There is a certain type of mentality that just doesn’t believe that government should do anything, and that private enterprise will always have the solution.
Those people appear to be in control of all levers of power in the United States.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/02/trumps-latest-plan-t...
So on the one hand they're saying government shouldn't do anything, but on the other hand they love having the government put its finger on the scales of the market.
I think you can make that ~80%, but maybe you've done the calculations more diligently than I have.
Rather: They don't want the government to impede capitalist interests (greed), so they're using the government to further their corruption and greed
On top of that, there is the whole accelerationist ideology factor, which is also deeply insane to me.
For example - The ratio of government employees (including contractors) to US population is at an all time high[1], and the ratio of GDP to government expense is at an all time high[2].
It should be obvious if you have a profilgate printer priting dollars left and right, and the printer's controllers livelyhood depends on the printer working, workers will eventually lease printing to anyone willing to pay the controllers.
Thus, doesn't seem like a problem of wealthy people to me. You are always going to have wealthy people in any society. But it seems the fault is at having a printer, and letting people who aren't your neighbor, to control it.
I'm open minded in this being a "Chicken or egg" Problem. But I'd need to hear a compelling argument for it.
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-true-size-of-governme...
And completely ignores who is President and his explicit words.
Un-bias intelligence in this operation is not welcomed. One is told what is "factual truth" (not facts themselves) by those who operate out of Pennsylvania Avenue in DC.
If you're not blindly loyal and in line with the administration, then you'll be at risk of losing whatever role you have unless your loyalty is proven then you may receive some of that back based on how much you have demonstrated.
--
The problem in infosec in this world is not competence, it is cult of personality. This is why black t-shirt dislike black polo shirts not so secretly.
We’ve torched cooperation, shown we cannot protect classified information - if one didn’t know better one would think it was on purpose - but in general incompetence typically reigns. They just don’t think the agency should exist after they said elections in 2020 were generally secure.
Extremely embarrassing that the current POTUS should be in prison specifically for his mishandling of classified information
What are these living-off-the-land techniques?
These behaviors generate distinctive evidence of compromise in-progress, active, and after the fact, so your AV software or forensics team can identify it.
“Living off the Land” means minimizing or eliminating the payloads and the system modifications, and leveraging anything and everything that is found already existing in the system.
Obviously while presenting extra logistical challenges, LOL can be stealthier and easier to deploy on your target systems.
The answer is right at the beginning. Current administration has the explicit goal to not have free elections going forward. It has been stated plainly, on TV. The rest is collateral damage, and an attack on critical infrastructure will be a good excuse to invade the next country, declare state of emergency or outright war and get rid of elections completely.
You really thing the adminstration's goal is for Americans to not have running water & electricity, thinking that will keep them in power? That makes no sense.
More likely is incompetence, assuming the reporting is objective. Or to outsourse this work to private companies.
Politicians and their lackeys prioritize what makes them popular with the electorate. "Institutions" are not exactly something the electorate holds in high (relative to the recent past decades) esteem these days. And it's only gonna get worse as the boomers croak and are replaced by younger people who've seen institutions do a lot less good in their lifetimes.
Their goal is to stay in power at all costs. Again, they themselves have stated this plainly enough.
If there is collateral damage to the American people as a consequence of their ambition, well, that's a sacrifice they are willing to make.
How, then, do you explain their frequent retreat, e.g. on ICE, on tariffs, etc.?
I think they are pushing very very hard on many fronts, but even they are limited by what Americans will allow and we see it as they fret and adjust when there’s strong pushback.
Sure. The current administration is more message-focused than policy-focused. That's because most voters have no idea about policies, and know only how it's spun on Fox News.
This fact makes it all the more frustrating that so many business and influential people are failing to push back when their voice could make a difference.
But that doesn't change their goal. They have openly stated what they want, the fact that courts have sometimes intervened or that fig leaves have been given doesn't change the long-term goal.
Were they retreating on ICE when they said they want them at polling stations? It seems like an escalation to me.
OK, let's assume that.
Goal is one thing. How far they're willing and able to go (and hence be effective in getting that goal) is a different matter. That's my argument.
The current adminitration has shown that their ego (adoration) is a limiting factor in what they're willing to do for power.
