I appreciate your attempt to clarify here, but your citation link above in 2) is for 'trangender', a misspelling (but it does search successfully).
This isn't a 'search problem'; searching for 'gender' and 'transgender' always and immediately redirects back to the main page. I also tested several unrelated searches without any issues (HIV, genome, public, potato).
I've heard reports via the NIH subreddit that this censorship was actually added back in January, not over the weekend while Trump and Musk broke the NIH website.
Thanks for pointing this out. This makes it much more likely that someone messed up a server/firewall configuration than that Musk is ripping out network cables at NIH.
I’m a little late to this thread; but is PubMed really one of the most reliable services in the history of the internet?
I worked on the underlying infrastructure that powers PubMed in the 2010’s at the National Library of Medicine.
I was all up in that thing converting legacy pneumatic Johnson Control systems to Siemens PXC’s, and didn’t actually realize its historical importance online. That’s pretty cool to see this comment.
We had full access to the Datacenter at the National Library of Medicine, and as a young apprentice I really had no idea what PubMed was at the time lol.
I only realized how important of a system it might be when we saw the realtime traffic analytics on the screens outside of the data hall.
Pubmed is essentially Google for scientists. Anytime you search for scientific publications you usually use Pubmed. Of course there are alternatives, but until now you didn't really have to know about those. Everyone just used Pubmed, I'd bet that even most European scientists didn't know the local alternatives until now.
And there's a lot more functionality made available to scientists by the NIH.
I almost never use pubmed, while I use Google Scholar everyday (for neuroscience/medical/computer science research). But I admit that all medical researchers I know only use pubmed.
Apparently the FAA database that tracks accident investigations is down also, and probably a bunch of other systems that regular people aren't aware of that various organizations rely on.
If this was a Chinese cyberattack, it would be the scandal of the decade. But it's on purpose.
So looking at this from a technical point. NIH.gov has three name servers. Each host are still up, but only answering dns on TCP and not UDP. All three are located under the same AS, which implies that there is a single operator responsible. No ipv6. From the outside I can't see any sign that they have delegated operation of either the servers or the service to any external company.
Doing some more looking around, it seems like NIH has a department/group/structure called Center for Information Technology, which is the IT support side of NIH and are the operators for the DNS servers.
I'm going to regret this, I bet, but here we go: Many years ago I was the manager of the team inside NIH/CIT that ran both the border firewalls and the DNS servers in question (to be specific, at the time it was NIH/CIT/DNST/NEB/NSS). Obviously, since I'm not there anymore I don't have any special inside information, but given that the DNS servers were responding to TCP and not UDP during the outage, my bet would be a simple firewall screwup, rather than malice.
Stuff happens - maintenances have unintended consequences, people typo stuff, etc. Don't freak out about every event - save your powder for the real outrages (like 18F).
I’ve thought about it and you’re right, this was just confirmation bias on my part. There is in fact no evidence that DOGE is in any way involved. Apologies.
This is exactly how the HN community responded to Twitter, too. The amount of baseless speculation paraded as fact is crazy for a supposedly rationalist community.
Maybe if I remembered or looked at how HN handled Trump's first election win then I'd have a more accurate impression, but both the Twitter/Musk takeover and now Trump's win and DOGE seem to have sent a lot of people into strange hysteria that I've rarely seen on HN. I just want people to calm down and provide better commentary but I think that would be downvoted to hell with responses like "don't you know <insert apocalyptic event here> is happening? Are you <select from stupid/bigoted/evil>?"
The other day, I had a chat with a friend (IRL) and he told me his friend told him that planes are falling from the sky because Trump had fired all the air traffic controllers (which, as Trump would put it, is fake news, driven by irresponsible headlines). The commentary here is on that, very low, very misguided, tribal (not even partisan, worse) and very unhelpful level. That's not the kind of plurality of opinion HN needs, in my opinion.
The first election was very different as he had more accountability in the other branches of government. Now we are seeing Nazi salutes right from the inauguration, the alienation of every ally, the opening of mass detention centres outside the US, executive orders to place himself above the courts while siding with Putin, and unofficially created branches of government acting without oversight to dismantle large swathes of the state.
The reaction is completely different because the reality is completely different. People are "hysterical" because we grew up with the explicit agreement that we wouldn't let these things happen again and now the systems which we built to prevent it are rapidly falling apart. When facism comes knocking at the door the time for plurality of opinion is gone, there are only two sides here and only one of them is in any way a moral choice.
I'm sorry to say, but I find your comment an example of the hysteria I mentioned.
Firstly, that is not fascism and I do wish people would stop misusing that word. The Doctrine of Fascism[1] is an interesting and elucidative read. I'm sure that tyrannical, authoritarian or any of the other more appropriate (yet still inaccurate, in my view) words would be a much better choice. The thesaurus lists arbitrary, which might fit Trump much better than any of them, but fascist, no. That would be a risible choice. Fascists don't cut the size of government for start, and they certainly don't fight for the right to do so in court. What a thought!
> the opening of mass detention centres outside the US
Are you referring to the Guatanamo Bay detention camp? That was opened in 2002 and has run continuously till now. Two Republican presidents, two Democrat. I was against it in 2002 and I'm glad people are finally noticing, but its use as a processing centre for migrants goes back even further to the early 90s (and less officially, the 1970s)[2].
> executive orders to place himself above the courts
That is not what the executive orders do, nor is that how the system works, and even if you think the executive's ignoring of court orders would be a crisis, Andrew Jackson ignored them[3], almost 200 years ago, America didn't descend into fascism (and not because it hadn't been conceived yet).
From[4]:
> The Trump administration is still entrenched in legal fights in the lower courts and, so far, has not defied any orders from the U.S. Supreme Court, the nation's highest court, she noted.
> Firstly, that is not fascism and I do wish people would stop misusing that word.
It is facism. The treatment alone of the trans community is enough to earn it that title. If you want to make an argument from your book then please do so but linking to it alone is not an argument.
> Are you referring to the Guatanamo Bay detention camp?
Are you deciding to pick and choose from the list I gave you? The Nazi salutes mean nothing?
I'm referring to the directive to house 30,000 people there, up from a current population of zero. Coupled with dehumanising language like "illegals," the "delegation of immigration authority" to untrained officers, and the careless attitude to false positives make these developments very much incomparable to anything that's gone before (at least outside of places like Nazi Germany). Do ask yourself as well how easily the use of these facilities can be broadened in the future once there there to house other types of "illegals."
They are already ignoring the courts [0]. What the Executive Order does "legally" does not matter to someone who claims "he who serves his country breaks no law." The only thing that matters is intention. You're thinking about this from a legalist perspective but those days are gone.
Interesting, those IP addresses are under a different AS and under a different organization, that of National Library of Medicine. They don't seem to use the IT infrastructure of nih.gov.
Yeaaaahhhh...NLM is/was a special beast inside NIH.
At the time I was there they had a budget to die for, and Pubmed was in the top 300 websites in the world (both are probably still true). NLM pushed so much traffic because of Pubmed that they had their own internet connection to avoid DoS'ing the commodity desktop traffic of the rest of the NIH.
PubMed is self hosted in a datacenter located within NLM on the NIH campus.
They also have their own fiber connections as you mentioned.
There is also a legit storage vault located within the building that houses non digital records. We were told that there were medical records going back thousands of years kept there; and possibly as far back as the Egyptian era.
The most accessible tool I would recommend is zonemaster.net, a tool developed by AFNIC and The Swedish Internet Foundation. Go to advanced and type in nlm.nih.gov as domain, and then the two nameservers listed above and their ip addresses. Run the test and it will present a status summery of the domain and its name servers. (or just use this link: https://zonemaster.net/en/result/4a7d593dce6e167b)
Alternatively you can use the tool dig command tool which is the industry standard for dns debugging and probing. Installing it on windows/mac is a bit of work, but is very easy and convenient on linux. The command here would be "dig @130.14.55.128 nlm.nih.gov". The @ sign is for saying which nameserver to use, and the last part is the domain name you are looking for.
For quick reference, BLAST refers to the 'Basic Local Alignment Search Tool' that's a commonly used part of the bioinformatics toolkit. You 'BLAST' sequences by sending a query sequence of interest against a database of other sequences to find similarity hits.
I have been out of the field for some time, so I am not sure how much BLAST is used these days.
Therer was a time when BLAST-ing a DNA and protein sequence you have is like doing a Google search on it: it simply tells you where the sequence might come from. This is useful especially when your research is to figure out what that specific sequence is doing. It won't give you the answer immediately (otherwise why bother doing the research at all), but it certainly gives context: sequence similarity often hints at similar / related functions.
As an analogy: imagine if StackOverflow is suddenly down and you don't know *if* it's going to be up again.
My sibling is a molecular biologist working in the industry and they do use BLAST data. She's been telling her company for months they need to secure access with an alternative source or offline backup, hopefully their software team started it in time.
Everyone can set-up their own blast database. Usually if you are specialized on a certain species you have your own DB cached in memory somewhere locally for efficiency. Also there are alternatives. NCBI blast is just one of many. Also all the sequences are globally kept and in sync in different regions of the world, so if one Datacenter goes down you still have the option to use the exact same data from Europe or Japan and so on.
Fair, and to be totally clear, even when I was in the field (an age ago), sequence stuff was never really my thing. However, sequence comparison is a fairly fundamental tool.
Of course, yes you can run these things locally, other providers (such as EBI Europe and Japan) have them, etc. It's still a bad sign on the pile of other bad signs, IMO.
Not a professional, but still use it like that. They also have a new smartblast thing, which works much faster (really, really like Google!) but only on highly similar proteins.
NIH/NSF pages have always gone down periodically for maintenance or otherwise, where this tends to happen over the weekend. It seems like this reaction by the HN community is a bit hasty. I've been reading HN since 2008 or so, and I feel like the comment quality is not what it once was....
FYI it has been like this for at least sixteen hours as last night I was trying to read something there too and it wouldn’t work. I hope there’s backups somewhere. I definitely wouldn’t feel bad about using non sanctioned sources at this point.
It seems someone shut down all NIH DNS servers.
Right now the NIH website, PubMed and BLAST are up, but not resolvable.
Cloudflare's 1.0.0.1 DNS resolver seems to still have cached the records. Google and most others I tried did not. This probably explains why some people on social media could access the sites while others couldn't.
At some point we have to consider the possibility that these aren’t just cuts to the budget, but an intentional plan to visit each government department and giving it a stab wound to let it bleed out and die over the course of the next year or two.
Not sure why you took a downvote. I think it is plain to see that we are unlikely to have free and fair elections in 2028, possibly even the next cycle.
The thing is, are these situations really comparable?
Biden has just transferred power peacefully and gracefully, his supporters didn't initiate any coups.
And after Trump's 2020 loss, Biden basically enacted a bunch of sensible policies, including continuing some reasonable Trump policies (some specific tariffs, for example). Trump in 2025 instead decided to ban paper straws (!!!!).
Select non-malicious but incompetent people to head departments, gives you plausible deniability when people claim that what's happening is malicious. "No, look, RFK Jr is sincere in his desire to help the American people." He's just really bad at it. Of course, that doesn't speak well to the judgment of the people at the top. They'll try and claim that RFK Jr did a fine job and it was the Deep State that caused the problems.
Probably exactly what will happen. “Oh, with the dramatic reduction in vaccinations the American people would have been so much healthier, but the Deep State sprayed measles from chemtrails just to make us look bad”
At this point, I don't see why it should matter if it's criminal negligence or malice.
They know what they are doing is illegal. Or, if they don't, it's because they are actively insisting on not learning it, what shouldn't make any difference.
> I normally defer to Hanlon's Razor, but with this administration it's 50/50 if their actions are due to incompetence or malice.
The incompetent people were hired / appointed[1] as a form of malice against the "Deep State" (read: civil service) specifically, and government and civil society in general.
Hanlon’s razor is funny because it assumes that malicious actors can’t be incompetent and incompetent people can’t act maliciously. It is a fun logical trick that functions by pretending that huge swathes of the population don’t exist, like a sort of inverted cognitive behavioral therapy exercise
I don't think it is assuming that malicious actors can’t be incompetent or that incompetent people can’t act maliciously, it's just asserting that incompetence is so, so much more widespread than actual malice.
I think if your argument is that they're making hasty decisions, you've provided good evidence for that. But the remainder of the sentence you quoted was:
> but an intentional plan to visit each government department and giving it a stab wound to let it bleed out and die over the course of the next year or two.
If your argument is that they're trying to make agencies die, and you're using the above as evidence for this, then you'd have to convince me that they want the government to lose control of nuclear bombs or bird flu.
> If your argument is that they're trying to make agencies die, and you're using the above as evidence for this, then you'd have to convince me that they want the government to lose control of nuclear bombs or bird flu.
I don't necessarily disagree, but unless they're literally ready to jump to anarcho-capitalism in the next four years I don't think they're trying to let the nuclear bombs go unattended. I think the specific examples you gave aren't your best examples to this point. If anything it's a counter-argument.
There are US citizens, former employees of USAID, who have been abandoned after trying to stop a cholera outbreak in the middle of a civil war in South Sudan.
With their families.
Their security detail: fired.
Their logistics team: fired.
No water, no power, no fuel.
Look: sufficiently advanced incompetence and/or carelessness is equivalent to malice.
I don’t care if you WANT to attend to the nuclear weapons, if you are so unserious, or understaffed, or incompetent, or distracted, or whatever to fail to actually do the thing.
I think I did a poor job of articulating my point. My point is that they've spoken their intent to smash the bureaucratic state. Their intent is not to dismantle 100% of the government, including the military and the nuclear bombs. So I don't think the nuclear bombs incident is a great example of them enacting their intent. Unless you actually think they want to do that, but then that's a much different claim you're backing up.
And again, I'm responding to another post (two, actually) about intent. If you have an issue with it, take it up with them. I acknowledge your point as fair, but a separate point.
Do not worry about world-ending neglect towards the staff responsible for the maintenance and security of our nuclear arsenal, their intent was only for a smaller government!
I don't know what's going on with HN right now, there usually is a lot more reading comprehension and level headed conversation, even on controversial topics.
It's not me minimizing a series of catastrophic events because in my great wisdom I have perfectly ascertained the intentions of an unpredictable administration, it's reading comprehension.
"Yes, your honour, I did shoot him point blank in the chest. But you can't use that fact as evidence that I wanted to kill him, that's just evidence of how he died."
Murder, manslaughter, intent, accident, purpose, neglect. We have many words that try to put a degree of malice on the act of taking a life, but the life is still gone.
At some point, you need to draw a line in the sand and say "They're going where I can't follow.". Right now, it seems like you're drawing the line right after they come out and tell the world that they specifically intend to burn America to the ground and auction off the remains for their personal profit. Where you draw your line is your own personal choice, but it's worth thinking about ahead of time.
What is your model of this group of people behind DOGE? If it's a group of radical right wingers with libertarian leaning who want to smash the bureaucratic state, that's probably accurate and most people (even supporters) can get behind that characterization. Do you think this group of people, ushered in by Donald John Trump, want to dismantle the military? If not, then why would they purposely try to lose control of the nukes? There probably exist some radical libertarians (or even left-wing anarchists) who would actually advocate for let's say decommissioning the nukes, but I think it's pretty clear that that's not who's in office.
What I see is a ham-fisted approach to slashing the Department of Energy. That's the actual goal. Plenty of anti-Trump outlets report it that way. The idea that they actually want the nuclear weapons to lapse is a pretty bold implication, assuming I'm not misunderstanding the argument.
Sufficient active disregard for consequences is equivalent to actively seeking said consequences.
If someone consistently drives extremely recklessly, refuses to service their brakes, allows their tires to become completely tread worn, removes their mirrors, etc. etc.
What could one reasonably infer about their desire to get into a car crash?
Would loud and repeated claims of a desire to drive safely convince you? Moreover, would you consider such claims to be in good faith, especially if said reckless behavior continues?
Besides, the GOP has said time and time again: let’s make the government so small we can drown it in the bathtub.
What private sector entity would find it profitable, or even be able to, control the bird flu or manage the nuclear arsenal.
Much less, do you want there to be a profit motive in those places?
I don't think there is one unified plan to destroy the federal government; however, many influential people in the current administration are motivated to destroy particular parts of the federal government and will not get in each other's way. I believe the result of this is that the current administration will attempt to destroy the union (inclusive OR) of all the agencies that influential individuals within the administration want to destroy.
Here's a quote from the conservative political operative and self-described Christian Nationalist Russ Vought, who is both the current and former head of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump:
“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can't do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.” [1]
This is a visceral and radical statement which has gotten some airtime on the news recently. However, it's interesting to note that Project 2025, which Vought helped lead and authored key sections of, does not advocate for the dismantling of USAID, rather recommending that its mission be narrowly aligned to national security goals[2]. In 2025, however, Elon Musk wanted USAID shuttered, and Vought was happy to oblige in his position as "the nerve center of the federal budget."
However, Project 2025 advocates for eliminating or defunding the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Education, EPA, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and other government agencies. It's likely that these will also come under fire.
Finally (and this is my opinion), I believe it is impossible to understand this current administration's policy agenda without at least a surface level understanding of the writing of Curtis Yarvin, a software developer and reactionary political blogger. One this topic, Yarvin says the following:
“What is government? A government is just a corporation which owns a country. Nothing more, nothing less. It so happens that our sovereign corporation is very poorly managed and there’s a very simple way to replace that, which is what we do to all corporations that have failed. We simply delete them.”
