I hope all the people working in tech today realize that once you let the executive ignore laws that you dislike, it's a very clear path to them ignoring laws that protect you and your companies. You WILL be a target eventually and nobody is going to protect you.
This is a slow-motion disaster but too many people are complacent because they think it's not going to affect them. No matter your political leanings we cannot allow a constitutional crisis to go unchecked. Things that we take for granted dissolve rapidly if institutions start grabbing power without consequences.
This isn't a politics forum, but abolishing USAID without congress was also insane. I don't care if you dislike something USAID does or did, it would require congress to legally abolish it.
And a few other things, that's just a prominent example.
Congress is pretty much ignoring this. Both parties.
Probably like the apparatchik of the Soviet "parliament", that just rubber stamped everything, and can then enjoy the luxury of being the elite the rest of the day. Just needs more mistresses (corruption is already there), anyone got Matt Gaetz' number?
Alcoholic (speaking of Russian stereotypes!) wife-abuser as defense minister? Rubber-stamped! RFK as health minister? Rubber-stamped! Glory to the union!
> All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.
> Congress shall have Power To ... declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;
Meanwhile on the "executive" side:
> He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur;
To me, this is pretty clear, at least about things like war and treaties and land acquisition. But it's easy to come up with a ton of examples from all parties that seem to violate these very basic rules.
What I would read as very fundamental "violations" of the document are often upheld by courts as being in agreement with it.
By the majority in Congress voting to block any attempts to challenge the executive branch.
Judges are acting to stay executive orders, but judicial processes are deliberately slow and the current administration seated several current Supreme Court judges.
Civil disobedience and mass unrest seems inevitable when the rule of law and balance of powers is systemically undermined.
Yet initially the two current leaders of the Democratic Party seemed determined to broadcast their own weakness. Minority leader Hakeem Jeffries spent last week at a donor retreat with billionaire tech leaders, only to emerge whining, ‘What leverage do we have? They control the House, the Senate, and the presidency.’… Jeffries’s conflation of “leverage” with “holding a majority in a chamber” is jaw-dropping. Power—the ability to change the behavior of another—comes from information, charisma, law, attention, procedure, expertise, and the ability to convene and organize. … What could they have done? Here are four suggestions: First, vigorous procedural delay….. Second, convene and spotlight. They should not see their power just through the lens of how it has traditionally been used. Congressional Democratic leadership should also make full use of their own convening power, holding hearings taking testimony from fired and pressured employees…. Congressional Democrats can also do more on basic legal protection of the institution. The people’s house is under attack, and they should be wielding law like swords to defend it. While Democratic state attorneys general have been filing lawsuit after lawsuit, congressional leadership—whose own power as the lawmaking arm of the American public is being decimated—should understand they also need to play a key role in making sure lawsuits are brought to block the destruction. Whatever their legal abilities, they are all astute fundraisers, and can play matchmaker between constituents, possible plaintiffs, lawyers, and donors to make sure that effective and well-resourced lawsuits are brought to stop the illegal power plays….. Finally, they can go on offense, forcing Trump and Republicans to either help Americans, or clearly demonstrate that they don’t want to. That means being willing to work with Republicans—if they can get laws passed that make people’s lives better, and not focus on Democratic Party branding.”
Congress is also ignoring the principles laid out in the Constitution by acting like presidents have unilateral power when they do not, and were never intended to. Many members of Congress have defended Trump's actions on these issues by implying that voters gave him a mandate, but the voters also voted for Congress, and they are supposed to check the President in some ways. Congress is probably supposed to be the most impactful branch of federal government, not the weakest.
Laws are just words on paper if no one decides to enforce them. What is Congress going to do to Trump, impeach him? lol
Okay, so Congress could pass a resolution saying they consider the dissolution of USAID a violation of the law… but the silence speaks for itself. The law is not what is written, the law is what we do and what we tolerate.
The billionaire doing the abolishing also called it a nest of Marxist vipers.
Really just the wild stuff that Elon and Trump post to their social media is terrifyingly unhinged. I feel most people get the sane-washed version via the media but it's genuinely mind boggling to read their directly published public comments about stuff.
Direct quote for the record:
> USAID was a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America
Isn't this a slippery slope into authoritarianism? How are people not more worried about this? The whole of checks and balances is this, this is democracy literally eroding away isn't it?
We’re in the authoritarianism part already, the 3 branches are aligned on this. The democrats whole campaign this election was to worry , but they are too committed to process and impartiality to have any effect (and let’s face it, most of congress is too old and/or too rich to give a damn what happens to our democracy in the first place)
Many of us made peace with this road a couple decades back and have been focused on building communities locally to survive it. Obama, Trump, Biden, GW ... they were all building the road to this moment together.