To wit, top Republicans warn GOP will face midterm election ‘bloodbath’. Why bother caring? Is it just political theater?
No need to assume, they have explicitly stated it!
> To wit, top Republicans warn GOP will face midterm election ‘bloodbath’. Why bother caring?
This isn't about "Top Republicans," it is about the administration. The same administration that is actively trying to nationalize elections to prevent that bloodbath.
Secondly, is it conceivable that Republicans fearing an electoral bloodbath would make them more likely to support aggressive election interference (ICE a polling stations, new election laws, Federal takeover of elections, re-litigating 2020 Georgia results)?
> No need to assume, they have explicitly stated it!
Really honest question... can you point us to that explicit statement?
The Trump administration's official executive orders and fact sheets repeatedly state their goal is to have "free, fair, and honest elections".
They have specific policy proposals around voter ID, citizenship verification, and election integrity measures.
I will concede that what they think is free and fair, others might not, like legal ID requirement, so that's a requirement reasonable people can disagree on.
But I do think, but am very open to be proven wrong, that they explicitly state that they want to do away with free elections.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/pres...
https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/03/fact-sheet-pr...
> “I won’t say cancel the election, they should cancel the election...”
> "You Won't Have to Vote Anymore"
> "The Republicans should say: 'We want to take over. We should take over the voting in at least 15 places.' The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting,"
To argue against myself, one could take it at face value. If you do, then you are saying you are near 100% confident that's the goal in which case you ought to do something about it. The lack of more urgency or extreme counter action suggests to me that not enough people truly think that that is fact the goal.
You could maybe accuse me of being naïvely hopeful.
Yes, right here:
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/five-takeaways-reuters-inte...
You mean, they know they need to be voted in! I.e. elections.
“He boasted that he had accomplished so much that ‘when you think of it, we shouldn't even have an election.‘“
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/five-takeaways-reuters-inte...
The president expressed frustration that his Republican Party could lose control of the U.S. House of Representatives or the Senate in this year’s midterm elections, citing historical trends that have seen the party in power lose seats in the second year of a presidency.
“It's some deep psychological thing, but when you win the presidency, you don't win the midterms,” Trump said. He boasted that he had accomplished so much that “when you think of it, we shouldn't even have an election.”
There's a difference between what he believes or wishes for and what you know the reality. He is self-aware enough to know that Americans will only put up with so much. When you look at his rhetoric in totality and actions, you quickly realize he is paying attention to where the voter is and knows that he cannot do just whatever he wants, no matter what he might wish for.
At the same time, I actually think that characterization lacks usefulness. For instance, in some cases there’s clearly breaking norms (most poeple would porobably mostly for the worse, and in some limited cases for better).
In other cases it is just more overt (or in some cases, more extreme) expression of typical American policy.
It is utter chaos, both internal and external. Your calibration point should not be Trump 1 but the Obama or Clinton administrations which were if not super popular at least competent.
To get a little personal, I will just say that you don't know what's in my heart or on my mind.
To get back on point:
> None of this is 'typical American policy'.
Mabye you will say I'm being pedantic, but I think that's a categorically false statement.
> Your calibration point should not be Trump 1 but the Obama or Clinton administrations which were if not super popular at least competent.
Why cherry pick those two? What about more recent (Biden) or further back? I think you will find that there's a lot of things that are persistent over the last 250 years, including political violence, xenophobia, detaining people without due process, invading other countries, tarriffs, rhetoric that Europe should pay for its own defense, etc.
To be clear, I'm not saying any of these are OK. There are also other positive dynamics that persist, like Americans pushing back and the administration needing to retreat and adjust.
No but you are making statements here and those are indicative.
> Mabye you will say I'm being pedantic, but I think that's a categorically false statement.
That's your privilege.
> Why cherry pick those two?
Because the US economy and the US status in the world under those two sets of administrations was doing well compared to many of the alternatives.
Hard disagree.
The term serves a legitimate purpose: distinguishing between evidence-based claims about actual conspiracies (which do happen) and unfounded or poorly-supported theories. Watergate was a real conspiracy. The tobacco industry really did conspire to hide health risks. But not every claim of hidden coordination is equally credible.