Could you imagine any Project 2025 type wanting the government to disband the military? I imagine not. So why would they want to lose control of the nukes? I think in the case of the nukes it was just a ham-fisted attempt to downsize the Department of Energy. To that point, last I heard they were scrambling to re-hire those people.
Curtis Yarvin isn't a libertarian (anymore), he's a monarchist. I also don't think he would advocate for the government to lose control of the nukes.
I think the DoE thing was a mistake. Kind of frightening that nobody in the chain of execution for that decision knew what the DoE actually does, but I don't think that was intentional.
Okay cool. Well maybe I misinterpreted, but it sounded like the person I was responding to in my initial post was implying that it was on purpose. Or at very least, they would have to imply that it was on purpose for their argument to make sense. That was my point. Perhaps I haven't been clear.
I think the person I responded to did insinuate that, and I think that the evidence they provided doesn't support their premise.
I am making the argument that the current administration is trying to make government agencies die, but that it isn't one centrally orchestrated conspiracy. I am using different evidence than the parent comment to make that argument.
More importantly, the purpose of my original comment is to inform readers of the thread on highly influential second-tier actors (Russ Vought is well-known, but he's not Elon Musk) and help foster a more nuanced discussion of the current administration, its motivations, and its actions.
Yeah. Remember when Mitt Romney planned a speech promising to abolish the DoE, forgot which agency when giving the speech, and then got put in charge of the DoE? I imagine this is the sequel.
There's a proven track record with the Republican plan and USPS that they like to sabotage the agency and then point to the dysfunction they created as a reason to get rid of it. I fully suspect that we're going to hear that several agencies have been non-productive since January 20th and should thus be cut... Despite the fact that they BLINDLYfired not only the new employees, but all the employees that have had promotions over the last year as well (And were probationary in their new role).
I don't know how to fix this ratchet of "Republicans shatter things for fun and self-profit; Democrats try to tape things back together but it's harder to fix things than break them; so voters punish them by electing Republicans" that's been going on my entire life
It's not that simple. Democrats are responsible for plenty of stupid ideas, and Republicans have pushed through some good ideas.
Being overly reductionist makes one easier to reject as partisan.
What is new is the MAGA/2025 hijacking of the Republican party to enact its goals. To the extent that the current Republican leadership is essentially a different party than it was 6 years ago.
I attended GOP caucuses circa 2010-2014. I would like to believe there was once a healthy sensible conservative party, but I'm sorry to say that to my eyes nothing has been hijacked: MAGA is what the Republican party has been for my entire adult life. It's just loud about it in public now instead of behind the doors of political machinery.
There is a through line from Goldwater to Nixon to Reagan to Gingrich to Trump. Connective tissue has been provided by the likes of Roger Stone. This has been a 60-plus year project to overturn the New Deal.
Facts. All Trump did was take the top talking points of AM radio & fox (birtherism/racism, illegal immigration, and no factory jobs) and parroted them to power.
That's a fundamental shift in historical Republicanism though.
For most of its history, the Republican party was fairly anti-populist (defined by whatever populism was at the time).
The Republican southern strategy from 1980+ was predicated on attracting southern white votes by attacking civil rights (explicitly or implicitly), but ultimately focusing on business priorities (with some headline-catching red meat).
However, in the decades since, the explosion of hardline conservative talk radio then dragged the party to answer to its more egregious populist demands.
I would argue that their opposition to civil rights was populist. It was amoral and intended only to get votes from racists, as an “ends justify the means” way to pursue deregulation and corporatism.
That bait-and-switch reveals the core, though. The R base wanted what Trump is doing all along but was tricked by the establishment business class. The reason they are so loyal to Trump is because he ripped away the fasaud and acts out their longstanding wishes.
PEPFAR started in 2003 under Bush and has saved millions of lives. Of course Trump is dismantling it now but I think it's inarguably the best thing Bush did as president.
I totally agree with you, but as someone who has seen the impact on the ground in parts of Africa, and how HIV/AIDS is no longer the death sentence it once was, PEPFAR is an amazing program that came too late, but let's not discount the actual good that it has done.
The national debt is too abstract and wonk-ish to be an actual tenet of a populist movement. I remember people talked about it a lot, but only in trite ways and I really think it was just a fig leaf.
I actually believe that the hardline tea partiers did believe this until they actually saw where the money was going. Then, lots of people in the tea party started saying "get the government's hands off my social security" (the irony would be funny if it didn't hurt so much).
The national debt is concrete, but no president likes having their ability to spend constrained.
It should be handled in the way all >4 year payback US problems are: by empowering a commission to do the neccessary unpopular things and give members longer-than-4-year terms.
Many Republicans don't realize this. The party you've voted for all your life is not the same party running America today. Today's Republican party has been co-opted by an Anarcho-capitalist wing. And step 1, which they're well on track to do is to dismantle the Federal government. Step 2, which will be coming within the next year or two is to sell off previous government services to private entities.
When the Soviet Union collapsed the US sent over "economic consultants" to steer what happened next towards "free markets."
What happened next is that various chancers marched into state institutions, usually with private security details made of low-grade armed thugs promoted from street crime, and said "This is ours now."
The US aristocracy saw this and apparently thought "Perfect - let's make that happen here too."
The fact there's been no significant state or media push back against Musk's takeovers is all anyone needs to know. The aim is a kleptocratic imperium drowning in gold, drugs, delusion, and corruption - which is exactly what Russia turned into.
The best part is where the plant is still state property on paper, but operates at loss because it exports everything to a shell company in Austria who resells it at profit paid to the actual benefociary controller.
And if report on this, the president orders you to be behaded
There were two paths, the examples I would give are Cheney and Graham. Both thought Trump was terrible, one stuck to her convictions and is now out of government, the other rolled over and is now licking Trump's boots.
The entire platform of the GOP is that the government is the problem.
The ACA would have been much better had the GOP not tried to stop it any way possible. Suing to remove critical aspects of it, voting at every turn against it, arguing that there would be death panels for grandparents.
Even once it was law, no attempt to improve, or replace.
A good faith effort would include an alternative health care plan. Where is it?
Two options: either incapable of producing a plan or are at best indifferent to the suffering and death of hundreds of thousands of people, if not more.
The GOP has only tirelessly worked to ensure that the ACA would be less effective than it could have been.
Note: not repeal it. It’s entirely too popular and effective for that.
David Brooks, at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, had a session called "How the Elite rigged Society (and why it’s falling apart)"
I included a link just below to at the exact timestamp he talks about this:
How Brooks sees Trumpism: not conservative, they don't have a conservative or positive vision for society, they just want to destroy the institutions "dominated" by left. In his words, this means, they are astoundingly incompetent. "Elite Narcissicm" leads to the destruction of every thought system it encounters.
Takes like this only focus on domestic politics and ignore the harrowing neoliberal foreign politics both parties uphold in order to perpetuate class inequality and create consumer demand. Both parties are invested in selling this country out, even if some Democrats really do care about social services.
That's already planned. The republicans want to pass another 4.5 trillion of tax cuts for the richest 0.1%
They simply lie to their supporters, and are believed because republicans are indoctrinated throughout life to believe that "government bad, corporations good, taxes bad, money good, collective power bad, individual power good"
trump said before the election he didn't know what project 2025 was. He lied, pure and simple.
It's deeper than lying about P25. P25 was allegedly an intentionally public document, designed to grab the media spotlight. It is actually plausible that trump had never seen a single page of that document by design.
There is a secret runbook that goes much further than P25 which the same authors ensured was never printed or emailed anywhere which could be susceptible to FOIA. That is the runbook they have been using since day 1, which likely contained all 74 of his day 1 orders pre-written.
Trump is too reactionary to have an N-step plan. The man thrives in chaos and uncertainty. Furthermore project 25 is large enough I'd be a lot more surprised if whatever happens wasn't on that wishlist somewhere.
For the millionth time, we don’t pay the government. The US federal government is not funded by taxes. The US government spends money into existence. It taxes money out of existence to help control the supply of money, inflation, etc. Stop using the deficit as a smokescreen for redistribution of wealth away from the 99% to the 1%.
> when it obviously can't allocate what it already has
No large government in the history of the world has ever perfectly spent its money.
We can at best aspire to good government spending, not perfect.
Therefore the current dog and pony show of 'look at these excesses and get mad' is just a distraction to functional cuts that would be less popular.
Elon Musk, Russell Vought, and Donald Trump are lying. They know exactly what they're trying to do: impair the operation of the US government.
Any claims about fiscal justification are ridiculous from a financial standpoint -- if they cared about US debt, they'd be making these spending cuts, and not passing tax cuts.
We aren't even in the same dimension as perfection here. It's a historically obvious phenomenon. Basically all human organizations tend toward inefficiency and waste eventually. The US government is the largest employer in the world. The reasoning would be no different if it was a corporation.
This is true. So now let’s look at the substance of what DOGE has actually done:
- indiscriminately fire people who have been in long term positions but recently got promoted and so were considered “probationary”
- dismantle the CPFB which was a net gain for revenue
- dismantle 18F which has a track record of improving government efficiency
- fire people who were involved in managing nuclear weapons and bird flu and then try to bring them back
- share spreadsheets on Twitter about really old people in the social security system making people think there’s tons of fraud without learning about the 2023 OIG report that already existed that explained this data
- make a bunch of noise about cutting a bunch of contracts including a third of which were already fully spent and will save nothing
Does this give you confidence that they are genuinely focused on reducing inefficiency and waste? It seems to me like they are rushing in, not bothering to learn what has already been done, arrogantly making assumptions, randomly breaking things and causing chaos, and all for what… a few billion in real savings which is not even a fraction of the proposed increase in spending by the current budget resolutions being worked on by the Republicans in the house?
Why should we have ever thought that an operation literally named after a dog meme was serious about anything?
I’d also add that doing all of this by breaking laws/contracts makes it likely that the net cost will be greater than the advertised savings. Every one of the contractors they stiffed has pretty straight forward grounds for a breach of contract suit and every government employee they said was fired for poor performance has grounds and a strong incentive to sue to clear their name.
All of this makes everything more expensive in the future: new contracts are going to have higher overhead to account for new legal and accounting costs, and unless the government will never hire anyone again they’re going to struggle to get skilled employees at all, much less at the same salary, when it’s clear that they’d be signing up to be treated like this. The direct cost is bad but the productivity cost will be even greater and last for decades.
The government has a fair bit of flexibility to cancel contracts without penalty. They usually don't, and of course nobody has ever seen it as this scale.
You're probably correct about the employment law. That will take more legal finesse to keep them from having to pay a ton of money. Fortunately for them they also own the judiciary. It's not 100% reliable, but they've for 4 out of 5 needed votes locked in at the top level
They also deleted the largest "fraud findings" from their site after a day or so after posting them because they were lies, and enough people called them out
I don't think the US government is the largest employer in the world unless we aren't counting other countries governments. China seems to have around 50M government employees, 10 million civil servants and 30-40 million in other government jobs.
> It's a historically obvious phenomenon. Basically all human organizations tend toward inefficiency and waste eventually
It's not that obvious to me, and is such a broad assertion that I'd require more than an "Everyone knows it. Just look at history" explanation to accept it as fact.
It also implies 2 things that I would disagree with
1) That the inefficiency and waste increases over time. It's likelier to me the ratio of those things stays the same, but it's more apparent as it scales - a company "wasting" 2% of its budget is vastly different than the US government "wasting" 2% of its budget.
2) That it's inherent to "human organizations" themselves - this doesn't seem to explore any other possible explanations. Given the nature of the discussion, I would think it's worth discussing whether other factors (like capitalism) might have an effect
(We'll ignore the vagueness of terms like "inefficiency" and "waste" with regards to government spending; not everyone agrees on what things are efficient or not. There are also many ways of measuring efficiency for both long- and short-term outlooks.)
When ever anyone talks about government inefficiency, ask what perfect efficiency would look like.
Nail them down to specifics. Not just improvements, but perfect efficiency.
Guaranteed they will soon start to flounder, because "inefficient government" is a propaganda talking point, not a fact that can be established with any workable economic definition.
And "the deficit" is the difference between what government chooses to spend and chooses not to tax.
A huge proportion of government spending is either/both an investment and/or a direct driver of beneficial economic activity. That includes "unworthy" spending like welfare.
Dilbert is about a corporation, not government. Everyone seems to know that every large organization has some inefficiency. They seem to think the government has it worse, because that's what Republicans have been telling them.
It's no worse for government than any other large organization. Better than expected, given it's size.
> Why do you want to pay a government more money when it obviously can't allocate what it already has?
I don't think they're reflexive responses by stupid republicans, I think billionaires don't like paying taxes (to pay back into the society that made them fantastically rich in the first place) so they purchase Republican politicians to both obstruct government and vote for tax cuts. They obstruct the government to make it inefficient and then they use the resulting inefficiency as evidence that the government needs to be "starved".
And that's just politics-as-usual stuff before the literal cabal of billionaires in the Trump admin began working expressly to create an oligarchy.
I absolutely believe he never read it during the campaign, probably hasn't done more than skim a summary to this day. He doesn't need to. None of that matters to him.
Keeping his distance gave him "plausible" deniability...kinda. Anyone who actually thought Trump wasn't going to let Heritage Foundation people take over substantial control of government should take a long hard look at their sources of information, internal biases, and critical thinking capability.
IMO we don’t need to attribute malice to it, which will drag everyone into a debate about what’s going on inside the clearly broken minds of a few rich men.
The sheer incompetence of it all is disqualifying by itself.
In my experiences arguing with MAGA, the incompetence argument lands a lot more convincingly than the evil argument.
What we are seeing is clearly an act of malice. We need to be honest about that. Trying to obfuscate what we are seeing helps no one. We should use plain English and talk in a straightforward way about what is happening.
I disagree. The nameservers still respond to requests on 53/tcp. It seems like someone messed up a firewall configuration or rolled out a bad server configuration. Shit happens - maybe exacerbated by the DOGE insanity. But there is no indication that this was done on purpose.
It's like shouting that the bridge is going to collapse because you see a few supports buckle. Anybody with eyes can see the bridge is standing and heavy ass trucks are driving on top of it.
Trumps first term was relatively neutered because people just refused to do what he asked. Those supports are gone now though and like the bridge collapse the observable changes happened slowly and then suddenly all at once.
I would agree with you if I had been talking about using "fascism" to describe first-term Trump and his hardcore supporters, but I was very specifically referring to the application of the term toward liberals and progressives who were deemed too moderate on identity politics. And to be clear, by "too moderate", I mean stuff like "advocating nonviolent protests" and "criticizing the weaponization of Title IX at universities".
I think warning about Trump fascism was appropriate and legitimate, but I think using the label as a lazy cudgel to get liberals and progressives to toe a poorly-conceived line did a tremendous amount to erode the term's significance and rhetorical power.
There can be incompetence and malice together in all this. The malicious often leverage the incompetent to further their goals.
One way to get more people on board with destroying government structures is to render the government structures as ineffectual and incompetent as possible.
You want to downplay the malice to avoid arguments about whether it's really malicious. I want to spotlight the malice because it's really fucking bad and a lot of people are going to get hurt, and that's not an accidental outcome.
If it’s malice then it’s an attack. You have react differently to an attack than to incompetence.
The EU made the same mistake with Trump‘s appeasement to Putin. They hoped it’s some kind of clever negotiation tactic but they learned it’s not. It’s just two autocrats teaming up at the expense of Ukraine.
You open with "IMO" but want evidence from me? Lol.
There were many dems who remembered Trump as the funny orange man, didn't really care to turn out against him, and fell for the "both sides bad" messaging that was absolutely rampant on the left (esp with regard to Kamala and Palestine). So no, I don't think the most important rally-the-base rhetoric was to ratchet up "Trump is Fascist" so much as suppress "Both Sides Bad" while we had an election to win.
"IMO" means "in my opinion." You made a statement as a fact, which is why I asked for evidence. Lol.
Agreed the "both sides bad" messaging was a huge factor here. But that's exactly why we should talk about these fuckups as questions of competence. They are unambiguous evidence of a difference in both sides' ability to actually operate a government!
Both sides were bad. Biden and Kamala were terrible candidates for the Democrats to run, and their campaign positioning lacked a unifying aspirational message.
Which was a horrendously stupid tag line. All people saw was "prices not going back." Everyone in America remembers simpler, better times. 1990s race relations alone were far better than they are now.
It is not incompetence to put people with no relevant experience into cabinet positions. It's purpose. Destruction with a huge amount of distraction is the purpose.
Curtis Yarvin has been writing about this forever. JD Vance has spoken publicly about his agreement with ideas like RAGE (Retire All Government Employees). Musk has similarly spoken publicly about how CEOs are the best people to run the world. Although Thiel is not directly in power, he's also a Yarvin-ite and has been instrumental in both Vance's rise and also the pipeline for the various people working at DOGE to destroy the government.
Alongside these budget cuts, the GOP is proposing massive tax cuts and massive increases in funding for parts of the government related to law and immigration enforcement that will massively outweigh any savings from DOGE destroying entire programs overnight. DOGE is also demolishing organizations that are revenue positive and Trump has fired Inspector Generals, who are responsible for identifying waste and inefficiency in government operations.
Musk is still there to take the hit, and he will. He's spoken about it openly to a degree. Something about how he's only planning to be in that role temporarily and will get back to building rockets.
> DOGE is also demolishing organizations that are revenue positive
The revenue will be still be there when the re-org is completed. Are you worried about competitors?
It's surprising to see how many people still don't get this. None of what happened so far was in any way surprising. You can literally go right now and read up what else they have planned. We're in for a wild ride.