It's like watching one of those hydraulic press videos - the slow build up of the squeeze has been happening for awhile, we've finally arrived at the point where the pressure is really deforming stuff. But it was predictable for a long time.
Just for completeness, Congress’ check on the executive and judicial is impeachment, but this check is somewhat defeated by party politics, a weakness President Washington was prescient enough to warn us about in his farewell address
The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty.
Without looking forward to an extremity of this kind, (which nevertheless ought not to be entirely out of sight,) the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.
It serves always to distract the Public Councils, and enfeeble the Public Administration. It agitates the Community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms; kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which find a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions. Thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another.
While this is true (to some degree anyway), it seems qualitatively different from Congress (and then backed up by SCOTUS) explicitly banning a specific company (and explicitly banning other companies from doing specific things related to that company) and then being completely ignored by an incoming president who just says "wut? no worries, carry on tiktok".
this is not a debate about just what the intelligence community can and cannot do, or what level of enforcement and in what communities is appropriate for a given law. it is a point blank statement "i am the president, and you (tiktok) and you (google, apple) can ignore the law", made in public, without any possible national security justification (whatever level of BS that might normally come with).
It's somewhat different to not enforce a general law against a multitude of possible targets and enforcing a law literally imposed against a single target.
A lot of people don't get fined for jaywalking and it's not a big deal because it's understood that it's a lot of work to actually cite all of them everywhere, so the difference between the normal level of not enforcing everything and intentionally not enforcing isn't 0 vs 100.
This is passing a law that John Smith should go to jail and then deciding you don't actually want to send him to jail. Why did you bother passing the law if you didn't care. Trump literally started all this TikTok banning stuff and now is against it, but isn't actually repealing the law. Congress seems to have just given up too. It's fully lawless.
He is a servant of chaos to use fantasy terminology (due to lifelong mental imbalances that were glaringly obvious way before he got power). Maybe chaotic neutral after all + and - will eventually be summarised, but for now, for most of the world he veers towards evil scale.
Maybe something good will come out of this like Europe finally waking up, even now in 2025 here on HN I got attacked for warmongering if I dare say that we should increase defense (literally in our case) budgets.
Elephant in the porcelaine shop will make a room for new products for sure but thats not the most important thing that happens.
The law went into effect on the last day of the Biden administration. If you are going to traffic in provable facts, “Biden declined to implement enforcement of a new law on his final day in office” is a more descriptive provable fact to share.
I'm noting that there is a qualititive difference in Trump's behavior with respect to this law compared with ... well, anything anyone has been comparing it to.
No, we're downvoting a bad-faith argument. Typical Trump-supporter nonsense, trying to equate Biden's and Trump's actions when they are qualitatively and quantitatively completely different.
That's a very good point. There are certainly more examples of laws that go un-enforced to reinforce your point. For example jaywalking laws are routinely flouted with little enforcement. Likewise buggery laws are routinely ignored by law enforcement.
Along that axis, you are certainly right that it is basically the same as the president unilaterally choosing to exempt a specific multibillion dollar company controlled by a powerful foreign adversary from laws passed by congress with the intent of shoring up national security.
This insight is well received by me and I'm sure others.
The executive branch is explicitly granted the power to choose which drugs are or aren't scheduled. The law already having provisions to allow the executive to choose which drugs to ban or not makes the choice not to enforce very different qualitatively.
Watching the tech community waltz into DC and pretend that they know how all the levers of government work is pathetic. Are there inefficiencies? Sure. Are there places to improve? Of course. But pretending that they can understand the intricacies of literally decades of institutional knowledge and deep connections across the globe in the course of a single weekend is asinine.
We need to do better. The US government isn't Twitter. Breaking things simply because you have the power is the opposite of leadership, it's nihilism.
Note this isn't representative of the tech industry in general.
When I worked for Google I visited NIH, sat on study groups, and helped advise program managers how to move more compute to the cloud. Like many other techies in SV I have a PhD in a quantitative science and understand how NIH works. My efforts were entirely designed to help update the establishment, not tear it down, and that's true for the wide swath of my coworkers I encountered.
The folks who are doing this are a subset of the tech community, who do not represent the larger community.
There is a real schism in the SV elite community between the "tech right" and Google. You could argue that OpenAI was founded by Sam Altman and Elon Musk to deny Google exclusive access to the GenAI.
"Been thinking a lot about whether it's possible to stop humanity from developing AI. I think the answer is almost definitely not. If it's going to happen anyway, it seems like it would be good for someone other than Google to do it first."
"OpenAI is on a path of certain failure relative to Google. There obviously needs to be immediate and dramatic action or everyone except for Google will be consigned to irrelevance."
