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Dismissed Nuclear Bomb Specialists Recalled by Energy Department
- ben_w 2y agoNon-paywalled alternative on same topic: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/doge-screw-up-nuclear-experts-fired-b2698732.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic... > “Congress is freaking out because it appears DOGE didn’t really realize NNSA oversees the nuclear stockpile,” This chaos absolutely reminds me of one of the recent-ish stories from Tesla and, as a root cause, basically every story from Twitter since he bought it.
- pwarner 2y agoI wonder if he'll need to break something bad enough to get kicked out?
- tw04 2y agoThis should definitely be the thing. If anyone still thinks he isn’t an absolute moron, I don’t even know what to say. Firing people because you have no idea what they do is just so spot on for his “I’m the smartest guy in the room so if I can’t figure it out, nobody can”. He is very rarely the smartest guy in the room…
- aqueueaqueue 2y agoThe US is a defacto dictatorship now.
- andrewinardeer 2y agoDo you think there will be a presidential election in ~3.75 years time?
- aqueueaqueue 2y agoMy prediction is there will be but Trump does everything he can get away with to tilt it towards a family member being the next. E.g. executive orders that cause things to go in his favour.
- qingcharles 2y agoIt's interesting that he threw Vance under the bus recently when asked about this. Clearly he has someone in mind already.
- hayst4ck 2y agoRussia has elections, but the elections don't matter. The elections are ritualized consent for a despotic state. American elections are already ritualized. You can't really vote for an anti-oligarch/regulate corporations candidate unless you're in a couple districts. There are very few "rule of law" candidates. There's no voting based way to get congress persons to stop trading stock. I think there will be the performance of voting in 3.75 years, but even less substance to it than we already have.
- aqueueaqueue 2y agoWe are beyond that way of thinking. It would be like someone breaking something bad in a dictatorship. Best case they get moved and a similar person takes over. It is more likely he gets kicked out if he humiliates Trump somehow.
- crooked-v 2y agoAt this point, I think the only practical way to get rid of him will be to publicly embarrass Trump about 'President Elon' enough that Trump can't take it anymore.
- Freedom2 2y agoI feel like public embarrassment only works on those who can feel shame. If his first 4 years of the presidency wasn't enough, then I don't think there's much more the world, let alone the US, can do.
- darth_avocado 2y agoBut no nukes have gone off, it’s fine, probably they weren’t doing anything. (The same argument for my Twitter app loads fine, so the fired employees were probably not needed) /s
- verzali 2y agoIf nobody is monitoring radiation levels then you can't have any radiation leaks. Simple.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- anigbrowl 2y agoI have confidence in the ability of the Republican party to blow off any notions of shame or collective responsibility. Total control over a badly damaged institution is more appealing than a pluralistic role in a well functioning one for some people, and it is exactly such people that control the party now.
- aqueueaqueue 2y ago[flagged]
- netsec_burn 2y agohttps://archive.is/u6UQU https://archive.is/u6UQU
- Sabinus 2y agoThe US federal government is a gargantuan entity that guarantees the safety, prosperity and happiness of millions of people. Treating it like a silicon valley tech company is a recipe for disaster.
- whamlastxmas 2y agoThere needs to be a middle ground between spending a trillion dollars a year for this and having no level of accountability versus treating it like a failing startup
- beezlewax 2y agoWhy so you think there is no accountability? Aside from that isn't some overspending a necessary evil to ensure stability over all else?
- nobodyandproud 2y agoReplace “stability” with “rule of law”.
- whamlastxmas 2y agoCorruption and incompetence. There’s no accountability both because people have a vested interest in there not being any so they can profit off it in shitty ways, and also politics in general are so dysfunctional that any attempts at reform fail. I would argue the dysfunction is also deliberate, again due to corruption
- vessenes 2y agoSo, this is obviously really bad(TM) when it comes to nuclear technology and security. That said, I think that the ‘fire them all and let God sort them out’ strategy has a rational economic angle that journalists miss. The cost of all that headcount while you have slow change management vs just fucking around and finding out who’s actually necessary in a corporate setting can make sense, I think. Especially when teams are well entrenched. Journalists dunk on some CEO who had to rehire five people they needed, the CFO is happy to pay them double + a signing bonus, because the 95 other salaries, management overhead, and presumably political impact of that team is gone. I’m also of the opinion that even if it may be desirable to some to reset certain programs, that this method won’t translate to government very well; in particular my friends who are federal employees have communicated to me that they are very unused to this sort of treatment, and it’s extremely upsetting — that sort of experience en masse can have huge decades-long impacts in a complex system like the US Federal government.
- dboreham 2y agoFine in a simulation but when there's human targets they may notice they're being shat upon by a tosser and adjust their future behavior accordingly. Put another way: social darwinism isn't side effect free.
- lupusreal 2y agoSounds like Muntzing, but to organizations. Remove parts until it breaks, then put parts back in until it works again. Good for electronics or software, maybe not so good with people since you'll piss people off and eventually find that you can't just put them back.
- crooked-v 2y agoIf a company did that to me there's zero chance I would go back to them, because it makes it obvious management has no idea what they're doing and the company is probably doomed in the medium term.
- moogly 2y agoPerhaps it makes more sense to start at the top and go from that direction. Does Tesla actually need a CEO, for instance^? What about SpaceX? ^: Probably, but perhaps a better one that actually shows up to work?
- zackangelo 2y agoSomething something Chesterton s fence
- tantalor 2y ago[flagged]
- readthenotes1 2y agoIt's very useful. In this case, they may have figured the wrong answer to why all those people were hired in the last year
- actionfromafar 2y agoI assume this was sarcasm
- amai 2y agoThe fastest way to figure out why a fence was build, is to tear it down. The Soviet Union did this several times, e.g. - https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1926/07/the-russian-effort-to-abolish-marriage/306295/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1926/07/the-rus... - https://www.history.com/news/soviet-union-stalin-weekend-labor-policy https://www.history.com/news/soviet-union-stalin-weekend-lab...
- rndmize 2y agoThere's really nothing surprising about this - I remember similar articles at the start of the first Trump administration about how one of the nuclear weapon departments (might have been the same one) had its top people retiring, and multiple Republican senators had to make noise before Trump got around to appointing a replacement. In the same vein, Rick Perry ran on the idea of getting rid of the Department of Energy during the campaign and was picked by Trump to be its secretary. It was explained to Perry at some point that the DOE is not, in fact, just about energy; that someone has to manage, manufacture, design and test the nuclear weapons we have; and that the national labs might be fairly important components of our scientific and technological advantages as a nation. I don't expect any better this time around.
- beezlewax 2y agoYa'll need to rename entire government departments to have long self describing titles that are also easy to remember acronyms.
- ChrisArchitect 2y agoEarlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43055119 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43055119
- amriksohata 2y agoTo pull out the years of weed growth in the garden sometimes some flowers are going to be disturbed (tongue in cheek)
- bmgoau 2y agoThere doesn't really seem to be that many weeds at all. A better analogy is that a bunch of kids have been let loose with chain saws in a well kept garden farm that keeps us all alive.