Reminds me of how 9/11 turned into the GWoT and Iraq I etc. The Project for the New American Century posted their playbook for that on their website too. Most people downplayed it.
I distinctly 'member people even right here on this site taking dumps on anyone who dared accuse the Republicans of being hellbent on implementing Project 2025. Called us "conspiracy nuts", said that this was just "enemy propaganda" or that there was no connection between Trump and Project 2025, downvoted and flagged our warnings... where the fuck are y'all now? Where the fuck are y'all with your guns and "don't tread on me" flags now that MAGA is tearing down the government and installing an autocracy in all but name? And where the fuck are the even more people who did just the same on Reddit?
The thing is, almost no one was used to politicians actually following through with their plans and promises. Trump is the first Western leader since I'm alive (other than the current Spanish government) to actually do what he has promised, and I fear this image of him being an "accomplisher" will send him for a wave of support in both the midterms and the next election (and yes, I also believe that there will be no one left to enforce the "two terms" regulation).
> Where the fuck are y'all with your guns and "don't tread on me" flags now that MAGA is tearing down the government and installing an autocracy in all but name?
The same place they were when Breonna Taylor was summarily executed by government agents retaliating for Kenneth Walker exercising his second amendment right to home defense at night (the exact type of scenario they continually grandstand about!) - following the twisted logic and misdirection of their mainstream media so they can continue lazily attacking a strawman of their fellow citizens ("oWn tHe lIbS!1!") rather than reflect on what it would actually take to live their purported values.
At this point the only real question for so-called "conservatives" is when will they realize their leaders have betrayed us and given away our country's future to China?
The US mismanaged the pandemic about as badly as anyone could; other than the ubiquitous surveillance of the population I don’t know many us federal agencies that I personally would describe as “quite functional”.
I certainly don’t know any that require they be run by the state.
** WAKE UP FOLKS! ** THIS IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW. NO ONE IS COMING TO SAVE US.
If you're in the US, it's time to start asking yourself what you are going to want to be able to say to your kids or grandkids when they ask what you did about it when the constitutional republic was falling.
Eh? “At some point”? You must’ve been sleeping. This has nothing to do with efficiency or improving the budget. Bill Clinton laid off thousands of employees, but he did it in an orderly fashion, got congressional approval etc. This is the exact opposite. The goal here is to cause havoc, be cruel, cut regulations (by reducing budget and reducing personnel) etc. After the carnage, divvy up what’s left among the billionaires. So far, it seems going according to plan.
Did you hear what Russell Vought said? “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,”
Anyone genuinely interested in efficiency should start with why the Pentagon has failed audits and is unable to account for tens (hundreds?) of billions of dollars
We can rebuild the government. We will eventually rebuild the government. All of these agencies will eventually be rebuilt. It might take 20 years, but eventually the USA will get back to where it was in late 2024, in terms of state capacity. But the damage being done right now almost guarantees a "Lost Generation" that has to spend its life rebuilding what we had, rather than moving into the future.
> We can rebuild the government. We will eventually rebuild the government. All of these agencies will eventually be rebuilt. It might take 20 years,
They're going to a lot of effort, and exposing themselves to a lot of risk, if this is all likely to be undone in a few years time. My worry is that they won't be able to resist trying to permanently lock-in these changes, even if the most obvious way to do that is to abandon democracy.
It is possible, but why do you believe this is a necessity? It's also possible that the US becomes an oligarchy dictatorship like Russia. All the assets are seized by a small group (crashing the economy, removing oversight, removing national park maintenance, etc. makes it possible). Then give people just enough money and fear not to revolt. Feed them propaganda all day, find some enemies to direct their hate towards. I mean, it's pretty much Vance and Thiel's playbook, rule by 'wise' tech CEOs.
We're already far too balkanized as a country for a central dictatorship to make much sense in the long run. Especially when the money tap starts running dry. I think we'll just have an extremely weak federal government (or perhaps we will finally split.)
What has bound us together as a people is the massive ocean of cash we collectively float on. Abundance that's actively being slashed and burned as we speak. Apologies for the mixed metaphor.
I was hinting at building an alternative system that would be resilient to this kind of tampering. Decentralization fanatics might be of use right now.
The only thing I can think of would be.... weakening the federal government and giving up on the idea of centralized control outside of the military and the dollar. Which is exactly what republicans are doing now.
On the bright side, this might also mean the end of rampaging around the globe in the name of democracy. I think that ship has fully sailed, alhamdulillah.
Every citizen of age is entered into a lottery. From this pool you will be selected, at random, to be assigned into a government management role (eg: president, law maker, justice) supported by staff. Any citizen, randomly in roles of power. No voting. Then you serve your role for 4 years and never get another one. Now the incentive is to do the least harm?
Sorry if I misjudged the way to approach this, I still think that the 'method' (or technology) matters because it influence the social and political layer too. How would you approach it, genuinely curious.
Our global influence and wealth will almost certainly never be this high again. I think that's probably a very good thing for the globe in itself, but we can wreak a lot of destruction on our way out of power.
Don’t wanna be that guy but if not really being about budget cuts seemed pretty obvious from the start, if Elon and Donald got a hand in it it’s pretty much always ego driven.
It's already well-known that crippling the government and destroying things is the point. To have ever entertained anything else is to have been naive, morally defective, and stupid.
HN was in the same uproar after Musk reformed Twitter. Minor disruption? “The sky is falling!” Brief outage? “It’s malice!” “You see! Musk is obviously driving it into the ground.”
Could there be a world in the middle where maybe the government is bloated and irresponsibly spending money and republicans aren’t just myopic nitwits and do care for our country? And they’re executing on cleaning things up but in a way you disagree with?
Why is it always malice and ruin? It’s tiring. Twitter BTW pulled 1.25B in profit last year…
The government is bloated but rather than attacking the bloat (DoD budget that never shrank after ending two wars, subsidies for profitable businesses) they're going after the regulatory infrastructure that protects Americans from corporate greed.
Extraneous regulation stifles innovation and is the definition of bloat. I certainly haven't been protected from corporate greed lately, have you? The main function if gov’t is to provide a military. That’s appropriate spend.
Ah yes, tech companies that provide zero personal support just scaling storage and delivery are the same as government which is MOSTLY providing support and person to person work, the OPPOSITE of scalable using tech.
Because it's the explicit goal of the people doing it. Why go after the CFPB and 18F and IRS Direct File? They've been very outspoken about destroying administrative capacity and making the executive branch a king to punish the enemies of their national conservatism project. Red states are already trying to roll back women's and LGBT people's rights. How does trying to overturn Obergefull balance the budget?
There is waste everywhere. I sincerely don’t understand how, when the stated plan is to look closely at all orgs and cut waste across the board, when the lens focuses on specific instances of orgs, the response is “not this one, cutting here will ruin everything”. I don’t buy it.
What is developing in-house capabilities with 18F waste? Why is protecting consumers from scams and even recouping that money by the CFPB waste? Why is allowing people to e-file without private middlemen waste?
Well, we don’t need two identity providers, for one. I’m sure the non wasteful things will be sustained under different management that isn’t insubordinate.
"Different management" ffs the govt isn't supposed to pivot like a company every 4-8 yrs. That's an unthinking suggestion for a federal govt & heterogenous population.
It basically is like having politically motivated human chaos monkeys running around the data center randomly killing systems and seeing whether anyone notices.
The very fact that it takes such a battle to even get read only access to analyze where the money is going is evidence enough that there is insanely baroque levels of waste and unnecessary services happening here.
If it’s that important it can be put back.
Why is it so scandalous that conservatives want a smaller government, got elected, and are now making the government smaller?
You wouldn't be saying "if it's important it can be put back," if it was a government service important to you, like water service to your house. Scientists actually need to use pubmed.
Equating government-funded research programs (completely optional) to water provision isn’t remotely coherent. Pipes in the ground are a natural monopoly.
I'm glad I have the chance to explain this to somebody. Research is also a natural monopoly, because a fundamental particle can only be discovered once. Repeated development of what's under the hood of a car isn't wasted because every car is different, but repeated invention of internal combustion would be wasted time and energy.
What I mean by wasted time and energy is, it is wasteful for 1,000 researchers working in secret at private companies to independently discover the same protein, without telling anyone, when instead one person could have discovered it and then shared the information. It's like 1,000 companies digging trenches for water pipes under the same road.
Working with the most charitable interpretation of your view, is the idea that Peter Higgs would have patentented the Higgs boson, CERN would have paid him royalties to attempt to produce it, and CERN and Higgs together would have sold the rights to a trust that was able to collect royalties on all products whose invention required the use of electroweak theory? It would have to be a patent term that lasted about 100 years, otherwise Maxwell wouldn't have been able to fund Maxwell's laws.
Things like PubMed are probably some of best good to the world that did the US in recent years. Especially because of its great openness with widely open API and so...
If it becomes unavailable, my feeling is that the world will really enter in a dark age.
The entire 18f org was let go. Many of these employees oversaw the building of digital services.
Login.gov is a most critical SSO resource for logging into services such as the IRS for tax payments. It’ll see peak usage next month for taxes. The teams maintaining these have been indiscriminately let go.
More of these online services will start to go down, rapidly.
If the point of DOGE is really to tackle the deficit, all these moves are incredibly shortsighted.
(Yesterday the 18F former employee put https://18f.org/ as a transparent warning of what’s to come)
> If the point of DOGE is really to tackle the deficit, all these moves are incredibly shortsighted.
The point is to shutter or kneecap every last government service. When it becomes obvious which services were/are mission critical, they'll be replaced with private solutions -- most of which will conveniently be on offer from X.
In my 30+ years working at about everywhere and on everything the only place I’ve worked, inclusive of federal roles, with intentionally bottom productivity, are private government contractors. Federal employees while fairly kushy in benefits space were often pretty mission driven and believed deeply in what they were doing as they had taken a long term commitment on their role vs more money on the private side. The contractor space is a constant churn of bids and re orgs with the mission being keeping the contract in the next bidding cycle but losing it due to random political whims. It’s the most depressing form of employment I’ve ever experienced, and I’ve worked at multiple FAANG, so that’s really saying something.
It is a DNS issue.
Try and change which net you are using. If you are on wifi at home try your cell, however if your home network and cell provider are the same that wont help.
A solution is to change which DNS you are using.
Its a bit nerdy but actually very easy. Do a search on "change which DNS you are using for browsing"
On your computer you can add following to your hosts file located in C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc
add this
156.40.212.210 nih.gov
96.17.96.9 www.nih.gov
34.107.134.59 pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
130.14.250.10 ftp.wip.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
130.14.250.10 ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
130.14.29.110 blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Another cute and recent development is that they’ve really restricted the hours on the federal payment system, making it difficult for everyone to draw down funds owed. It’s all electronic banking, why does it ever have to go offline?
Seems like it’s back.
One of my projects when in bioinformatics was making an alternative search with NIH data.
They update pubmed yearly with daily updates after that. It really is a great resource.
I don't think we can guess the specific problem here, but the credit card limits could indeed easily take services offline as hosting isn't payed. So it would not surprise me at all to see a bunch of cases like this caused by the inability to pay their hosting bills.
Last modified header of Tue, 10 Apr 2012 15:06:32 GMT so I think not - they probably put this html page up one time and redirected requests from other URLs to it and just forgot to remove
FWIW, I just tried going to pubmed, searching for something, and everything seemed to work. DNS servers go down every now and then. It's always DNS, after all.
BLAST is totally outdated, not because it's a bad algorithm but because people should be able to run their own version locally. i find it disappointing that there isn't a lot of innovation in determining protein homogeneity, i thought of multiple ideas when i was doing bioinformatics but never had the time to implement it. slow and bad slackademia strikes again
How can you claim to have insight into bioinformatics, but not realize the reason BLAST is run in the cloud is that having all the sequence data of all existing organisms would be absolutely massive and exceed the storage capacity of most laptops?
the data really isn't that large and the algo isn't difficult, most people who do this work don't need to compare proteins across every organism in the world. most people just compare to a few organisms that they work within the context of for clinical trials or data.
if you're comparing DNA and looking at every organism ever you might need such power, but if you do i'd hope you work at some institute that makes your own algo in house because blast isn't the end all be all
Eggs were getting too expensive thanks to H5N1, so they thought they'd vote in a bunch of scientifically-illiterate antivax clowns.
Think about it this way.. when tech folk got hooked up to mainline net access 24/7, it wasn't exactly good for us. Think 1970s cocaine consumption.
When the rest of the population got Facebook, that's a refined and potent strain being sold into a population with no natural immunity or defensive mechanisms. Now it's 1990 and there's a crack dealer on every corner in poor neighborhoods.
Those politicians who were at the wheel in 2008-10 must bear a share of the blame. They could see this coming, or should have done. There was far too much complacency about what was festering online and how easily it spread.
Did none of our leaders hear about Gamergate in, what, 2015 and go, hang on we've got a BIG problem brewing here? Even GG wasn't really that much of a shock/surprise if you'd been paying attention since the mid 00's.
It's kind of interesting seeing this play out differently depending on your grocer. My grocer is a little bit "upscale" I guess where eggs were more or less always $6 for a dozen jumbos. All through this prices haven't budged, it's just a matter of whether the eggs are in stock or sold out already. However, you go to Ralphs, the ostensibly "working man's" store incomparison, large eggs there are pushing $10 now. Same city, another 5 minutes down the road.
Russian state media were allowed into the Zelensky meeting while other traditional news orgs were not.
The use of tariffs and customs against trading partners to shape general foreign policy, via a compromised president, as well as other things, is strongly reminiscent of Russian interference in Ukraine pre-2014.
Even the Mueller report is best read as concluding there was obstruction of justice into the investigation.
Thiel has openly discussed disappointment with democracy and advocated for autocracy, and his companies have celebrated the current state of things in shareholder meetings.
russian propagandists and useful idiots try to hide or dismiss discussions about it.
russia owns trump. elon talks to putin regularly, and he was promised access to Ukrainian mineral wealth. The whole Panama canal, Canada, and Greenland sabre-rattling is so eventually russian oil tankers can traverse the world with impunity.
russia is dividing and conquering. They still dream of being a superpower, instead of a failed mafia state with nuclear weapons.
Our White House is filled with the Friends of Russia. They want to turn Ukraine over to Russia and loot it. JD Vance erupted on Zelenski because he showed people what was happening instead of just glad-handing his way through the talks and eating shit. This is a clear indication of what happens to YOU should you dare not fully submit.
Our only hope now is that the American economy rebels against this insanity.
The Orange One spent a lot of time praising Zelenski before throwing him to the wolves. That had to be a jolt to everyone, admitted or not.
As a well educated and literate American, I confirm: the majority of US citizens are either beat down or a sociopath, largely thanks to a completely failed educational system. We manufacture these morons.
Seriously done with excusing brutish behavior. After everything we have observed over the last 8 years why would I give this administration the benefit of the doubt?
They’re shutting down this government until it is just the police and military left. And then what?
I realized we had a material and significant education problem back in the early 80's, and have been an alarmist about our manufacturing obedient fools for decades. Now we have a critical mass, and the nation is crumbling while large numbers just watch dumbfounded. Moronic? The end of the USA is here. For fucks sake, Fox News is #1 in the USA.
I think you underestimate the role of misinformation. I don't think "all" saw it coming even though many or most did.
I share your frustration with how someone could have voted for these criminals but I've also seen very well educated accomplished individuals — who are also not right wingers — essentially brainwashed into thinking Trump was a victim and his ramblings were meaningless showmanship or a media mudslinging campaign. I've also seen interviews with these people during the campaign, people who expected this to be like his last administration.
Trump openly lied about Project 2025 and people who refuted those lies were accused of "TDS", etc in these outlets. Even relatively centrist outlets were accused of sanewashing him.
You can be dismissive but I know people as I type this who are genuinely upset and feel betrayed by the GOP and Trump because they didn't believe they would do all this. Maybe it's a form of stupidity or weakness but the level of fraud and deception throughout cannot be forgotten.
That is our failed education system, creating gullible fools. One may have a PhD in some technical field, but they can't identify a conman, they believe in "conservative values", go to church, self-identify with their political party, and believe their paster's excuses about that little girl.
Given the thoughtless cuts to the workforce and the arbitrary bureaucracy to get anything done/paid for that they've introduced, I'd say the prior probability towards it being their fault should be fairly high. I'm waiting for evidence that it isn't their fault.
Almost everything has been infected by a zero-sum mindset in the US. Some other group of country wins means I must be losing, etc.
The administration doesn’t see that the entire world order is built on many positive sum relationships and coalitions that the US has asymmetrically benefited from. And the same goes for social order. Wealthy people suddenly see themselves as victims(?) of their employees, and investors blame entitled tech employees for companies problems. When the reality is that employee and management - and social classes - benefit economically by supporting each other.
Thanks for this idea suggestion, this spin. Its a framing that, now that I see it, maps well & explain so much. The limited world view is collapsing our world, in horrible ways. Mankind became better than the animals because we grew to encompass more than short transactional views of ourselves, and it's so heartbreaking watching vicious dark side anger unmake the core of spirit that propelled us so far.
As someone in Europe, I'm honestly starting to wonder if the companies whose tech I oversee aren't better off eliminating reliance on US tech companies. Hard to tell what they'll do, being strong armed by Musk and Trump, or even just trying to win their favour.