Google has always been the company that looms over whatever next-gen hyped things the VC crowd can invest in (or whatever field Elon can pretend to be far ahead in). I even think it being perceived as so liberal has moved these people to the right instead of "libertarian" as they used to claim so they can hit it politically
> Note this isn't representative of the tech industry in general.
I'm not convinced. In the past half decade or so this industry has veered hard toward outright fraud and grift. I see this trend all over--adtech, cryptocoins, "AI", security... These days I assume technologists are frauds until they prove otherwise. It's a blunt instrument, but it often works well.
I'm sorry, but your defense for the "not all techies" argument is that you flew to NIH and told them how to stop investing in their own infrastructure and funnel tax dollars to private hosting rentals instead? I cannot wrap my head around this as a defense of anything. Seems like the current crew is just cutting out the middleman.
Yeah it's a more involved discussion than we could really have in a form like this but I truly believe that the cloud is a better solution than self-investment and infrastructure when it comes to universities. I spent plenty of time working with closet clusters and grad students is admins when I was at the University and I just don't think it's a good investment of time or money.
When I advise the NIH to do was to do a large bulk group buy on behalf of many thousands of scientists that use the scale of the NIH to negotiate in extremely large concession. My experience with Amazon is that you can basically get them down about 50% just by asking.
I work for a well-funded company now and we use the cloud and we have on-prem infrastructure. The on-prem infrastructure is extremely hard to change sometimes just asking for a GPU will take 6 months or more. Storage is always highly limited and slow. Let the cloud hyperscalers do what they're good at and focus on doing the science
Stop playing along with this farce. Their goal is not to improve anything or reduce waste, it's to destroy the apparatus of governance entirely, privatize everything, and rule over a destitute, terrified populace as unto gilded age kings lording over fiefdoms.
It may be a bad assumption to think HN comments reflect the broader tech community's opinion on what is happening in the US government right now. That being said, there are far too many commenters that seem to be okay with what's happening, especially when it comes to DoE and Musk taking over the treasury.
There just seems to be an overall lack of respect for how government works, the broader machine and bureaucracy that is supposed to protect from unilateral decisions made by a single entity. Government is not, and should not, be run like a tech startup. Going fast and breaking things isn't a recipe for stability or reliability in both government and software. History has tried kings and dictators and, well, they never turn out great for the general population. Democracy is slow and sucks sometimes, but it also has a ton of perks that we seem all too quick to dismiss and throw away.
In that respect it is astonishingly successful by every measure. Musk got his global political shift and becoming co-president of the US for a causal $40 billion.
But was the complete annihilation of all safety measures on twitter and chasing away most advertisers necessary to accomplish that? Couldn’t he have bought twitter, truly kept it an open place to discuss topics with less misinformation, kept his advertisers, and still shit post and donate his way into the White House?
He undoubtedly slashed spending, but didn’t he also tank revenue? The question I have is was any of that really necessary for him to get to where he is right now?
What's the name for that principle/rule where someone blithely removes rules or regulations without any context for them being there in the first place? It's on the tip of my tounge. I feel like we're seeing that a lot in the US Federal govt at the moment.
Technologists and engineers can be so damn arrogant. Learn some humility. You probably aren't that smart or valuable and people like you aren't the only people adding value to society.
Turncoat Zuck's Meta had posters on the wall in every building: a picture of a rocking horse with the caption: "Not all motion is progress."
The fourth estates' and the masses' blind faith in and compliance to self-righteous, egotistical billionaires, one of whom may be a Nazi, is what is both disappointing and frightening.
Small nit, but these folks 100% can not be described as the "tech community". They're owners of big tech monopolies, their VC backers, and our new oligarchs. Tech community, however, they are not.
> In March 2014, Tunney petitioned the US government on We the People to hold a referendum asking for support to retire all government employees with full pensions, transfer administrative authority to the technology industry, and appoint the executive chairman of Google Eric Schmidt as CEO of America.
DOGE is staffed precisely by the tech elite. Like 20 year old grads who are elite programmers winning competitions, that type.
Are they not part of the tech community now? You highly overestimate the political homogeneity of the tech community, because opposing voices were previously so shut down. You would be surprised by what your co-workers are thinking deep down.
That feels like a No True Scotsman argument after decades of chasing VC approval, prestigious jobs at those huge companies, and adopting their practices and software. I don’t like the oligarchy either but it’s a huge part of the tech world under any definition I can come up with. We’re having this conversation on a board run by one of the VC firms with partners who are openly supportive of what’s going on, after all - is this not part of the tech community?
Honestly fair enough. Pay package over principles does pretty well describe the policy of far too many of the colleagues I've worked with over the years.
