The vast majority of federal spending is tied to programs like social security, Medicare, and the DoD which DOGE didn’t cut.
DOGE actions appear to have been largely based on the chaotic whims of Elon in response to perceived slights and tweets sent to him and did not have any significant effect on the budget. They chased after ghosts previously investigated by IGs and found insignificant, such as dead people on the social security rolls.
Real budget reform proposals remain out there from CRFB and others, and perhaps some future administration will undertake them when social security becomes insolvent in a few years.
Right, and the vast majority of most people’s budgets are their mortgage/rent. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t cut out that streaming subscription they don’t need when they’re accruing debt every year. Every bit helps.
If their time and energy are limited, the highest impact actions would be reducing the mortgage/rent or increasing income. And it's questionable whether foreign aid is a "streaming subscription" or a "gym membership" expenditure. Assuming you regularly go to the gym maybe keeping it will help you get a better job.
Even that isn't what's happened here. If we continue the analogy it's more like stop paying for wifi, then later discover you need it for work so sign up again at and pay an extra fee.
There is so much conflation (maybe intentional, I dunno) between the goal of cutting spending and the method that DOGE employed. If DOGE went in methodically and actually cut waste and fraud I'd cheer them. What actually happened was a mixture of:
- Cutting things without knowing the details and then later having bring them back at extra cost (e.g. employees)
- Cutting things regardless of consequence based on ideological views (or just randomly?)
- Not actually saving anything and just lying about it
I suspect most problematic American drivers already know they aren’t supposed to text, drink, or watch or record TikToks while they drive, but simply do it anyway because they are aware these laws are under-enforced.
I think an copyright/IP assignment contract is standard in many or most U.S. software jobs, at least when working for a big enough company that they have a lawyer who handles the NDA/employment paperwork.
That pretty much automatically rules out over employment because you can’t separately promise two different companies that you’re assigning all software copyrights to them rather than you, it’s an incompatible contract (even if it’s limited to work hours - you’re pretending to both companies that you’re working 9-5 solely for them).
A large percentage of U.S. software jobs (and probably nearly all YCombinator startups) are in California. Other states might be different, but stuff you do outside of work doesn't automatically become your employer's IP in California.
There are some nuances and I'm not a lawyer, but the gist of it is that three ways to trigger the IP to attach to your employer:
1. You do it on-prem or during work hours (but work hours are flexible for salaried employees)
2. You do it using company equipment (say, company laptop at home)
3. It's reasonably related to what you or other people do at your day job
If none of those apply, then you own it. That's relevant to the discussion at hand because, at least in California, you could work from home for two companies with unrelated businesses and not break any rules.
You can do anything - the question is whether you'll get caught and then whether you'll get punished. Does the employer have anything to gain by suing the employee in these cases?
All successful big tech businesses - all of them - got that way by openly breaking laws. They don't trigger automatically, but upon a manual review, triggered by someone with at least a couple grand to spend on the endeavour. A lot flies under the radar in practice.
So they would rather be homeless? In a market without landlords, everyone who couldn’t afford to buy a home would have to live in their car or camp on the street.
Verification and validation of LLM output in this context would mean doing all the same research, training etc done today for human staff and then comparing the results line by line. It would actually take more time. How do you know if the LLM failed to apply one of hundreds of rules from a procedure unless you have a human trained on it who has also examined every relevant document and artifact from the process?
> one clear driver is continually increasing rules, regulations, and compliance, along with fears of audits and lawsuits
As mentioned by the GP posts the main problem is the increasing rules, regulations and compliance need to be processed the admin staff not the research contributions itself (these invention and innovation parts are performed by the graduate students and professors who are getting cuts by the limited budget).
This AI based system will include (not limited to) LLM with RAG (with relevants documents) that can perform the work of the tens if not hundreds jobs of the admin staff. The agent AI can also include rule based expert system for assessment of the procedures. It will be much faster than human can ever be with the on-demand AWS scale scaling (pardon the pun).
Ultimately it will need only a few expert admin staff for the compliance validation and compliance instead tens of hundreds as typical now in research organizations. The AI based system will even get better over time due to this RLHF and expert human-in-the-loop arrangement.
I came from a middle class family (both parents college educated with white collar jobs) and received significant financial aid offers from multiple colleges (2 decade ago). A mix of grants and subsidized federal loans.
I think it depends a lot on the family’s position within the middle class. Upper middle class families will not be eligible for financial aid, while members of the lower middle class have significant non-merit based aid available.
If DOGE is going to spend the USAID-allocated billions on some other foreign development aid, they are saving zero money. Their claims of cost saving contradict a defense that they aren’t violating the spending laws passed by Congress.
Catching the flu virus also gives a high temperature and fever and results in 100s of kids dying each year from the flu[0]. Vaccines have been shown to be much safer than exposing yourself to the virus.
The House passed this Act in 2021 to reduce the presidents power, but Biden never asked the senate to act on it. Reducing his own power wasn’t a priority for him, he spent his political capital on pushing for other laws.
DOGE actions appear to have been largely based on the chaotic whims of Elon in response to perceived slights and tweets sent to him and did not have any significant effect on the budget. They chased after ghosts previously investigated by IGs and found insignificant, such as dead people on the social security rolls.
Real budget reform proposals remain out there from CRFB and others, and perhaps some future administration will undertake them when social security becomes insolvent in a few years.
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