With server hardware, I can't think of real alternatives, at least x86. But then again, I guess they'll just continue to work once bought :P
Cloud hosting and PaaS: We have some major, reliable hosters (Hetzner, OVH etc), but it's a bit lower level than AWS or Heroku. This part I'm pondering the most, since I mostly want to use stuff you can easily find freelancers to work on. With anything closer to self hosting, that's a bit tricky.
Stuff like Google Workspace, Notion etc is non-trivial but possible to replace with stuff like Fastmail and the Atlassian suite. Not an "as good" replacement, but a workable one.
I still feel a bit paranoid even thinking about this, and I'll ponder it some more before I act. But I can't help but wonder how many European CTOs are in the same boat after the oval office meeting with Zelenski. Kinda brought it home to me that the US is a very different country now, and using anything made there is no longer the no brainer it used to be. If the actual government can't resist their commands, private companies most definitely can't. And with a trade war looming, it'd be easy to just take competitors that rely on AWS et al off the market quickly, spy on competitors in Google Workplace, and stuff like that.
It's definitely a thought I've had too. In particular, there are some tech stacks I know of dealing with critical energy infrastructure which are tied to US cloud companies, I think those represent a huge risk, and I wouldn't be suprised to see a few of them start shifting soon.
I'd love to go with Hetzner (reliable for decades, well known etc), which has almost everything I need in their cloud offering, except an AWS RDS equivalent. OpenStack is probably worth a look!
Sounds naive I guess, but my tech choices are pretty heavily biased towards "can I quickly find someone affordable to work on it?". Makes the market leader the obvious choice, quite often. And that's currently usually a US company.
I will only bend my knee to a Pizza Overlord. (I've heard they will have a stuffed crust and extra cheese, at no extra cost!) All they require is I give up most of my freedoms and stop any critical thinking.
What I'm astounded by is how Musk/DOGE haven't been stopped, sued or even arrested. Isn't this interfering with the proper functioning of government, or vandalism, or gross negligence, some other illegal act?
Not an expert on law, but isn't there some mechanism to get policemen to stop DOGE while he's being sued? Like I imagine if I started taking down traffic lights the police would stop me then ask questions.
I think that's the question on everyones minds. A judge has to order it though, which would trigger a direct confrontation between law enforcement divisions.
They could also order assets frozen or something though (I think?) which I don't understand why they don't do.
I dunno, if there were like 30 of you all wearing orange vests and had relevant department of transportation stickers on actual work pickup trucks I think you might be able to get away with it as long as you threw some cones to dead-end one way of the intersection.
Here's an informative Congressional Research Service article on Enforcement of Court Orders Against the Executive Branch.[1]
TLDR; courts issue TRO (temporary restraining order), preliminary injunction, or permanent injunctions. Normally people comply. If the government does not comply then individuals can be found in civil contempt and the U.S. Marshals would enforce that. Civil contempt can't be pardoned.
There have been some TROs and injunctions issued but also some ignoring of them by the government (and also the supreme court has temporarily stayed at least one). I don't believe any contempt rulings (findings?) have been made, so not yet appropriate for the cops (Marshals).
Law enforcement is under the executive branch. The judicial branch doesn’t have any physical ability to project force. The courts rely on the executive’s respect to carry out the rule of law.
Yes, court orders. But the officers that enforce them are part of the executive branch, so under Trump. They have been purging all career agents so there’s few left to willingly enforce court orders.
I find this an interesting position after the news I just saw that police departments are getting cybertrucks. I know that doesn't technically mean anything but it sure has the optics of police being very unlikely to arrest doge staff.
Given what we've seen so far it wouldn't surprise me if Musk had built a kill switch into these vehicles to stop the police from taking action against him.
The people that see this as an issue are trying to respect the rule of law, while the other half celebrate anything Musk and his assistant Trump do even if it's clearly terrible.
When half the people are fine with it and all branches of government are allied with them, there isn't much the rest of us can do except try to clean up the mess when we get a chance to.
It may be an acceptable compromise if the two alternative options weren't so extremely unpopular with the other side. That's why the checks and balances are required.
Please read more carefully what I wrote. Most trump voters may well he on board but that doesn't mean that most of the overall voters are.
A fraction of people who voted for Trump thought he would be like Trump 1.0 and just wanted to stop the woke drift of the democrats and/or didn't feel represented by a non-white+woman president.
We can debate how small that fraction is but it likely affected the election results.
I did read. I think the fraction you are mentioning is quite small if it exists at all. Elon was the reason for a vast majority of the people I know voting for him - it's not even close
I don't think the average conservative grandma is really in favour of the chaos that Elon is unleashing.
The only reasons they voted for Trump is that they thought they were against total debauchery of the left and the trans activism and whatnot.
If that grandma could choose between an old school conservative and these clowns she will choose the old school conservatives.
Yes it's a winner take all system, yes that's how it works. But don't use that to justify that whatever the winner does is what all people actually wanted because it's just not true.
I will go out on a (small) limb here and note that it really looks like the intention of this submission is is to associate a technical issue with DOGE and find a friendly audience to further a point. Normally a DNS issue of a government site would not be news. Since the submission does not give any evidence or fact, it is lazy in that respect. And if indeed it had an unstated motive (my small limb), you could also say it’s disingenuous and brigading. Am I wrong? I would be happy to stand corrected.
I submitted this post and can guarantee that it was not my intention to associate this technical issue with DOGE. Quite the opposite: both in this thread and on Bluesky (where a lot of people blame DOGE for 'shutting down PubMed'), I have advocated for Hanlon's razor.
My aim was to document that this was just a DNS problem, and to suggest a workaround to affected people.
I actually find it a little bit sad that the DOGE angle is so prominent in this thread.
Why are people assuming this was done intentionally? Is there more info somewhere describing the outage? I would typically assume that there’s some error or intentional crash.
I would believe it was an accident or bug if it was any other administration under any other circumstance. Given the vandalism that’s already been committed against basic U.S. government functions, I have to conclude it’s malice until proven otherwise.
I suppose the good news is that there’s no report that this is malicious and it’s all just assumptions. That makes me happier than if there was some intentional shutdown.
And fortunately, pubmed is up and running as of 822amEST
It is certainly intentionally that NCBI is miraculously down for no real reason. But usually when the political debates are heated it happens more often. What one can observe now is just funny nothing of unhappy political activists.
It is a DNS issue.
Try and change which net you are using. If you are on wifi at home try your cell, however if your home network and cell provider are the same that wont help.
A solution is to change which DNS you are using.
Its a bit nerdy but actually very easy. Do a search on "change which DNS you are using for browsing"
On your computer you can add following to your hosts file located in C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc
add this
156.40.212.210 nih.gov
96.17.96.9 www.nih.gov
34.107.134.59 pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
130.14.250.10 ftp.wip.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
130.14.250.10 ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
130.14.29.110 blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Apologies in advance if this is too off topic, it’s something that has been bugging me for a while and I wanted to mention it somewhere.
I occasionally use the Unifi Wifiman app to quickly test my network, even though I don’t use Unifi gear.
One reason I like it is as soon as you open the app you see a bunch of latency metrics for various domains.
X is one of the default test domains. I don’t know when this happened but x.com does not seem to be running anycast in Australia anymore, I get 110ms latency to x (for many this would be 130 to 160 or higher, my provider uses premium transit). A traceroute shows the server I am hitting is in Japan.
Why? This is highly irregular, I can’t imagine any other major website not having a POP in Australia.
DNS resolution seems to work again now. https://dnschecker.org/#A/pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Ok, I added [fixed] to the title above. Please let me know if that's not accurate!
This specific issue is fixed, but they also added censorship. Try searching NIH.gov for “transgender” and it kicks you out of the search.
According to a comment on Reddit, search problems have been existing for some time - they did not just appear after the DNS issue [1].
Also, I just searched for "transgender" on nih.gov, and got lots of hits [2], the first one being a publication on PubMed [3].
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/NIH/comments/1j28ytk/comment/mfs14d...
[2] https://search.nih.gov/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&affiliate=nih&q...
[3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34993517/
Edit: as another commenter pointed out, you have a misspelling which is why your search works. This link is correct and demonstrates the censorship:
https://search.nih.gov/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&affiliate=nih&q...
Adding an extra word to censored searches appears to defeat the effect for now. For example, “diversity” is censored but “diversity a” works.
I appreciate your attempt to clarify here, but your citation link above in 2) is for 'trangender', a misspelling (but it does search successfully).
This isn't a 'search problem'; searching for 'gender' and 'transgender' always and immediately redirects back to the main page. I also tested several unrelated searches without any issues (HIV, genome, public, potato).
Good catch, I hadn’t realized they have a misspelling.
Just want to point out that I tried this just now and I am not seeing the behavior you describe.
I've heard reports via the NIH subreddit that this censorship was actually added back in January, not over the weekend while Trump and Musk broke the NIH website.
Cool, thanks!
It's been pointed out that these servers still respond over TCP: https://mstdn.social/@rysiek/114089755401568345 https://lists.dns-oarc.net/pipermail/dns-operations/2025-Mar...
Given that the service is still partially operational (albeit not in a useful way), it's difficult to say from the outside what is going on.
This is for sure a firewall misconfiguration. If there would be malicious intent, the bad actor would for sure not just close UDP.
Can confirm.
Thanks for pointing this out. This makes it much more likely that someone messed up a server/firewall configuration than that Musk is ripping out network cables at NIH.
OTOH it's possible this is the easiest way to disrupt a site - screw with the DNS
So we are looking at reckless incompetence, and not malice? Sorry, but at this point, prove it.
Biden was sleepy though!
Pubmed is one of the most reliable services in the history of the internet. Sure the exact issue is opaque, but the fish rots from the head.
I’m a little late to this thread; but is PubMed really one of the most reliable services in the history of the internet?
I worked on the underlying infrastructure that powers PubMed in the 2010’s at the National Library of Medicine.
I was all up in that thing converting legacy pneumatic Johnson Control systems to Siemens PXC’s, and didn’t actually realize its historical importance online. That’s pretty cool to see this comment.
We had full access to the Datacenter at the National Library of Medicine, and as a young apprentice I really had no idea what PubMed was at the time lol.
I only realized how important of a system it might be when we saw the realtime traffic analytics on the screens outside of the data hall.
Pubmed is running. (Thankfully as it is one of the building blocks of science)
Pubmed is essentially Google for scientists. Anytime you search for scientific publications you usually use Pubmed. Of course there are alternatives, but until now you didn't really have to know about those. Everyone just used Pubmed, I'd bet that even most European scientists didn't know the local alternatives until now.
And there's a lot more functionality made available to scientists by the NIH.
I almost never use pubmed, while I use Google Scholar everyday (for neuroscience/medical/computer science research). But I admit that all medical researchers I know only use pubmed.
Apparently the FAA database that tracks accident investigations is down also, and probably a bunch of other systems that regular people aren't aware of that various organizations rely on.
If this was a Chinese cyberattack, it would be the scandal of the decade. But it's on purpose.
So looking at this from a technical point. NIH.gov has three name servers. Each host are still up, but only answering dns on TCP and not UDP. All three are located under the same AS, which implies that there is a single operator responsible. No ipv6. From the outside I can't see any sign that they have delegated operation of either the servers or the service to any external company.
Doing some more looking around, it seems like NIH has a department/group/structure called Center for Information Technology, which is the IT support side of NIH and are the operators for the DNS servers.
I'm going to regret this, I bet, but here we go: Many years ago I was the manager of the team inside NIH/CIT that ran both the border firewalls and the DNS servers in question (to be specific, at the time it was NIH/CIT/DNST/NEB/NSS). Obviously, since I'm not there anymore I don't have any special inside information, but given that the DNS servers were responding to TCP and not UDP during the outage, my bet would be a simple firewall screwup, rather than malice.
Stuff happens - maintenances have unintended consequences, people typo stuff, etc. Don't freak out about every event - save your powder for the real outrages (like 18F).
Editing to remove an unproductive comment.
And you believe that DOGE employees are tweaking firewall rules at NIH IT?
Like the vast majority of Americans, I have no idea what DOGE is actually doing.
Then why speculate when we have a real expert responding on the thread?
I’ve thought about it and you’re right, this was just confirmation bias on my part. There is in fact no evidence that DOGE is in any way involved. Apologies.
This is exactly how the HN community responded to Twitter, too. The amount of baseless speculation paraded as fact is crazy for a supposedly rationalist community.
HN is not rationalist community, there is a plurality of opinions and it is part of what make this site great.
Another important part is the excellent moderation that try to insure civil discussions.
The post-election HN community has been very different of late, at least on political topics. I’ve been here quite a while.
The world has been different since January. People are taking sides quickly and rightly so.
Maybe if I remembered or looked at how HN handled Trump's first election win then I'd have a more accurate impression, but both the Twitter/Musk takeover and now Trump's win and DOGE seem to have sent a lot of people into strange hysteria that I've rarely seen on HN. I just want people to calm down and provide better commentary but I think that would be downvoted to hell with responses like "don't you know <insert apocalyptic event here> is happening? Are you <select from stupid/bigoted/evil>?"
The other day, I had a chat with a friend (IRL) and he told me his friend told him that planes are falling from the sky because Trump had fired all the air traffic controllers (which, as Trump would put it, is fake news, driven by irresponsible headlines). The commentary here is on that, very low, very misguided, tribal (not even partisan, worse) and very unhelpful level. That's not the kind of plurality of opinion HN needs, in my opinion.
The first election was very different as he had more accountability in the other branches of government. Now we are seeing Nazi salutes right from the inauguration, the alienation of every ally, the opening of mass detention centres outside the US, executive orders to place himself above the courts while siding with Putin, and unofficially created branches of government acting without oversight to dismantle large swathes of the state.
The reaction is completely different because the reality is completely different. People are "hysterical" because we grew up with the explicit agreement that we wouldn't let these things happen again and now the systems which we built to prevent it are rapidly falling apart. When facism comes knocking at the door the time for plurality of opinion is gone, there are only two sides here and only one of them is in any way a moral choice.
I'm sorry to say, but I find your comment an example of the hysteria I mentioned.
Firstly, that is not fascism and I do wish people would stop misusing that word. The Doctrine of Fascism[1] is an interesting and elucidative read. I'm sure that tyrannical, authoritarian or any of the other more appropriate (yet still inaccurate, in my view) words would be a much better choice. The thesaurus lists arbitrary, which might fit Trump much better than any of them, but fascist, no. That would be a risible choice. Fascists don't cut the size of government for start, and they certainly don't fight for the right to do so in court. What a thought!
> the opening of mass detention centres outside the US
Are you referring to the Guatanamo Bay detention camp? That was opened in 2002 and has run continuously till now. Two Republican presidents, two Democrat. I was against it in 2002 and I'm glad people are finally noticing, but its use as a processing centre for migrants goes back even further to the early 90s (and less officially, the 1970s)[2].
> executive orders to place himself above the courts
That is not what the executive orders do, nor is that how the system works, and even if you think the executive's ignoring of court orders would be a crisis, Andrew Jackson ignored them[3], almost 200 years ago, America didn't descend into fascism (and not because it hadn't been conceived yet).
From[4]:
> The Trump administration is still entrenched in legal fights in the lower courts and, so far, has not defied any orders from the U.S. Supreme Court, the nation's highest court, she noted.
So, as I noted, hysteria.
[1] https://archive.org/details/doctrineoffascis0000muss
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Migrant_Operations_...
[3] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Worcester-v-Georgia
[4] https://www.npr.org/2025/02/12/nx-s1-5293132/trump-vance-con...
> Firstly, that is not fascism and I do wish people would stop misusing that word.
It is facism. The treatment alone of the trans community is enough to earn it that title. If you want to make an argument from your book then please do so but linking to it alone is not an argument.
> Are you referring to the Guatanamo Bay detention camp?
Are you deciding to pick and choose from the list I gave you? The Nazi salutes mean nothing?
I'm referring to the directive to house 30,000 people there, up from a current population of zero. Coupled with dehumanising language like "illegals," the "delegation of immigration authority" to untrained officers, and the careless attitude to false positives make these developments very much incomparable to anything that's gone before (at least outside of places like Nazi Germany). Do ask yourself as well how easily the use of these facilities can be broadened in the future once there there to house other types of "illegals."
They are already ignoring the courts [0]. What the Executive Order does "legally" does not matter to someone who claims "he who serves his country breaks no law." The only thing that matters is intention. You're thinking about this from a legalist perspective but those days are gone.
0: https://www.npr.org/2025/02/10/nx-s1-5292342/trump-federal-f...
18F?
See https://18f.org/
FWIW, nameservers lhcns1.nlm.nih.gov (130.14.55.72) and lhcns2.nlm.nih.gov (130.14.55.128) still resolve nlm.nih.gov subdomains.
Interesting, those IP addresses are under a different AS and under a different organization, that of National Library of Medicine. They don't seem to use the IT infrastructure of nih.gov.
Yeaaaahhhh...NLM is/was a special beast inside NIH.
At the time I was there they had a budget to die for, and Pubmed was in the top 300 websites in the world (both are probably still true). NLM pushed so much traffic because of Pubmed that they had their own internet connection to avoid DoS'ing the commodity desktop traffic of the rest of the NIH.
Yes, this is correct.
PubMed is self hosted in a datacenter located within NLM on the NIH campus.
They also have their own fiber connections as you mentioned.
There is also a legit storage vault located within the building that houses non digital records. We were told that there were medical records going back thousands of years kept there; and possibly as far back as the Egyptian era.
What am I doing wrong?
I can't ping 130.14.55.128
I can give two tips on how to test this.