Legitimate uses include describing theories that rely on unfalsifiable reasoning ("any evidence against it is planted"), highlighting lack of credible evidence for extraordinary claims, distinguishing speculation from established facts.
Bad faith uses includ dismissing inconvenient questions without engaging the evidence, shutting down legitimate skepticism of official narratives, or using it as a thought-terminating cliche to avoid debate.
Now, reasonable people can disagree on whether my characterization is in bad faith or legitimate. I think we could agree on that.
For reference, I wish you were right, it would be great if indeed the word still served that purpose - but it doesn't.
The GP post literally said that the goal was not to have free elections, and that the other things you mention were collateral damage, or at worst something that could be exploited to further the main goal. You took their two examples of collateral damage, implied the GP thought those were the goal, and ignored his actual claim that the goal was to end fair elections.
It's dangerous to pattern match what you read to something in your head, rather than paying attention to the claims someone actually made.
OK, let's assume that.
Goal is one thing. How far they're willing and able to go (and hence be effective in getting that goal) is a different matter. That's my argument.
The current adminitration has shown that their ego (adoration) is a limiting factor in what they're willing to do for power.
To wit, top Republicans warn GOP will face midterm election ‘bloodbath’. Why bother caring? Is it just political theater?
Lots of people are just incompentent, not malicious. This made Hanlon's razor, "assume incompentence not malice," memetically fit in many walks of life, so it spread till millions of Americans followed it when processing news.
As a result, incompetent politicians got more leeway to do malicious things. It turned out that in electoral politics, if you are already an a-hole, leeway to be evil without being called on it is more useful than compentence. Incompetence is hard to fake, so our electoral system now demands that you be both incompetent and an asshole to get elected. The only fix is to change the incentives, which means calling out malice in our politicians when it looks like malice, even if we can't prove that it's malice and not just incompetence, and ESPECIALLY even if the person is incompetent too.
All of this pussyfooting is only making matters (much) worse.
Where do you get this from?
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/donald-trump-laura-ingraham-f...
Repeated statements by Trump and his circle claiming he’ll run in 2028. Statements by Trump that his supporters won’t ever need to vote again. That little insurrection they tried on January 6th 2021. Their current weaponization and staffing of ICE by people with questionable backgrounds and morals and deploying them against their political enemies under the pretext of illegal immigration (Texas has a bigger problem than Wisconsin For what it’s worth). Constantly praising dictatorial leaders like Putin and Xi while threatening and talking shit about Democratic allies.
So whether or not metastasizes to that point, pretending like this concern has no grounding in actual actions taken and statements uttered is wild, because this playbook isn’t new and the intended direction seems more clear than not.
> I'm a veteran. I served under both parties. I don't care which side of the aisle fixes this.
The idea that there are things entirely unpartisan or unpolitical is a polite fiction we can work with when things are somewhere around normal - usually even when things are pretty far from normal.
I get the army drilled this stance into you, but at some point the price the people pay for corruption includes their security.
It is, in fact, about politics.
Note: I'm an independent, but the current administration is incompetent on an embarrassing level.
Tbh, I don't see any way going back to democracy and rule of law is possible without completely rewriting our constitution.
there is no need to rewrite it, because it's fine. What's not fine is people not observing it, and defending it with their lives, and making sure that violations are actioned with penalties, social stigma and disdain.
You are blind. The senate and electoral college and lack of clearly distributed powers have meant that we have never functioned as a liberal democracy despite our lofty rhetoric claiming otherwise.
I'm not qualified to know who will make a good president. You probably aren't either. Pushing the process further into American Idol territory would make it worse, not better.
Randomly-selected citizens would have performed what we’ve gotten in the last few elections at minimum.
Genuinely think we should consider that.
This is, incidentally, how we massively screwed up the federal government. In the original design US Senators were elected by the state legislatures, the premise being that they would prevent federal overreach into the regulatory domain of the states because they would be directly accountable to the state governments.
Then populists who wanted to do everything at the federal level pushed for the 17 Amendment which eliminated the state governments' representation in the federal government and then people stopped caring about local politics because it started feeling like an exercise in futility when federal law could preempt anything you wanted to do and the thing meant to keep that in check was deleted.
