular channel. It's in there, it just could be anywhere in there...
They didn't happen to post any new videos lately so they aren't on the main subscriptions page of latest videos, you have to go to the menu on the left to the list of all subscribed channels and just arrow down forever, back up, down again... Why in the ever loving world isn't that list at least alphabetical?
Oh and why is the list nine miles long anyway? Self-inflicted problem subscribing to so many channels you can't possibly be watching...
Well I've always had history turned off, and a few years ago YT blanked out the home screen if you have history turned off. Ever since then I have a blank home screen with just a message saying to go into settings to correct the error that I have history turned off.
I never used to subscribe to any channels, but then when they blanked out the home screen you have no other way to get any kind of feed. So only after they did that, I subscribed to a bunch of channels so that at least the subscriptions page would have some kind of feed.
This still doesn't give you anything related, just exactly the subscribed channels. If you want any kind of variety and quantity you have to keep subscribing to more and more channels so that the subscriptions page can almost sorta provide something like the old home page before they blanked it.
I complain, but I gotta say one thing, this way I NEVER see Mr.Beast or SsssniperWolf or anything like those any more. So, maybe it's better this way.
The most surprising effect of Mounjaro, at least initially was that it drastically reduced by desire to drink beer, and when I started, my drinking was at a very unhealthy level (beer calories being a major factor in my weight problem). But maybe I'm an odd case, as I had a real beer habit but don't like wine and very rarely touched spirits.
Actually losing some weight as well as cutting my drinking down, helped me with depression far more than SSRIs (which had previously led to even faster weight gain)
Unfortunately, the effects started to diminish somewhat after about a year on it, as if I was building up a bit of a tolerance to the drug. And then I switched to Wegovy (=Ozempic) after big UK price hikes to Mounjaro, and found it much less effective, started gaining weight again (winter/xmas didn't help). Switching back to Mounjaro at the moment, but having to slowly step back up from a lower dose. Not expecting to see the initial near-miraculous effects again, expecting to have to combine it with some actual willpower and more exercise going forwards.
The really beautiful thing now is that, with the evidence from GLP-1 drugs as a class, we're seeing 3 things: new targets for all kinds of things, that were previously discarded as "too difficult to make into medication", and in addition, injectable treatments - for a long, long time anything that required injections was just ruled out at the mechanism level. The third thing is that pharmaceutical industry has learned how to hit multiple targets with a single drug - previously most drugs were formulated to hit at most one or two receptors, and now we're seeing work on quad or 5-way drugs.
I'm super optimistic, the pipeline for future medications in these classes and other related ones are enormous. Huge effects both for me personally but for the world as a whole, a world in which obesity and other chronic behavioral conditions are treated more like cancer than smoking - even smoking itself!
I've had a similar experience where I'd be craving a beer, but not really craving alcohol since wine or spirits didn't sound appealing at all. I think it might actually be the hops and not the alcohol.
I don't know if it's common in the UK, but in the US, a lot of breweries have started making hop water. I've found that it can really scratch that itch. Even just a hop tea might work if you can't find pre-made hop water.
It sounds weird, but it's actually delicious with nice floral and citrus notes and just enough bitterness that you don't drink it too quickly.
It’s not just you. I’ve known several people who lost their desire to drink beer specifically on these drugs. I didn’t personally experience it, but then I am more of a whiskey guy.
Mounjaro is widely known to cause bad hangovers and side effects while drinking isn't it? That's what I gleaned from my research. I'm a little surprised you didn't come across that
Curious also if you're considering staying on the lowest dose for cost purposes? I've ignored all advice to step up from 2.5mg and I can even go 10-14 days without noticing too much, but weight loss is slow compared to others (12kg in 6 months). But that's how I want it to be honest.
Though I guess lower dose for longer might work out more expensive
Creating some sort of genetically-engineered dinosaur-derived ‘dragon’ may be more plausible than actually reaching another star system. It’s not going to breathe fire though.
Doesn't matter what you do as a parent so long as kids are allowed smartphones at school.
You can set up perfect filtering for your own kids, but that won't help when some other kid brings in a device loaded up with the most shocking content they could find on some unfiltered home connection.
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