The most accessible tool I would recommend is zonemaster.net, a tool developed by AFNIC and The Swedish Internet Foundation. Go to advanced and type in nlm.nih.gov as domain, and then the two nameservers listed above and their ip addresses. Run the test and it will present a status summery of the domain and its name servers. (or just use this link: https://zonemaster.net/en/result/4a7d593dce6e167b)
Alternatively you can use the tool dig command tool which is the industry standard for dns debugging and probing. Installing it on windows/mac is a bit of work, but is very easy and convenient on linux. The command here would be "dig @130.14.55.128 nlm.nih.gov". The @ sign is for saying which nameserver to use, and the last part is the domain name you are looking for.
Maybe those goats don't do ICMP?
For quick reference, BLAST refers to the 'Basic Local Alignment Search Tool' that's a commonly used part of the bioinformatics toolkit. You 'BLAST' sequences by sending a query sequence of interest against a database of other sequences to find similarity hits.
I have been out of the field for some time, so I am not sure how much BLAST is used these days.
Therer was a time when BLAST-ing a DNA and protein sequence you have is like doing a Google search on it: it simply tells you where the sequence might come from. This is useful especially when your research is to figure out what that specific sequence is doing. It won't give you the answer immediately (otherwise why bother doing the research at all), but it certainly gives context: sequence similarity often hints at similar / related functions.
As an analogy: imagine if StackOverflow is suddenly down and you don't know *if* it's going to be up again.
My sibling is a molecular biologist working in the industry and they do use BLAST data. She's been telling her company for months they need to secure access with an alternative source or offline backup, hopefully their software team started it in time.
Everyone can set-up their own blast database. Usually if you are specialized on a certain species you have your own DB cached in memory somewhere locally for efficiency. Also there are alternatives. NCBI blast is just one of many. Also all the sequences are globally kept and in sync in different regions of the world, so if one Datacenter goes down you still have the option to use the exact same data from Europe or Japan and so on.
Yup, her company's software was set up to only use NCBI and she's been warning that that was a risk :)
Fair, and to be totally clear, even when I was in the field (an age ago), sequence stuff was never really my thing. However, sequence comparison is a fairly fundamental tool.
Of course, yes you can run these things locally, other providers (such as EBI Europe and Japan) have them, etc. It's still a bad sign on the pile of other bad signs, IMO.
Not a professional, but still use it like that. They also have a new smartblast thing, which works much faster (really, really like Google!) but only on highly similar proteins.
European alternatives:
https://europepmc.org/
https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/browser/home
https://www.ensembl.org/
It's been great seeing the pan-European effort on genomics and biotech.
Denmark's ecosystem is definetly a North Star for this.
That said, BLAST seems to be up [0]
[0] - https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi
not for me
DNS servers may be down temporarily, e.g., NIH is doing maintenance, but this is not making websites unreachable
Perhaps "unreachable" in the title is a figure of speech
I have no problem reaching these websites and can provide IPs to anyone who needs them
For example,
www.nih.gov 23.41.4.71 (Akamai)
www.nih.gov 2.22.31.155 (Akamai)
www.nih.gov 60.254.143.7 (Akamai)
www.nih.gov 95.101.74.96 (Akamai)
www.nih.gov 88.221.24.17 (Akamai)
www.nih.gov 184.51.148.226 (Akamai)
www.nih.gov 54.235.145.223 (Amazon)
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov 34.107.134.59 (Google)
blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov 130.14.29.110
Usage example
echo 130.14.29.110 blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov|busybox sed -i -e 1r/dev/stdin -e1N /etc/hosts
echo 34.107.134.59 pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov|busybox sed -i -e 1/r/dev/stdin -e1N /etc/hosts
The main pubmed website seems to be working for me as well and I'm in upstate NY: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
NIH/NSF pages have always gone down periodically for maintenance or otherwise, where this tends to happen over the weekend. It seems like this reaction by the HN community is a bit hasty. I've been reading HN since 2008 or so, and I feel like the comment quality is not what it once was....
I still can't access blast. Am I supposed to put `130.14.29.110` into my web browser?
130.14.29.110 redirects me to https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
which is unreachable
23.41.4.71 shows the following text
"Invalid URL The requested URL "[no URL]", is invalid.
Reference #9.47532217.1740935192.27b71986
https://errors.edgesuite.net/9.47532217.1740935192.27b71986"
FYI it has been like this for at least sixteen hours as last night I was trying to read something there too and it wouldn’t work. I hope there’s backups somewhere. I definitely wouldn’t feel bad about using non sanctioned sources at this point.
It seems someone shut down all NIH DNS servers. Right now the NIH website, PubMed and BLAST are up, but not resolvable.
Cloudflare's 1.0.0.1 DNS resolver seems to still have cached the records. Google and most others I tried did not. This probably explains why some people on social media could access the sites while others couldn't.
Workaround via /etc/hosts :
EDIT:While ns.nih.gov, ns2.nih.gov, and ns3.nih.gov do not respond, the nameserver at lhcns1.nlm.nih.gov (130.14.55.72) does.
Also see https://tldr.nettime.org/@ww/114089972404202687
They were not shut down.
Confirm yourself using:
Yes. As noted elsewhere in this thread, they still respond to TCP requests. I did not know this at the time of writing.
Thank you for writing this down. Might become relevant if they don't solve that before Monday.
One can only hope this is not intentional.
Cool, thanks! While the chaos monkey is at work, the true ARPANET spirit is still alive!
Nice work!
At some point we have to consider the possibility that these aren’t just cuts to the budget, but an intentional plan to visit each government department and giving it a stab wound to let it bleed out and die over the course of the next year or two.
> At some point we have to consider the possibility that these aren’t just cuts to the budget
"At some point"? That point was a few weeks, like when they blindly purged the folks that did maintenance on nuclear weapons:
* https://time.com/7225798/doge-fires-national-nuclear-securit...
Or when they purged people dealing with bird flu:
* https://apnews.com/article/usda-firings-doge-bird-flu-trump-...
Indeed, as Gary Kasparov eluded to
"These are not the acts of people who expect to lose power any time soon, or ever."
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/02/pu...
or
https://archive.is/l4kLV
Not sure why you took a downvote. I think it is plain to see that we are unlikely to have free and fair elections in 2028, possibly even the next cycle.
That's exactly the attitude a number of right-wing people had after Trump's 2020 election loss.
The thing is, are these situations really comparable?
Biden has just transferred power peacefully and gracefully, his supporters didn't initiate any coups.
And after Trump's 2020 loss, Biden basically enacted a bunch of sensible policies, including continuing some reasonable Trump policies (some specific tariffs, for example). Trump in 2025 instead decided to ban paper straws (!!!!).
Given that they Kennedy retracted on the vaccine mandate suggests gross incompetence might be at play here.
I normally defer to Hanlon's Razor, but with this administration it's 50/50 if their actions are due to incompetence or malice.
The only thing we know is their intent is never to benefit the majority of the people they are meant to be serving.
I don't think we need to pick between incompetence and malice here. I think both apply to most of their actions.
Select non-malicious but incompetent people to head departments, gives you plausible deniability when people claim that what's happening is malicious. "No, look, RFK Jr is sincere in his desire to help the American people." He's just really bad at it. Of course, that doesn't speak well to the judgment of the people at the top. They'll try and claim that RFK Jr did a fine job and it was the Deep State that caused the problems.
Probably exactly what will happen. “Oh, with the dramatic reduction in vaccinations the American people would have been so much healthier, but the Deep State sprayed measles from chemtrails just to make us look bad”
At this point, I don't see why it should matter if it's criminal negligence or malice.
They know what they are doing is illegal. Or, if they don't, it's because they are actively insisting on not learning it, what shouldn't make any difference.
> I normally defer to Hanlon's Razor, but with this administration it's 50/50 if their actions are due to incompetence or malice.
The incompetent people were hired / appointed[1] as a form of malice against the "Deep State" (read: civil service) specifically, and government and civil society in general.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoils_system
Hanlon’s razor is funny because it assumes that malicious actors can’t be incompetent and incompetent people can’t act maliciously. It is a fun logical trick that functions by pretending that huge swathes of the population don’t exist, like a sort of inverted cognitive behavioral therapy exercise
I don't think it is assuming that malicious actors can’t be incompetent or that incompetent people can’t act maliciously, it's just asserting that incompetence is so, so much more widespread than actual malice.
I think if your argument is that they're making hasty decisions, you've provided good evidence for that. But the remainder of the sentence you quoted was:
> but an intentional plan to visit each government department and giving it a stab wound to let it bleed out and die over the course of the next year or two.
If your argument is that they're trying to make agencies die, and you're using the above as evidence for this, then you'd have to convince me that they want the government to lose control of nuclear bombs or bird flu.
> If your argument is that they're trying to make agencies die, and you're using the above as evidence for this, then you'd have to convince me that they want the government to lose control of nuclear bombs or bird flu.
I'm saying they want to get rid of government:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43218884
I don't necessarily disagree, but unless they're literally ready to jump to anarcho-capitalism in the next four years I don't think they're trying to let the nuclear bombs go unattended. I think the specific examples you gave aren't your best examples to this point. If anything it's a counter-argument.
There are US citizens, former employees of USAID, who have been abandoned after trying to stop a cholera outbreak in the middle of a civil war in South Sudan.
With their families.
Their security detail: fired. Their logistics team: fired.
No water, no power, no fuel.
Look: sufficiently advanced incompetence and/or carelessness is equivalent to malice.
I don’t care if you WANT to attend to the nuclear weapons, if you are so unserious, or understaffed, or incompetent, or distracted, or whatever to fail to actually do the thing.
Intent is irrelevant. Outcomes are everything.
That's fair, but the initial point I was replying to was about intent.
They have spoken their intent out loud, over and over.
I think I did a poor job of articulating my point. My point is that they've spoken their intent to smash the bureaucratic state. Their intent is not to dismantle 100% of the government, including the military and the nuclear bombs. So I don't think the nuclear bombs incident is a great example of them enacting their intent. Unless you actually think they want to do that, but then that's a much different claim you're backing up.
Again, intent is irrelevant.
Sure, criminal negligence vs murder, but do you really care if it’s your kid?
And again, I'm responding to another post (two, actually) about intent. If you have an issue with it, take it up with them. I acknowledge your point as fair, but a separate point.
Do not worry about world-ending neglect towards the staff responsible for the maintenance and security of our nuclear arsenal, their intent was only for a smaller government!
I don't know what's going on with HN right now, there usually is a lot more reading comprehension and level headed conversation, even on controversial topics.
It's not me minimizing a series of catastrophic events because in my great wisdom I have perfectly ascertained the intentions of an unpredictable administration, it's reading comprehension.
The foundations of the American government and its ability to care for its citizens. People are loosing their livelihoods, people are dying, etc.
You have been desperately attempting to defend the “intent” of the perpetrators.
That might rub folks the wrong way, huh?
"Yes, your honour, I did shoot him point blank in the chest. But you can't use that fact as evidence that I wanted to kill him, that's just evidence of how he died."
Murder, manslaughter, intent, accident, purpose, neglect. We have many words that try to put a degree of malice on the act of taking a life, but the life is still gone.
At some point, you need to draw a line in the sand and say "They're going where I can't follow.". Right now, it seems like you're drawing the line right after they come out and tell the world that they specifically intend to burn America to the ground and auction off the remains for their personal profit. Where you draw your line is your own personal choice, but it's worth thinking about ahead of time.
What is your model of this group of people behind DOGE? If it's a group of radical right wingers with libertarian leaning who want to smash the bureaucratic state, that's probably accurate and most people (even supporters) can get behind that characterization. Do you think this group of people, ushered in by Donald John Trump, want to dismantle the military? If not, then why would they purposely try to lose control of the nukes? There probably exist some radical libertarians (or even left-wing anarchists) who would actually advocate for let's say decommissioning the nukes, but I think it's pretty clear that that's not who's in office.
What I see is a ham-fisted approach to slashing the Department of Energy. That's the actual goal. Plenty of anti-Trump outlets report it that way. The idea that they actually want the nuclear weapons to lapse is a pretty bold implication, assuming I'm not misunderstanding the argument.
Sufficient active disregard for consequences is equivalent to actively seeking said consequences.
If someone consistently drives extremely recklessly, refuses to service their brakes, allows their tires to become completely tread worn, removes their mirrors, etc. etc.
What could one reasonably infer about their desire to get into a car crash?
Would loud and repeated claims of a desire to drive safely convince you? Moreover, would you consider such claims to be in good faith, especially if said reckless behavior continues?
Besides, the GOP has said time and time again: let’s make the government so small we can drown it in the bathtub.
What private sector entity would find it profitable, or even be able to, control the bird flu or manage the nuclear arsenal.
Much less, do you want there to be a profit motive in those places?
I don't think there is one unified plan to destroy the federal government; however, many influential people in the current administration are motivated to destroy particular parts of the federal government and will not get in each other's way. I believe the result of this is that the current administration will attempt to destroy the union (inclusive OR) of all the agencies that influential individuals within the administration want to destroy.
Here's a quote from the conservative political operative and self-described Christian Nationalist Russ Vought, who is both the current and former head of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump:
“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can't do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.” [1]
This is a visceral and radical statement which has gotten some airtime on the news recently. However, it's interesting to note that Project 2025, which Vought helped lead and authored key sections of, does not advocate for the dismantling of USAID, rather recommending that its mission be narrowly aligned to national security goals[2]. In 2025, however, Elon Musk wanted USAID shuttered, and Vought was happy to oblige in his position as "the nerve center of the federal budget."
However, Project 2025 advocates for eliminating or defunding the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Education, EPA, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and other government agencies. It's likely that these will also come under fire.
Finally (and this is my opinion), I believe it is impossible to understand this current administration's policy agenda without at least a surface level understanding of the writing of Curtis Yarvin, a software developer and reactionary political blogger. One this topic, Yarvin says the following:
“What is government? A government is just a corporation which owns a country. Nothing more, nothing less. It so happens that our sovereign corporation is very poorly managed and there’s a very simple way to replace that, which is what we do to all corporations that have failed. We simply delete them.”
[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/video-donald-trump-russ-v...
[2] https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FUL... (pg 253-255)
[3] https://apnews.com/article/trump-doge-russell-vought-project...
Could you imagine any Project 2025 type wanting the government to disband the military? I imagine not. So why would they want to lose control of the nukes? I think in the case of the nukes it was just a ham-fisted attempt to downsize the Department of Energy. To that point, last I heard they were scrambling to re-hire those people.
Curtis Yarvin isn't a libertarian (anymore), he's a monarchist. I also don't think he would advocate for the government to lose control of the nukes.
I think the DoE thing was a mistake. Kind of frightening that nobody in the chain of execution for that decision knew what the DoE actually does, but I don't think that was intentional.
Okay cool. Well maybe I misinterpreted, but it sounded like the person I was responding to in my initial post was implying that it was on purpose. Or at very least, they would have to imply that it was on purpose for their argument to make sense. That was my point. Perhaps I haven't been clear.
I think the person I responded to did insinuate that, and I think that the evidence they provided doesn't support their premise.
I am making the argument that the current administration is trying to make government agencies die, but that it isn't one centrally orchestrated conspiracy. I am using different evidence than the parent comment to make that argument.
More importantly, the purpose of my original comment is to inform readers of the thread on highly influential second-tier actors (Russ Vought is well-known, but he's not Elon Musk) and help foster a more nuanced discussion of the current administration, its motivations, and its actions.
Yeah. Remember when Mitt Romney planned a speech promising to abolish the DoE, forgot which agency when giving the speech, and then got put in charge of the DoE? I imagine this is the sequel.
You are misremembering Rick Perry as Mitt Romney.
Thank you, but also: it feels appropriate.
See also https://project2025.observer/.
There's a proven track record with the Republican plan and USPS that they like to sabotage the agency and then point to the dysfunction they created as a reason to get rid of it. I fully suspect that we're going to hear that several agencies have been non-productive since January 20th and should thus be cut... Despite the fact that they BLINDLYfired not only the new employees, but all the employees that have had promotions over the last year as well (And were probationary in their new role).
I don't know how to fix this ratchet of "Republicans shatter things for fun and self-profit; Democrats try to tape things back together but it's harder to fix things than break them; so voters punish them by electing Republicans" that's been going on my entire life
It's not that simple. Democrats are responsible for plenty of stupid ideas, and Republicans have pushed through some good ideas.
Being overly reductionist makes one easier to reject as partisan.
What is new is the MAGA/2025 hijacking of the Republican party to enact its goals. To the extent that the current Republican leadership is essentially a different party than it was 6 years ago.
I attended GOP caucuses circa 2010-2014. I would like to believe there was once a healthy sensible conservative party, but I'm sorry to say that to my eyes nothing has been hijacked: MAGA is what the Republican party has been for my entire adult life. It's just loud about it in public now instead of behind the doors of political machinery.
There is a through line from Goldwater to Nixon to Reagan to Gingrich to Trump. Connective tissue has been provided by the likes of Roger Stone. This has been a 60-plus year project to overturn the New Deal.
Facts. All Trump did was take the top talking points of AM radio & fox (birtherism/racism, illegal immigration, and no factory jobs) and parroted them to power.
That's a fundamental shift in historical Republicanism though.
For most of its history, the Republican party was fairly anti-populist (defined by whatever populism was at the time).
The Republican southern strategy from 1980+ was predicated on attracting southern white votes by attacking civil rights (explicitly or implicitly), but ultimately focusing on business priorities (with some headline-catching red meat).
However, in the decades since, the explosion of hardline conservative talk radio then dragged the party to answer to its more egregious populist demands.