Sure, but there’s a lot of shared culture even though they have distinct subgroups. I don’t think the guys in the news wouldn’t be welcomed at most startups.
Honestly, this is exactly how Silicon Valley operates. Uber broke the laws until they could fix the laws (in their favor). AirBnB did the exact same thing. Meta knew their platform was causing damage to children and teenagers, and they gave zero fucks.
What does the inclusion of the move to Texas actually have to do with the downfall of the company?
I get that it is the original title, but even the article itself points out that the company was in dire straits well before the move.
The move (and forced relocation of employees) was likely a way to force attrition, since it was followed fairly quickly with layoffs elsewhere.
If anything, including mention of the move in the title just muddles the readers' expectations of the article, IMHO, and the article would be better off without it.
Has any SPAC ever actually succeeded in the sense that whatever it purchased didn't die after a year or was atleast profitable? Every one of them always seemed like a huge obvious scam to dump the bags on dumb money.
I think that’s sort of the point of SPAC: a lot less scrutiny than a full on IPO so shakier companies can go public.
If someone is the type who willingly hand over their money knowing what a SPAC is and does, he’s a contrarian who smarter than everyone else, an idiot, or someone who thinks he can make a quick buck by letting the idiot hold the bag at the end — but really the latter two end up being the same.
I maintain a little de-SPAC portfolio to track their progress. Many of them are dead, there's about 50 companies left in my tracking now.
The only companies on this list with stock prices over the original $10 SPAC price are:
- Oklo (mini nuclear reactors)
- DraftKings (gambling)
- Hims & Hers (wellness telehealth)
- Grindr (gay hookup app)
The majority of companies have lost 80-95% of their original value. Many SPACs have done a big reverse split, so their price appears to be over $10 but the original price would have been in the hundreds.
Yep. I think Hims & Hers is the very rare SPAC that was a new company at time of its listing (founded in 2017), and has managed to deliver both profits and shareholder value. Perhaps it's even the only one.
I was going to ask this same question. Literally every SPAC I can think ranged from bad to unmitigated disaster. Probably my favorite example is Getaround, the car sharing company that tanked immediately after the SPAC merger. How did that deal even happen?
Does anyone know of a site that tracks the outcome of SPAC mergers? I found some articles but most of them are pretty old. Curious if there have been any successes.
It feels like so much "financial innovation" of the past 30 years in that it was just a way for rich people to get even richer and, as you say, leave the dumb money as bag holders.
I mean DraftKings is currently successful, and while I think Lucid makes fantastic cars and I want ChargePoint to succeed, they may not be dead but their stock is well below the $10 SPAC price and they're far from profitable.
If Boeing was paying $500K+ TC for engineers in their early/mid career, you'd see a lot more expertise enter the field. Instead you basically have to go into tech or PE/IB to see that type of compensation fresh out of school. Especially when students are taking on hundreds of thousands in debt, the payback period becomes really important when considering career paths.
I completely understand graduates would choose higher TC from tech/finance vs TC from Boeing. What I do not understand is why tech/finance companies would want to hire chemical engineering graduates.....
I know a few people who changed careers from biology to finance - but that was only after going back to school and getting some business degree....
I've heard anecdotal reports that it can accelerate hair loss in males (male pattern baldness). I have no clue if this has been studied but enough people have reported it across the web that it has caused me to avoid creatine personally. Any experts here feel like weighing in?
You're ignoring the time element of healthcare. If you get hit by a bus, you aren't in a position to shop around or negotiate for care. You can even be incapacitated and unable to respond to questions before your treatment starts.
Imagine you get knocked out cold and wake up seated at a restaurant with an empty plate of food. You were fed the food but you have no memory of it. The bill comes and it's $5,999. Would you feel like this is fair?
Waymos do the same thing in SF where the streets are much denser, traffic is weirder, hills are way steeper, and the roads aren't in perfect shape by any means. The amount of impressive navigation I've seen around delivery trucks, weird construction patterns, etc has been pretty wild. They seem way ahead of the other options on the road.
Not from what I've seen - it happens in real-time just like most human drivers. I don't believe that a remote controlled operator is even permitted, but I could be wrong.
Waymos drive fairly fast and aggressively in rush hour traffic too, which is why I enjoy sharing the road with them. I was initially worried they'd drive like a grandma but that hasn't been the case. Also as a cyclist I enjoy riding near them because they know I'm there and they give you enough space in the bike lane.
This is a slow-motion disaster but too many people are complacent because they think it's not going to affect them. No matter your political leanings we cannot allow a constitutional crisis to go unchecked. Things that we take for granted dissolve rapidly if institutions start grabbing power without consequences.
It's insane that Congress isn't stepping-up here.