And the federal government was supposed to have enumerated (i.e. narrow, limited) powers. It doesn't have the scaffolding for people to hold it accountable. You can elect the local dogcatcher but the only elected office in the entire federal executive branch is the President of the United States. Which is fine when the main thing they're doing is negotiating treaties and running the Post Office but not fine if you're trying to do thousands of pages of federal regulations on everything from healthcare to banking to labor to energy.
There have been plenty of times the country has functioned extremely well with the exact same setup as it is now.
The issue is everyone being greedy cowards instead of actually fighting for what matters.
Resistance is difficult because it typically requires great personal sacrifice. It's hard to protest when you have to work to feed and shelter your family. It's hard to resist law enforcement when your life is the price.
The working class's current inability to resist tyranny isn't an accident.
it always takes sacrifice to resist tyranny. It's just that there's been less tyranny in the past half century, that the new generation raised have not had to make sacrifices, and thus don't feel they need to. Surely, somebody else will make that sacrifice when the time comes...
Which, given current incentives re: law and order does seem to be the sanest thing to do from a local minima perspective.
However, it is also one of the worst outcomes from a global perspective.
If the constitution was appropriate, the people would have the explicit legal means of remedying this situation without relying on elections several years after the constitutional crises was underway.
But the GOP turned into the MAGA cult.
There's a long way to go on the path the USA is currently on. Ask anyone from India or Russia or Argentina or Egypt or Nigeria how democracy actually works.
The word politics has basically split into two meanings that we swap between without noticing. There's the original sense, the art of navigating collective decisions, how we share power and resources. That version is unavoidable and actually kind of noble. Then there's what the word has come to mean in practice, which is identity-driven team sport. My side versus your side. Performance and signaling.
When you say "it is, in fact, about politics" you're technically correct in the first sense but you're activating the second sense, which is exactly the frame he's trying to get people out of. He's trying to create a space where people engage with the substance without immediately sorting into camps. That's valuable even if the distinction is a little artificial.
It's kind of a trap honestly. The escape hatch from tribal politics has itself become a political move, so you can always say "well actually that's political too." True, but not very useful if you're trying to get anywhere.
We've got a great term for the latter, and everyone is already familiar with it. Add the adjective "party". Done.
Similarly, "computer" in "computer games" is a noun that modifies the meaning of the following noun. Modifying nouns like this always are in singular.
Not two “teams” beating each other over the head.
"Both sides" / "tribes bad" / "transcend the conflict" discourse is such cancer, because intentionally ignoring the most pertinent parameters of a conflict is not a neutral choice. When Donald Trump said he would end the Russia/Ukraine conflict on Day 1, we didn't fear that he was lying, we feared that he was serious because we all knew that the only way to actually do it would have been to force Ukrainian defeat. When your toddler is screaming because the smell of cooking has made him hungry but he has to wait, giving in to his demands is not conflict-transcending 3D chess, it's teaching your kid that tantrums are an effective tool. The same goes for politics.
There, fixed the title with some subbtle edits. /s
I work in a cabinet level agency running an $350M IT program. I'm good what I do, including cyber. We're too focused on paperwork compliance and vendor agents that provide little to no value for 8-9 digit annual costs.
Anonymous Account because I'd like to keep my job.
I'm glad you're good at what you do, but to me, and this attitude of "I know this is an issue but I'm still gonna waste taxpayer funds as part of my job and perl-clutch on HN" is concerning.
Outside of your paycheck contributions and otherwise, that isn't your money friend.
Chaos ensues.
Average American - "This isn't about politics. Both sides are to blame. We must work together."
Unless people collectively get their heads out of their asses the situation isn't going to magically reverse itself.
Or is this like the DHS where you just get to say that we haven't had any more 9/11s, so clearly the money and complete transformation of how we think about personal liberties was worth it?
Theoretically, it makes sense that we would need something like a cyber defense agency. Realistically, this doesn't seem like something the government (even at the best of times) would be capable of doing effectively.
blakesterz•1h ago
JKCalhoun•1h ago
Then we will deserve it. (Sad to say.)
AnimalMuppet•59m ago
I mean, I'd far rather that that US had both offensive capability and a solid defense. But the situation is not totally hopeless - or so I hope.
felineflock•51m ago