Hence Trump.
I would argue that their opposition to civil rights was populist. It was amoral and intended only to get votes from racists, as an “ends justify the means” way to pursue deregulation and corporatism.
That bait-and-switch reveals the core, though. The R base wanted what Trump is doing all along but was tricked by the establishment business class. The reason they are so loyal to Trump is because he ripped away the fasaud and acts out their longstanding wishes.
How is it a hijack? He got and is still getting overwhelming support from the GOP rank and file.
It mightve been a hijack at one point, but MAGA owns the whole airline now.
It's an evolution, not a hijack. Even Mitt Romney accepts it as the new normal: https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/15/politics/video/mitt-romney-ma...
Name a single good idea the Republican Party has proposed and implemented at the federal level since 2000.
The most recent thing I can think of was getting Clinton to balance the budget, and he was a democrat.
PEPFAR started in 2003 under Bush and has saved millions of lives. Of course Trump is dismantling it now but I think it's inarguably the best thing Bush did as president.
The GOP fought against AIDS interventions since its discovery.
Had they not, PEPFAR or something similar would have existed a decade or more earlier.
Lotsa people died because of that.
By 2003, it was no longer tenable to refuse to fight AIDS, plus, notable GOP family members got AIDS.
Just like Nancy Reagan’s 180 on gay people once her daughter came out.
I totally agree with you, but as someone who has seen the impact on the ground in parts of Africa, and how HIV/AIDS is no longer the death sentence it once was, PEPFAR is an amazing program that came too late, but let's not discount the actual good that it has done.
Of course not! Better late than never.
10 year dominance of a political party by one man is not a hijacking. It's a revealed preference.
I think they believe the hijacking happened 12 years ago.
It started in 2008 and kicked into super high gear in 2010.
Yeah, this might be correct. It's possible Trumpism is a natural extension of tea-party-ism.
Especially ironic, given one of the tenets of tea partyism was paying down the national debt.
The national debt is too abstract and wonk-ish to be an actual tenet of a populist movement. I remember people talked about it a lot, but only in trite ways and I really think it was just a fig leaf.
I actually believe that the hardline tea partiers did believe this until they actually saw where the money was going. Then, lots of people in the tea party started saying "get the government's hands off my social security" (the irony would be funny if it didn't hurt so much).
The national debt is concrete, but no president likes having their ability to spend constrained.
It should be handled in the way all >4 year payback US problems are: by empowering a commission to do the neccessary unpopular things and give members longer-than-4-year terms.
Many Republicans don't realize this. The party you've voted for all your life is not the same party running America today. Today's Republican party has been co-opted by an Anarcho-capitalist wing. And step 1, which they're well on track to do is to dismantle the Federal government. Step 2, which will be coming within the next year or two is to sell off previous government services to private entities.
When the Soviet Union collapsed the US sent over "economic consultants" to steer what happened next towards "free markets."
What happened next is that various chancers marched into state institutions, usually with private security details made of low-grade armed thugs promoted from street crime, and said "This is ours now."
The US aristocracy saw this and apparently thought "Perfect - let's make that happen here too."
The fact there's been no significant state or media push back against Musk's takeovers is all anyone needs to know. The aim is a kleptocratic imperium drowning in gold, drugs, delusion, and corruption - which is exactly what Russia turned into.
The best part is where the plant is still state property on paper, but operates at loss because it exports everything to a shell company in Austria who resells it at profit paid to the actual benefociary controller.
And if report on this, the president orders you to be behaded
Non-MAGA republicans gave up; they are now extinct.
There were two paths, the examples I would give are Cheney and Graham. Both thought Trump was terrible, one stuck to her convictions and is now out of government, the other rolled over and is now licking Trump's boots.
What good ideas?
The entire platform of the GOP is that the government is the problem.
The ACA would have been much better had the GOP not tried to stop it any way possible. Suing to remove critical aspects of it, voting at every turn against it, arguing that there would be death panels for grandparents.
Even once it was law, no attempt to improve, or replace.
A good faith effort would include an alternative health care plan. Where is it?
Two options: either incapable of producing a plan or are at best indifferent to the suffering and death of hundreds of thousands of people, if not more.
The GOP has only tirelessly worked to ensure that the ACA would be less effective than it could have been.
Note: not repeal it. It’s entirely too popular and effective for that.
David Brooks, at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, had a session called "How the Elite rigged Society (and why it’s falling apart)"
I included a link just below to at the exact timestamp he talks about this:
How Brooks sees Trumpism: not conservative, they don't have a conservative or positive vision for society, they just want to destroy the institutions "dominated" by left. In his words, this means, they are astoundingly incompetent. "Elite Narcissicm" leads to the destruction of every thought system it encounters.
https://youtu.be/QSa52TR9tCA?si=Uckncgw-WbAfA5tZ&t=277
The two-party system in itself doesn't work well. So I'm not holding my breath.
Two santas theory.
I worry that the solution is a race to the bottom. As long as this shit helps only one party it won't get fixed.
Takes like this only focus on domestic politics and ignore the harrowing neoliberal foreign politics both parties uphold in order to perpetuate class inequality and create consumer demand. Both parties are invested in selling this country out, even if some Democrats really do care about social services.
I actually agree, but I'm not sure this is a relevant observation. It's not fawning over Democrats to say that they are, as a group, pro-institution.
Don't worry, a privately owned monopoly will pick up the slack.
> "probationary in their new role"
This is such a big tech "move fast and break things" thing to do. The cancer has now metastasized and reached the executive function.
If history is any indication, it won't even go towards fixing the debt. Capital Gains tax cut incoming in 3... 2... 1...
That's already planned. The republicans want to pass another 4.5 trillion of tax cuts for the richest 0.1%
They simply lie to their supporters, and are believed because republicans are indoctrinated throughout life to believe that "government bad, corporations good, taxes bad, money good, collective power bad, individual power good"
trump said before the election he didn't know what project 2025 was. He lied, pure and simple.
It's deeper than lying about P25. P25 was allegedly an intentionally public document, designed to grab the media spotlight. It is actually plausible that trump had never seen a single page of that document by design.
There is a secret runbook that goes much further than P25 which the same authors ensured was never printed or emailed anywhere which could be susceptible to FOIA. That is the runbook they have been using since day 1, which likely contained all 74 of his day 1 orders pre-written.
somebody needs to FOIA donald trump jr's etc chatgpt account
Trump is too reactionary to have an N-step plan. The man thrives in chaos and uncertainty. Furthermore project 25 is large enough I'd be a lot more surprised if whatever happens wasn't on that wishlist somewhere.
The TCJA made $4.5T in cuts for the richest 0.1%? Can you explain more about that? Is that by income, wealth?
Trump lied about a lot of things.
The concept of "electoral fraud" is enshrined in law, so I guess more lawsuits are coming.
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Why did they kill 18F, then? A department that was net-zero in costs.
For the millionth time, we don’t pay the government. The US federal government is not funded by taxes. The US government spends money into existence. It taxes money out of existence to help control the supply of money, inflation, etc. Stop using the deficit as a smokescreen for redistribution of wealth away from the 99% to the 1%.
> when it obviously can't allocate what it already has
No large government in the history of the world has ever perfectly spent its money.
We can at best aspire to good government spending, not perfect.
Therefore the current dog and pony show of 'look at these excesses and get mad' is just a distraction to functional cuts that would be less popular.
Elon Musk, Russell Vought, and Donald Trump are lying. They know exactly what they're trying to do: impair the operation of the US government.
Any claims about fiscal justification are ridiculous from a financial standpoint -- if they cared about US debt, they'd be making these spending cuts, and not passing tax cuts.
We aren't even in the same dimension as perfection here. It's a historically obvious phenomenon. Basically all human organizations tend toward inefficiency and waste eventually. The US government is the largest employer in the world. The reasoning would be no different if it was a corporation.
This is true. So now let’s look at the substance of what DOGE has actually done:
- indiscriminately fire people who have been in long term positions but recently got promoted and so were considered “probationary”
- dismantle the CPFB which was a net gain for revenue
- dismantle 18F which has a track record of improving government efficiency
- fire people who were involved in managing nuclear weapons and bird flu and then try to bring them back
- share spreadsheets on Twitter about really old people in the social security system making people think there’s tons of fraud without learning about the 2023 OIG report that already existed that explained this data
- make a bunch of noise about cutting a bunch of contracts including a third of which were already fully spent and will save nothing
Does this give you confidence that they are genuinely focused on reducing inefficiency and waste? It seems to me like they are rushing in, not bothering to learn what has already been done, arrogantly making assumptions, randomly breaking things and causing chaos, and all for what… a few billion in real savings which is not even a fraction of the proposed increase in spending by the current budget resolutions being worked on by the Republicans in the house?
Why should we have ever thought that an operation literally named after a dog meme was serious about anything?
I’d also add that doing all of this by breaking laws/contracts makes it likely that the net cost will be greater than the advertised savings. Every one of the contractors they stiffed has pretty straight forward grounds for a breach of contract suit and every government employee they said was fired for poor performance has grounds and a strong incentive to sue to clear their name.
All of this makes everything more expensive in the future: new contracts are going to have higher overhead to account for new legal and accounting costs, and unless the government will never hire anyone again they’re going to struggle to get skilled employees at all, much less at the same salary, when it’s clear that they’d be signing up to be treated like this. The direct cost is bad but the productivity cost will be even greater and last for decades.
The government has a fair bit of flexibility to cancel contracts without penalty. They usually don't, and of course nobody has ever seen it as this scale.
You're probably correct about the employment law. That will take more legal finesse to keep them from having to pay a ton of money. Fortunately for them they also own the judiciary. It's not 100% reliable, but they've for 4 out of 5 needed votes locked in at the top level
Most contract or employment disputes aren't going to the Supreme Court.
And expecting lower federal courts packed with conservative judges to vote in favor of ignoring contracts?
We'll see, but I wouldn't take that bet...
They aren't packed with conservatives. They are packed with Republicans.
They also deleted the largest "fraud findings" from their site after a day or so after posting them because they were lies, and enough people called them out
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The next step after identifying some waste isn't to cut well-performing functional parts of the government.
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> The reasoning would be no different if it was a corporation.
The difference being the overflow after wastes gets spend on society instead of shareholders.
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I don't think the US government is the largest employer in the world unless we aren't counting other countries governments. China seems to have around 50M government employees, 10 million civil servants and 30-40 million in other government jobs.
> It's a historically obvious phenomenon. Basically all human organizations tend toward inefficiency and waste eventually
It's not that obvious to me, and is such a broad assertion that I'd require more than an "Everyone knows it. Just look at history" explanation to accept it as fact.
It also implies 2 things that I would disagree with
1) That the inefficiency and waste increases over time. It's likelier to me the ratio of those things stays the same, but it's more apparent as it scales - a company "wasting" 2% of its budget is vastly different than the US government "wasting" 2% of its budget.
2) That it's inherent to "human organizations" themselves - this doesn't seem to explore any other possible explanations. Given the nature of the discussion, I would think it's worth discussing whether other factors (like capitalism) might have an effect
(We'll ignore the vagueness of terms like "inefficiency" and "waste" with regards to government spending; not everyone agrees on what things are efficient or not. There are also many ways of measuring efficiency for both long- and short-term outlooks.)
When ever anyone talks about government inefficiency, ask what perfect efficiency would look like.
Nail them down to specifics. Not just improvements, but perfect efficiency.
Guaranteed they will soon start to flounder, because "inefficient government" is a propaganda talking point, not a fact that can be established with any workable economic definition.
And "the deficit" is the difference between what government chooses to spend and chooses not to tax.
A huge proportion of government spending is either/both an investment and/or a direct driver of beneficial economic activity. That includes "unworthy" spending like welfare.
Dilbert is about a corporation, not government. Everyone seems to know that every large organization has some inefficiency. They seem to think the government has it worse, because that's what Republicans have been telling them.
It's no worse for government than any other large organization. Better than expected, given it's size.
A oft-missed point is what's required for redress of waste at scale: more spending.
It costs money to save wasted money.
Sometimes, that equation is net positive and other times net negative. But it's never financially efficient to reduce waste to zero.
> Why do you want to pay a government more money when it obviously can't allocate what it already has?
I don't think they're reflexive responses by stupid republicans, I think billionaires don't like paying taxes (to pay back into the society that made them fantastically rich in the first place) so they purchase Republican politicians to both obstruct government and vote for tax cuts. They obstruct the government to make it inefficient and then they use the resulting inefficiency as evidence that the government needs to be "starved".
And that's just politics-as-usual stuff before the literal cabal of billionaires in the Trump admin began working expressly to create an oligarchy.
What capital gains? Everyone will be getting tax relief next year for market losses.
The entire federal workforce is 4% of expenses. If they wanted to cut costs, they would halt all private contracts and audit those first.
This isn't a possibility. They've publicly stated it's their goal.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43225342
>> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43225342
> Everyone should watch the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, speak on government workers:
Russell Vought is the architect of Project 2025:
* https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c977njnvq2do
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025
You know, the thing that Trump publicly said he wasn't part of.
That was a master class in weasel words.
"I haven't read it, I don't know what's in it."
"I know nothing about it."
I absolutely believe he never read it during the campaign, probably hasn't done more than skim a summary to this day. He doesn't need to. None of that matters to him.
Keeping his distance gave him "plausible" deniability...kinda. Anyone who actually thought Trump wasn't going to let Heritage Foundation people take over substantial control of government should take a long hard look at their sources of information, internal biases, and critical thinking capability.
Argentina style. We've seen Musk with a chainsaw, he's not trying to hide it.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly25yny3ego
It is well-known, but it seems like it is hip to be indifferent on this sinking ship.
I wonder how long until they pull the "who needs public libraries when you have Jeff Bezos?" shtick again.
IMO we don’t need to attribute malice to it, which will drag everyone into a debate about what’s going on inside the clearly broken minds of a few rich men.
The sheer incompetence of it all is disqualifying by itself.
In my experiences arguing with MAGA, the incompetence argument lands a lot more convincingly than the evil argument.
What we are seeing is clearly an act of malice. We need to be honest about that. Trying to obfuscate what we are seeing helps no one. We should use plain English and talk in a straightforward way about what is happening.
I disagree. The nameservers still respond to requests on 53/tcp. It seems like someone messed up a firewall configuration or rolled out a bad server configuration. Shit happens - maybe exacerbated by the DOGE insanity. But there is no indication that this was done on purpose.
The insanity that has/will lead to functions no longer being properly staffed is on purpose.
“Helps no one” except probably winning elections, given the “he’s a fascist” messaging (while true) didn’t seem to resonate.
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I'm not sure the crying wolf is accurate.
It's like shouting that the bridge is going to collapse because you see a few supports buckle. Anybody with eyes can see the bridge is standing and heavy ass trucks are driving on top of it.
Trumps first term was relatively neutered because people just refused to do what he asked. Those supports are gone now though and like the bridge collapse the observable changes happened slowly and then suddenly all at once.
I would agree with you if I had been talking about using "fascism" to describe first-term Trump and his hardcore supporters, but I was very specifically referring to the application of the term toward liberals and progressives who were deemed too moderate on identity politics. And to be clear, by "too moderate", I mean stuff like "advocating nonviolent protests" and "criticizing the weaponization of Title IX at universities".
I think warning about Trump fascism was appropriate and legitimate, but I think using the label as a lazy cudgel to get liberals and progressives to toe a poorly-conceived line did a tremendous amount to erode the term's significance and rhetorical power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment
https://www.ft.com/content/02217acf-ac64-49c2-acd5-ef4f107f0...
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/techno-fas...
There can be incompetence and malice together in all this. The malicious often leverage the incompetent to further their goals.
One way to get more people on board with destroying government structures is to render the government structures as ineffectual and incompetent as possible.
I didn’t say there isn’t malice.
You want to downplay the malice to avoid arguments about whether it's really malicious. I want to spotlight the malice because it's really fucking bad and a lot of people are going to get hurt, and that's not an accidental outcome.
And when these websites are back up? What then?
Given the sheer amount of incompetence malice becomes a lot more probable
I’m not saying what’s true, I’m saying what is useful to argue.
The goal is to convince other people, not to rah-rah the already-believers.
Trivially: these websites go back up in a few days, is that more convincingly malice or just “these people don’t know how to operate a government?”
Then incompetence as as reason isn’t useful.
If it’s malice then it’s an attack. You have react differently to an attack than to incompetence.
The EU made the same mistake with Trump‘s appeasement to Putin. They hoped it’s some kind of clever negotiation tactic but they learned it’s not. It’s just two autocrats teaming up at the expense of Ukraine.
That is not even close to analogous.
Meh, feel free to disagree. How many MAGA voters do you talk to on a daily basis?
In person? None.
Online? More than enough and they show the same kind of malice like our own type of MAGA: AfD voters
Democratic turnout was a problem in the 2024 election. Rah-rah is important, like it or not.
And do you have evidence to suggest more people would’ve been activated by more “he’s a fascist” messaging?
You open with "IMO" but want evidence from me? Lol.
There were many dems who remembered Trump as the funny orange man, didn't really care to turn out against him, and fell for the "both sides bad" messaging that was absolutely rampant on the left (esp with regard to Kamala and Palestine). So no, I don't think the most important rally-the-base rhetoric was to ratchet up "Trump is Fascist" so much as suppress "Both Sides Bad" while we had an election to win.
"IMO" means "in my opinion." You made a statement as a fact, which is why I asked for evidence. Lol.
Agreed the "both sides bad" messaging was a huge factor here. But that's exactly why we should talk about these fuckups as questions of competence. They are unambiguous evidence of a difference in both sides' ability to actually operate a government!
Both sides were bad. Biden and Kamala were terrible candidates for the Democrats to run, and their campaign positioning lacked a unifying aspirational message.
What was Kamala's 2024 campaign slogan?
We're not going back?
Exactly.
Which was a horrendously stupid tag line. All people saw was "prices not going back." Everyone in America remembers simpler, better times. 1990s race relations alone were far better than they are now.
I saw that slogan and cringed immediately.
Sorry downvoters, I'm no MAGA cultist, it's just the worst slogan ever.
To borrow a phrase, any sufficiently incompetent organization becomes indistinguishable from malice.
Although I agree with others' sentiment that focusing on incompetence can be more persuasive to certain segments of society.
It is not incompetence to put people with no relevant experience into cabinet positions. It's purpose. Destruction with a huge amount of distraction is the purpose.
Curtis Yarvin has been writing about this forever. JD Vance has spoken publicly about his agreement with ideas like RAGE (Retire All Government Employees). Musk has similarly spoken publicly about how CEOs are the best people to run the world. Although Thiel is not directly in power, he's also a Yarvin-ite and has been instrumental in both Vance's rise and also the pipeline for the various people working at DOGE to destroy the government.
Alongside these budget cuts, the GOP is proposing massive tax cuts and massive increases in funding for parts of the government related to law and immigration enforcement that will massively outweigh any savings from DOGE destroying entire programs overnight. DOGE is also demolishing organizations that are revenue positive and Trump has fired Inspector Generals, who are responsible for identifying waste and inefficiency in government operations.
It isn't a possibility. It is very very clear.
In blue states, the middle class taxes are going to be hiked to pay for all this, just like under Trump 1.
Also, half of the “law and immigration enforcement” budget increase is actually going towards deploying the military inside the US, which is illegal.
Musk is still there to take the hit, and he will. He's spoken about it openly to a degree. Something about how he's only planning to be in that role temporarily and will get back to building rockets.
> DOGE is also demolishing organizations that are revenue positive
The revenue will be still be there when the re-org is completed. Are you worried about competitors?
This is an explicit Project 2025 goal.
It's surprising to see how many people still don't get this. None of what happened so far was in any way surprising. You can literally go right now and read up what else they have planned. We're in for a wild ride.
They get it, they just know it looks bad so they act as if they are surprised.
There are still some people (even in this thread) pretending it is not deliberately sabotaging the government in favor of billionaires.
Reminds me of how 9/11 turned into the GWoT and Iraq I etc. The Project for the New American Century posted their playbook for that on their website too. Most people downplayed it.
I distinctly 'member people even right here on this site taking dumps on anyone who dared accuse the Republicans of being hellbent on implementing Project 2025. Called us "conspiracy nuts", said that this was just "enemy propaganda" or that there was no connection between Trump and Project 2025, downvoted and flagged our warnings... where the fuck are y'all now? Where the fuck are y'all with your guns and "don't tread on me" flags now that MAGA is tearing down the government and installing an autocracy in all but name? And where the fuck are the even more people who did just the same on Reddit?
The thing is, almost no one was used to politicians actually following through with their plans and promises. Trump is the first Western leader since I'm alive (other than the current Spanish government) to actually do what he has promised, and I fear this image of him being an "accomplisher" will send him for a wave of support in both the midterms and the next election (and yes, I also believe that there will be no one left to enforce the "two terms" regulation).
Democrats don't believe in guns or storming the white house... they'll either wait 4 years or wishfully dream that orange man dies of a heart attack.
> I also believe that there will be no one left to enforce the "two terms" regulation).
I don't want to suggest what Trump himself suggested: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-2nd-amendment-folks-st...
I think that's a bad option.
What I am saying is: Every single time I've seen a headline about school shootings, someone suggests gun control.
Someone reacts that guns keep the government from becoming despots.
I said then, no, the military are the ones who decide such things. Militia don't make a dent, despite their self image.
And yet, Trump, who just narrowly avoided being killed, signed more support of the 2nd amendment.
https://www.nraila.org/articles/20250207/nra-statement-on-pr...
Did he sign because he's afraid, or because he's not?
> Where the fuck are y'all with your guns and "don't tread on me" flags now that MAGA is tearing down the government and installing an autocracy in all but name?
The same place they were when Breonna Taylor was summarily executed by government agents retaliating for Kenneth Walker exercising his second amendment right to home defense at night (the exact type of scenario they continually grandstand about!) - following the twisted logic and misdirection of their mainstream media so they can continue lazily attacking a strawman of their fellow citizens ("oWn tHe lIbS!1!") rather than reflect on what it would actually take to live their purported values.
At this point the only real question for so-called "conservatives" is when will they realize their leaders have betrayed us and given away our country's future to China?
This article is giving some background on the planning and setup of the new DOGE: https://archive.ph/oJRrI
It's really hard to have private companies charge for doing work that a functional government agency performs.
The US mismanaged the pandemic about as badly as anyone could; other than the ubiquitous surveillance of the population I don’t know many us federal agencies that I personally would describe as “quite functional”.
I certainly don’t know any that require they be run by the state.
** WAKE UP FOLKS! ** THIS IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW. NO ONE IS COMING TO SAVE US.
If you're in the US, it's time to start asking yourself what you are going to want to be able to say to your kids or grandkids when they ask what you did about it when the constitutional republic was falling.
Eh? “At some point”? You must’ve been sleeping. This has nothing to do with efficiency or improving the budget. Bill Clinton laid off thousands of employees, but he did it in an orderly fashion, got congressional approval etc. This is the exact opposite. The goal here is to cause havoc, be cruel, cut regulations (by reducing budget and reducing personnel) etc. After the carnage, divvy up what’s left among the billionaires. So far, it seems going according to plan.
Did you hear what Russell Vought said? “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,”
Anyone genuinely interested in efficiency should start with why the Pentagon has failed audits and is unable to account for tens (hundreds?) of billions of dollars
Keep in mind that this my be an internal revolt.
What’s the end goal here though?
And at some point it's time to take action to go around a rogue non government. We have the technology, we can rebuild it.
We can rebuild the government. We will eventually rebuild the government. All of these agencies will eventually be rebuilt. It might take 20 years, but eventually the USA will get back to where it was in late 2024, in terms of state capacity. But the damage being done right now almost guarantees a "Lost Generation" that has to spend its life rebuilding what we had, rather than moving into the future.
> We can rebuild the government. We will eventually rebuild the government. All of these agencies will eventually be rebuilt. It might take 20 years,
They're going to a lot of effort, and exposing themselves to a lot of risk, if this is all likely to be undone in a few years time. My worry is that they won't be able to resist trying to permanently lock-in these changes, even if the most obvious way to do that is to abandon democracy.
It is possible, but why do you believe this is a necessity? It's also possible that the US becomes an oligarchy dictatorship like Russia. All the assets are seized by a small group (crashing the economy, removing oversight, removing national park maintenance, etc. makes it possible). Then give people just enough money and fear not to revolt. Feed them propaganda all day, find some enemies to direct their hate towards. I mean, it's pretty much Vance and Thiel's playbook, rule by 'wise' tech CEOs.
I'm genuinely afraid of what we're doing to our childrens' futures.
We're already far too balkanized as a country for a central dictatorship to make much sense in the long run. Especially when the money tap starts running dry. I think we'll just have an extremely weak federal government (or perhaps we will finally split.)
A centralized dictatorship is what held the actual Balkans together...
How's that working in the long term?
What has bound us together as a people is the massive ocean of cash we collectively float on. Abundance that's actively being slashed and burned as we speak. Apologies for the mixed metaphor.
I was hinting at building an alternative system that would be resilient to this kind of tampering. Decentralization fanatics might be of use right now.
Decentralization is not the answer. Centralization is the answer.
Can you sketch out a bit more how this could work?
The only thing I can think of would be.... weakening the federal government and giving up on the idea of centralized control outside of the military and the dollar. Which is exactly what republicans are doing now.
On the bright side, this might also mean the end of rampaging around the globe in the name of democracy. I think that ship has fully sailed, alhamdulillah.
Every citizen of age is entered into a lottery. From this pool you will be selected, at random, to be assigned into a government management role (eg: president, law maker, justice) supported by staff. Any citizen, randomly in roles of power. No voting. Then you serve your role for 4 years and never get another one. Now the incentive is to do the least harm?
With precision no, I'm a newb, but a distributed system ala DHT, or git so that there is no single path of access.
I cannot emphasize enough that this is not a technology problem, nor is it one where solutions can be usefully informed by technology.
Sorry if I misjudged the way to approach this, I still think that the 'method' (or technology) matters because it influence the social and political layer too. How would you approach it, genuinely curious.
Our global influence and wealth will almost certainly never be this high again. I think that's probably a very good thing for the globe in itself, but we can wreak a lot of destruction on our way out of power.
Don’t wanna be that guy but if not really being about budget cuts seemed pretty obvious from the start, if Elon and Donald got a hand in it it’s pretty much always ego driven.
and it's not like private industry is going to do this work, there's no profit in such services, at least not short term
AND if they are doing this to NIH, imagine what they are doing to food and drug inspection for safety
just assume all regulation is gone or being ignored without penalty, now scale that out for four years
Forget "great depression" it's a dark ages of sorts with smartphones for distraction
TurboTax makes a lot of profit. This a perfect example of what should be a government service being privatized. That model will be replicated.
It's already well-known that crippling the government and destroying things is the point. To have ever entertained anything else is to have been naive, morally defective, and stupid.
HN was in the same uproar after Musk reformed Twitter. Minor disruption? “The sky is falling!” Brief outage? “It’s malice!” “You see! Musk is obviously driving it into the ground.”
Could there be a world in the middle where maybe the government is bloated and irresponsibly spending money and republicans aren’t just myopic nitwits and do care for our country? And they’re executing on cleaning things up but in a way you disagree with?
Why is it always malice and ruin? It’s tiring. Twitter BTW pulled 1.25B in profit last year…
The government is bloated but rather than attacking the bloat (DoD budget that never shrank after ending two wars, subsidies for profitable businesses) they're going after the regulatory infrastructure that protects Americans from corporate greed.
Extraneous regulation stifles innovation and is the definition of bloat. I certainly haven't been protected from corporate greed lately, have you? The main function if gov’t is to provide a military. That’s appropriate spend.
Ah yes, tech companies that provide zero personal support just scaling storage and delivery are the same as government which is MOSTLY providing support and person to person work, the OPPOSITE of scalable using tech.
Because it's the explicit goal of the people doing it. Why go after the CFPB and 18F and IRS Direct File? They've been very outspoken about destroying administrative capacity and making the executive branch a king to punish the enemies of their national conservatism project. Red states are already trying to roll back women's and LGBT people's rights. How does trying to overturn Obergefull balance the budget?
There is waste everywhere. I sincerely don’t understand how, when the stated plan is to look closely at all orgs and cut waste across the board, when the lens focuses on specific instances of orgs, the response is “not this one, cutting here will ruin everything”. I don’t buy it.
What is developing in-house capabilities with 18F waste? Why is protecting consumers from scams and even recouping that money by the CFPB waste? Why is allowing people to e-file without private middlemen waste?
Well, we don’t need two identity providers, for one. I’m sure the non wasteful things will be sustained under different management that isn’t insubordinate.
You're sure... Based on what?
Non wasteful things... Such as? Says who?
"Different management" ffs the govt isn't supposed to pivot like a company every 4-8 yrs. That's an unthinking suggestion for a federal govt & heterogenous population.
"Insubordinate"... To a unitary executive?
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Really pubmed?!?! USA is a disgrace!
Move fast and break things.
We don't know the root cause, but the kinds of moves that Musk is pulling are straight from a sabotage manual.
It basically is like having politically motivated human chaos monkeys running around the data center randomly killing systems and seeing whether anyone notices.
…which seems like not the worst idea?
The very fact that it takes such a battle to even get read only access to analyze where the money is going is evidence enough that there is insanely baroque levels of waste and unnecessary services happening here.
If it’s that important it can be put back.
Why is it so scandalous that conservatives want a smaller government, got elected, and are now making the government smaller?
You wouldn't be saying "if it's important it can be put back," if it was a government service important to you, like water service to your house. Scientists actually need to use pubmed.
Equating government-funded research programs (completely optional) to water provision isn’t remotely coherent. Pipes in the ground are a natural monopoly.
I'm glad I have the chance to explain this to somebody. Research is also a natural monopoly, because a fundamental particle can only be discovered once. Repeated development of what's under the hood of a car isn't wasted because every car is different, but repeated invention of internal combustion would be wasted time and energy.
I don’t believe your second sentence to be true; in fact quite the opposite: research seems infinitely parallelizable.
The discovery part is what happens at the end.
What I mean by wasted time and energy is, it is wasteful for 1,000 researchers working in secret at private companies to independently discover the same protein, without telling anyone, when instead one person could have discovered it and then shared the information. It's like 1,000 companies digging trenches for water pipes under the same road.
This seems to conveniently ignore how patents work.
Working with the most charitable interpretation of your view, is the idea that Peter Higgs would have patentented the Higgs boson, CERN would have paid him royalties to attempt to produce it, and CERN and Higgs together would have sold the rights to a trust that was able to collect royalties on all products whose invention required the use of electroweak theory? It would have to be a patent term that lasted about 100 years, otherwise Maxwell wouldn't have been able to fund Maxwell's laws.
This presupposes that CERN in its current implementation, scale, and efficiency is a net good for society.
Things like PubMed are probably some of best good to the world that did the US in recent years. Especially because of its great openness with widely open API and so...
If it becomes unavailable, my feeling is that the world will really enter in a dark age.
The entire 18f org was let go. Many of these employees oversaw the building of digital services.
Login.gov is a most critical SSO resource for logging into services such as the IRS for tax payments. It’ll see peak usage next month for taxes. The teams maintaining these have been indiscriminately let go.
More of these online services will start to go down, rapidly.
If the point of DOGE is really to tackle the deficit, all these moves are incredibly shortsighted.
(Yesterday the 18F former employee put https://18f.org/ as a transparent warning of what’s to come)
> If the point of DOGE is really to tackle the deficit, all these moves are incredibly shortsighted.
The point is to shutter or kneecap every last government service. When it becomes obvious which services were/are mission critical, they'll be replaced with private solutions -- most of which will conveniently be on offer from X.
In my 30+ years working at about everywhere and on everything the only place I’ve worked, inclusive of federal roles, with intentionally bottom productivity, are private government contractors. Federal employees while fairly kushy in benefits space were often pretty mission driven and believed deeply in what they were doing as they had taken a long term commitment on their role vs more money on the private side. The contractor space is a constant churn of bids and re orgs with the mission being keeping the contract in the next bidding cycle but losing it due to random political whims. It’s the most depressing form of employment I’ve ever experienced, and I’ve worked at multiple FAANG, so that’s really saying something.
>If the point of DOGE is really to tackle the deficit
It is obvious it is not. The purpose of a system is what it does.
Isn’t the leader of the 18f or digital whatever the so called “head” of DOGE aka the face for Elon. Btw, he’s totally not in charge. Wink wink.
I used to get them confused too, but 18f was a separate organization from USDS which got renamed DOGE. https://18f.org/
It is a DNS issue. Try and change which net you are using. If you are on wifi at home try your cell, however if your home network and cell provider are the same that wont help. A solution is to change which DNS you are using. Its a bit nerdy but actually very easy. Do a search on "change which DNS you are using for browsing" On your computer you can add following to your hosts file located in C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc add this 156.40.212.210 nih.gov 96.17.96.9 www.nih.gov 34.107.134.59 pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov 130.14.250.10 ftp.wip.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov 130.14.250.10 ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov 130.14.29.110 blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
The whole country is getting much more unreliable. Feels especially bad when I'm reading this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Nations_Fail
Another cute and recent development is that they’ve really restricted the hours on the federal payment system, making it difficult for everyone to draw down funds owed. It’s all electronic banking, why does it ever have to go offline?
https://pmsapp.psc.gov/pms/app/login
The US is being liquidated
Seems like it’s back. One of my projects when in bioinformatics was making an alternative search with NIH data. They update pubmed yearly with daily updates after that. It really is a great resource.
We link to their pages: eg
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=24827528,%2020832466,%...
I'm not fromm the US, but these servers are not mirrored, at least to have the information? Or is that not allowed?
I'm using PubMed to prepare for a lecture I'm giving on Monday right now and it is working fine: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
Possibly has something to do with Musk's limit on credit card payment? Very smart all around.
I don't think we can guess the specific problem here, but the credit card limits could indeed easily take services offline as hosting isn't payed. So it would not surprise me at all to see a bunch of cases like this caused by the inability to pay their hosting bills.
Yep, start of the month as well.
AFAIK cloudflare has a contract with CISA to provide DNS for .gov
Is this page correct, indicating they are undergoing maintenance?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/down/
Last modified header of Tue, 10 Apr 2012 15:06:32 GMT so I think not - they probably put this html page up one time and redirected requests from other URLs to it and just forgot to remove
Same message is in the internet archive back in 2020 https://web.archive.org/web/20201009054447/https://www.ncbi....
nih.gov seems to be back up.
And if you search for "trans", you get search results, tho unrelated (e.g., "transnational", etc.).
If you search for "transgender", it just redirects you to the homepage.
The cruelty is the point.
Elon?
Title is wrong. Sites are reachable, but not resolvable (except for servers still caching, such as 1.1.1.1).
It works for me.
I did a quick test, it looks like if you have set a DNS server like 1.1.1.1 you can still access it. But if you haven't, you can't.
FWIW, I just tried going to pubmed, searching for something, and everything seemed to work. DNS servers go down every now and then. It's always DNS, after all.
At this point, if this isn't reckless incompetence, it's malice.
BLAST is totally outdated, not because it's a bad algorithm but because people should be able to run their own version locally. i find it disappointing that there isn't a lot of innovation in determining protein homogeneity, i thought of multiple ideas when i was doing bioinformatics but never had the time to implement it. slow and bad slackademia strikes again
How can you claim to have insight into bioinformatics, but not realize the reason BLAST is run in the cloud is that having all the sequence data of all existing organisms would be absolutely massive and exceed the storage capacity of most laptops?
the data really isn't that large and the algo isn't difficult, most people who do this work don't need to compare proteins across every organism in the world. most people just compare to a few organisms that they work within the context of for clinical trials or data.
if you're comparing DNA and looking at every organism ever you might need such power, but if you do i'd hope you work at some institute that makes your own algo in house because blast isn't the end all be all
I don't see PubMed as being down? https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=study
possibly vandalism by someone looking to be the next Vindman-esque hero in their discord group
Don’t worry bigballs is on it. What a clown show.
PubMed has been sabotaged.
RFK Jr. and Elon Musk gaining political power will be one of the most challenging disasters the human race has ever encountered.
well this is.. uh.. not good
the level of malice towards like...the entire world displayed by Trump and Musk is just beyond comprehension.
how did they become so sociopathic and why did Americans let them have the most powerful jobs in the world?
Eggs were getting too expensive thanks to H5N1, so they thought they'd vote in a bunch of scientifically-illiterate antivax clowns.
Think about it this way.. when tech folk got hooked up to mainline net access 24/7, it wasn't exactly good for us. Think 1970s cocaine consumption.
When the rest of the population got Facebook, that's a refined and potent strain being sold into a population with no natural immunity or defensive mechanisms. Now it's 1990 and there's a crack dealer on every corner in poor neighborhoods.
Those politicians who were at the wheel in 2008-10 must bear a share of the blame. They could see this coming, or should have done. There was far too much complacency about what was festering online and how easily it spread.
Did none of our leaders hear about Gamergate in, what, 2015 and go, hang on we've got a BIG problem brewing here? Even GG wasn't really that much of a shock/surprise if you'd been paying attention since the mid 00's.
Eggs were getting expensive due to an egg monopoly raising prices, according to the egg monopoly. The H5N1 was just the reason given to the public.
It's kind of interesting seeing this play out differently depending on your grocer. My grocer is a little bit "upscale" I guess where eggs were more or less always $6 for a dozen jumbos. All through this prices haven't budged, it's just a matter of whether the eggs are in stock or sold out already. However, you go to Ralphs, the ostensibly "working man's" store incomparison, large eggs there are pushing $10 now. Same city, another 5 minutes down the road.
How ?
One is a convicted felon and the other one openly stated that he's going to prison if said convicted felon is not elected president.
WAKE UP AMERICA
They are being directed by putin to destroy the USA's influence and power in the world.
trump, thiel, and musk also see how rich russia's oligarchs are, and want to replicate russia in the USA.
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted.
It's a viable explanation.
Russian state media were allowed into the Zelensky meeting while other traditional news orgs were not.
The use of tariffs and customs against trading partners to shape general foreign policy, via a compromised president, as well as other things, is strongly reminiscent of Russian interference in Ukraine pre-2014.
Even the Mueller report is best read as concluding there was obstruction of justice into the investigation.
Thiel has openly discussed disappointment with democracy and advocated for autocracy, and his companies have celebrated the current state of things in shareholder meetings.
russian propagandists and useful idiots try to hide or dismiss discussions about it.
russia owns trump. elon talks to putin regularly, and he was promised access to Ukrainian mineral wealth. The whole Panama canal, Canada, and Greenland sabre-rattling is so eventually russian oil tankers can traverse the world with impunity.
russia is dividing and conquering. They still dream of being a superpower, instead of a failed mafia state with nuclear weapons.
Our White House is filled with the Friends of Russia. They want to turn Ukraine over to Russia and loot it. JD Vance erupted on Zelenski because he showed people what was happening instead of just glad-handing his way through the talks and eating shit. This is a clear indication of what happens to YOU should you dare not fully submit.
Our only hope now is that the American economy rebels against this insanity.
The Orange One spent a lot of time praising Zelenski before throwing him to the wolves. That had to be a jolt to everyone, admitted or not.
It’s being downvoted because it’s idiotic!
What would it look like if it were true? What would be different from what is happening?
Lol
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Share one or give an actual criticism?
They have spoken loudly about their intentions…
Published them, even. Many times. Bloody held conferences about them.
Where? Any links? I am curious.
If you are being sincere, you can read a summary here and wade into the muck yourself. I can’t take much of it.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/21/curtis-yarvi...
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As a well educated and literate American, I confirm: the majority of US citizens are either beat down or a sociopath, largely thanks to a completely failed educational system. We manufacture these morons.
you both can't be serious
Seriously done with excusing brutish behavior. After everything we have observed over the last 8 years why would I give this administration the benefit of the doubt?
They’re shutting down this government until it is just the police and military left. And then what?
I realized we had a material and significant education problem back in the early 80's, and have been an alarmist about our manufacturing obedient fools for decades. Now we have a critical mass, and the nation is crumbling while large numbers just watch dumbfounded. Moronic? The end of the USA is here. For fucks sake, Fox News is #1 in the USA.
Fox News and "Mainstream Media" isn't that relevant anymore.
Podcasts overtook them a long time ago; people like Joe Rogan are the new Mainstream Media.
ex. https://old.reddit.com/r/JoeRogan/comments/rvdcea/oc_joe_rog...
As if that is any better, just as moronic as Fox.
I think you underestimate the role of misinformation. I don't think "all" saw it coming even though many or most did.
I share your frustration with how someone could have voted for these criminals but I've also seen very well educated accomplished individuals — who are also not right wingers — essentially brainwashed into thinking Trump was a victim and his ramblings were meaningless showmanship or a media mudslinging campaign. I've also seen interviews with these people during the campaign, people who expected this to be like his last administration.
Trump openly lied about Project 2025 and people who refuted those lies were accused of "TDS", etc in these outlets. Even relatively centrist outlets were accused of sanewashing him.
You can be dismissive but I know people as I type this who are genuinely upset and feel betrayed by the GOP and Trump because they didn't believe they would do all this. Maybe it's a form of stupidity or weakness but the level of fraud and deception throughout cannot be forgotten.
There's a reason for propaganda.
That is our failed education system, creating gullible fools. One may have a PhD in some technical field, but they can't identify a conman, they believe in "conservative values", go to church, self-identify with their political party, and believe their paster's excuses about that little girl.
Fuck Elon Musk
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Given the thoughtless cuts to the workforce and the arbitrary bureaucracy to get anything done/paid for that they've introduced, I'd say the prior probability towards it being their fault should be fairly high. I'm waiting for evidence that it isn't their fault.
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Trust in the US is failing day after day.
Almost everything has been infected by a zero-sum mindset in the US. Some other group of country wins means I must be losing, etc.
The administration doesn’t see that the entire world order is built on many positive sum relationships and coalitions that the US has asymmetrically benefited from. And the same goes for social order. Wealthy people suddenly see themselves as victims(?) of their employees, and investors blame entitled tech employees for companies problems. When the reality is that employee and management - and social classes - benefit economically by supporting each other.
Non-zero: the Logic of Human Destiny was a very influential book for me growing up, talking about how society's very premise is non-zero sum thinking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonzero:_The_Logic_of_Human_De...
Thanks for this idea suggestion, this spin. Its a framing that, now that I see it, maps well & explain so much. The limited world view is collapsing our world, in horrible ways. Mankind became better than the animals because we grew to encompass more than short transactional views of ourselves, and it's so heartbreaking watching vicious dark side anger unmake the core of spirit that propelled us so far.
As someone in Europe, I'm honestly starting to wonder if the companies whose tech I oversee aren't better off eliminating reliance on US tech companies. Hard to tell what they'll do, being strong armed by Musk and Trump, or even just trying to win their favour.
With server hardware, I can't think of real alternatives, at least x86. But then again, I guess they'll just continue to work once bought :P
Cloud hosting and PaaS: We have some major, reliable hosters (Hetzner, OVH etc), but it's a bit lower level than AWS or Heroku. This part I'm pondering the most, since I mostly want to use stuff you can easily find freelancers to work on. With anything closer to self hosting, that's a bit tricky.
Stuff like Google Workspace, Notion etc is non-trivial but possible to replace with stuff like Fastmail and the Atlassian suite. Not an "as good" replacement, but a workable one.
I still feel a bit paranoid even thinking about this, and I'll ponder it some more before I act. But I can't help but wonder how many European CTOs are in the same boat after the oval office meeting with Zelenski. Kinda brought it home to me that the US is a very different country now, and using anything made there is no longer the no brainer it used to be. If the actual government can't resist their commands, private companies most definitely can't. And with a trade war looming, it'd be easy to just take competitors that rely on AWS et al off the market quickly, spy on competitors in Google Workplace, and stuff like that.
It's definitely a thought I've had too. In particular, there are some tech stacks I know of dealing with critical energy infrastructure which are tied to US cloud companies, I think those represent a huge risk, and I wouldn't be suprised to see a few of them start shifting soon.
We got a few OpenStack-based clouds.
https://www.open-telekom-cloud.com/en
https://www.stackit.de/en/
I'd love to go with Hetzner (reliable for decades, well known etc), which has almost everything I need in their cloud offering, except an AWS RDS equivalent. OpenStack is probably worth a look!
Sounds naive I guess, but my tech choices are pretty heavily biased towards "can I quickly find someone affordable to work on it?". Makes the market leader the obvious choice, quite often. And that's currently usually a US company.
Hetzner is great. I've used their services for some time and always had a great experience.
Is it possible to fully self-host the Atlassian suite with no external connectivity nowadays?
No, but it's an Australian company.
Look into Scaleway!
If it makes you feel any better, that trust was very low to begin with.
I for one welcome our new overlords, they're gonna make our lives so much better at some point we're gonna have to ask them to stop winning!
/s
I will only bend my knee to a Pizza Overlord. (I've heard they will have a stuffed crust and extra cheese, at no extra cost!) All they require is I give up most of my freedoms and stop any critical thinking.
Who needs critical thinking when you have stuffed crust!
What I'm astounded by is how Musk/DOGE haven't been stopped, sued or even arrested. Isn't this interfering with the proper functioning of government, or vandalism, or gross negligence, some other illegal act?
They are most definitely being sued: https://www.justsecurity.org/107087/tracker-litigation-legal...
Not an expert on law, but isn't there some mechanism to get policemen to stop DOGE while he's being sued? Like I imagine if I started taking down traffic lights the police would stop me then ask questions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_crisis
I think that's the question on everyones minds. A judge has to order it though, which would trigger a direct confrontation between law enforcement divisions.
They could also order assets frozen or something though (I think?) which I don't understand why they don't do.
I dunno, if there were like 30 of you all wearing orange vests and had relevant department of transportation stickers on actual work pickup trucks I think you might be able to get away with it as long as you threw some cones to dead-end one way of the intersection.
Here's an informative Congressional Research Service article on Enforcement of Court Orders Against the Executive Branch.[1]
TLDR; courts issue TRO (temporary restraining order), preliminary injunction, or permanent injunctions. Normally people comply. If the government does not comply then individuals can be found in civil contempt and the U.S. Marshals would enforce that. Civil contempt can't be pardoned.
There have been some TROs and injunctions issued but also some ignoring of them by the government (and also the supreme court has temporarily stayed at least one). I don't believe any contempt rulings (findings?) have been made, so not yet appropriate for the cops (Marshals).
[1] https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/LSB/LSB11271
Law enforcement is under the executive branch. The judicial branch doesn’t have any physical ability to project force. The courts rely on the executive’s respect to carry out the rule of law.
Yes, court orders. But the officers that enforce them are part of the executive branch, so under Trump. They have been purging all career agents so there’s few left to willingly enforce court orders.
Its a coup.
Vandalism and gross negligence _is_ the function of the government now. Failure is the goal.
I find this an interesting position after the news I just saw that police departments are getting cybertrucks. I know that doesn't technically mean anything but it sure has the optics of police being very unlikely to arrest doge staff.
Given what we've seen so far it wouldn't surprise me if Musk had built a kill switch into these vehicles to stop the police from taking action against him.
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It definitely feels like someone is trying to inflict Project Mayhem on our government. What's the appropriate response here by law enforcement?
The people that see this as an issue are trying to respect the rule of law, while the other half celebrate anything Musk and his assistant Trump do even if it's clearly terrible.
When half the people are fine with it and all branches of government are allied with them, there isn't much the rest of us can do except try to clean up the mess when we get a chance to.
This is what the US electorate voted for.
What Trump has done in 1 month is probably enough to keep courts busy for the next two years. So, get in line.
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Is it? A simple boolean choice and you give total carte blanche to anybody got elected?
I think a good chunk of the voters cast their choice assuming that there would be checks and balances.
Sure there are also many, many trump voters who really wanted exactly this. But they are not the majority of the people.
A winner takes it all system, where some votes are worth much more depending on where you live, isn't a very democratic system.
It may be an acceptable compromise if the two alternative options weren't so extremely unpopular with the other side. That's why the checks and balances are required.
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If they are, then they aren't paying enough attention, or are spectacularly ignorant about how dangerous all of this is.
Please read more carefully what I wrote. Most trump voters may well he on board but that doesn't mean that most of the overall voters are.
A fraction of people who voted for Trump thought he would be like Trump 1.0 and just wanted to stop the woke drift of the democrats and/or didn't feel represented by a non-white+woman president.
We can debate how small that fraction is but it likely affected the election results.
I did read. I think the fraction you are mentioning is quite small if it exists at all. Elon was the reason for a vast majority of the people I know voting for him - it's not even close
I think you may be the one in a bubble.
I don't think the average conservative grandma is really in favour of the chaos that Elon is unleashing.
The only reasons they voted for Trump is that they thought they were against total debauchery of the left and the trans activism and whatnot.
If that grandma could choose between an old school conservative and these clowns she will choose the old school conservatives.
Yes it's a winner take all system, yes that's how it works. But don't use that to justify that whatever the winner does is what all people actually wanted because it's just not true.
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Because NIH has been targeted by DOGE, keep up
Because they have literally dismantled several government agencies, took down websites and removed useful databases from several others?
because those idiots fired the people who were keeping these dns servers alive.
Because they’ve been gutting public institutions for an entire month now? Is this a serious question and you live under a rock, or are you a troll?
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I will go out on a (small) limb here and note that it really looks like the intention of this submission is is to associate a technical issue with DOGE and find a friendly audience to further a point. Normally a DNS issue of a government site would not be news. Since the submission does not give any evidence or fact, it is lazy in that respect. And if indeed it had an unstated motive (my small limb), you could also say it’s disingenuous and brigading. Am I wrong? I would be happy to stand corrected.
I submitted this post and can guarantee that it was not my intention to associate this technical issue with DOGE. Quite the opposite: both in this thread and on Bluesky (where a lot of people blame DOGE for 'shutting down PubMed'), I have advocated for Hanlon's razor. My aim was to document that this was just a DNS problem, and to suggest a workaround to affected people.
I actually find it a little bit sad that the DOGE angle is so prominent in this thread.
Thank you for clarifying!
well, it looks like Elon's teenage boys fired the wrong people :)
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Why are people assuming this was done intentionally? Is there more info somewhere describing the outage? I would typically assume that there’s some error or intentional crash.
I would believe it was an accident or bug if it was any other administration under any other circumstance. Given the vandalism that’s already been committed against basic U.S. government functions, I have to conclude it’s malice until proven otherwise.
I hope you’re proven wrong.
I suppose the good news is that there’s no report that this is malicious and it’s all just assumptions. That makes me happier than if there was some intentional shutdown.
And fortunately, pubmed is up and running as of 822amEST
It is certainly intentionally that NCBI is miraculously down for no real reason. But usually when the political debates are heated it happens more often. What one can observe now is just funny nothing of unhappy political activists.
As for me, I believe it not only because of the current administration per se, but because it's basically same as how the usaid.gov shutdown happened.
It is a DNS issue. Try and change which net you are using. If you are on wifi at home try your cell, however if your home network and cell provider are the same that wont help. A solution is to change which DNS you are using. Its a bit nerdy but actually very easy. Do a search on "change which DNS you are using for browsing" On your computer you can add following to your hosts file located in C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc add this 156.40.212.210 nih.gov 96.17.96.9 www.nih.gov 34.107.134.59 pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov 130.14.250.10 ftp.wip.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov 130.14.250.10 ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov 130.14.29.110 blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Apologies in advance if this is too off topic, it’s something that has been bugging me for a while and I wanted to mention it somewhere.
I occasionally use the Unifi Wifiman app to quickly test my network, even though I don’t use Unifi gear.
One reason I like it is as soon as you open the app you see a bunch of latency metrics for various domains.
X is one of the default test domains. I don’t know when this happened but x.com does not seem to be running anycast in Australia anymore, I get 110ms latency to x (for many this would be 130 to 160 or higher, my provider uses premium transit). A traceroute shows the server I am hitting is in Japan.
Why? This is highly irregular, I can’t imagine any other major website not having a POP in Australia.