CVE Foundation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43704430
Replacing CVE - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43708409
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kateoflahertyuk/2025/04/16/cve-...
My guess indefinitely.
DOGE might be a bunch of idiots, but in the entire DOD, there are non-idiots.
It’s worth noting that MITRE is a DoD contractor (with minor contracts from other agencies like this one). Having the CVE program operated by a company funded by the U.S. military raises valid concerns about conflicts of interest—especially in an ecosystem that depends on neutrality and global trust.
You can read a congressional report by the CRS describing FFRDCs and their role here: https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R44629.
As an example, a CNA like Mozilla, Apple, or Microsoft is unlikely to disclose vulnerability data via CVE until they have remediated the issue or have public guidance, and their embargo processes are likely separate from CVE publication.
In peacetime, I think everyone is generally alright with something centralized like the CVE database.
But in what increasingly seems like the lead-up to wartime... I'm hesitant to trust a CVE database operated or funded unilaterally by a single government — or even multilaterally, if the governments are all ones that all would end up on the same side of a hot war.
(Why? Strategic censorship of reports while the DB's patron takes advantage of the exploit, for one. Such a database becoming a high-priority cyberwar target, for another. Strategic wasting of enemy cybersecurity resources with false announcements, for a third.)
IMHO, the ideal form for the organization managing CVE, is one analogous to IANA and its Regional Internet Registries (RIRs).
IANA slices up the keyspace of IPs to assign to RIRs, and arbitrates disputes — but both at such a high level that their work is effectively in a de-facto state of "done until something comes up". The RIRs do all the actual everyday work.
This means that in a hot war that different RIRs end up on opposing sides of, where at least some of the RIRs can no longer trust the ownership of IANA to act in their best interests, the RIRs can just ignore IANA for a while, and keep on doing their own thing (managing allocations from their previously-agreed parts of the IP keyspace), and everything will still work.
And RIRs that control parts of IP space contended over by opposed states? They can just be split up, under obvious rules (every current allocation goes to the sub-RIR associated with the state that controls the gov/mil/corp/org entity currently holding that allocation.)
That's not the case with the CVE database under its current ownership. There's no established way to namespace it, no obvious way to split it up and keep it all working.
And I think that this problem would be obvious to the DoD. Which is precisely why paying to host a single-source-of-truth CVE database loses its lustre when that same DoD is aware that such a split might soon have to happen.
---
† I dislike the term "4D chess", because it implies one chess master who's really good at predicting non-obvious outcomes — rather than an entire military-industrial-complex acting as "see something, say something" inputs to an intelligence apparatus that does a lot of hard work and simulation analyzing potential outcomes, to produce easily-digested suggestions and action items. There just needs to be one guy in the Pentagon / the military / wherever, who realized this and sent a (classified MILNET) email about it.
Work on supply chain security has lead to the introduction of standardized SBOMs, as an artifact required by some large customers to accompany software binaries. It should be possible to associate each software binary CVE with a vendor SBOM and organization country code. Large multinationals might have geo-specific binaries to confirm with regional regulations like the EU CRA.
Where do you get that from?
I've seen no sign of long-term goals, much less any mechanisms being put in place for follow-through on those goals.
It seems like people keep making the mistake of believing there's a detailed plan, while all evidence tells us there isn't. I guess it's the normal human tendency to see order in the chaos.
Separate from whether we support this or not:
Trump is doing—or promising to do—exactly what he said he would. We can disagree with the policies, but it’s not accurate to say he or his team are directionless or incompetent. They have a coherent (if controversial) agenda.
So rather than dismissing them as clueless or idiots, it’s more productive to debate this:
- Why is outsourcing CVE program to private consortia a bad idea?
- Could a model exist where a private consortium is supported by federal grants, but maintains accountability and public interest safeguards?
Edit: good lord people I’m not defending Trump I’m saying he lies about everything including that he lied and said he wasn’t going to do project 2025. Read the post I’m responding to!
Project 2025 is 42% complete, 3 months in.
* He said he'd end the war in a day.
* He said he had a better health care plan.
* He said he'd drop the price of eggs.
* ...
* He said lots of things that were not true.His exact quote is: "I have nothing to do with Project 2025." Meaning sure - he did not write it. I doubt he read it - it is 900+ pages long document :-)
Anyway, he might fooled some people but I doubt - my understanding was that he is going to follow Project 2025. It is good time to rewatch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYwqpx6lp_s
I'm responding to someone who said Trump is doing what he SAID he would do, and that is all I intended to correct.
So you're making two immediately contradictory claims that Trump is doing what he said he would, and is following the project 2025 plan. That's not coherent.
You're suggesting a privatization plan exists, and want to debate its merits, but I see no sign such a plan is being adopted. E.g. who is enacting the plan? When is the comment period? Who do we send our feedback to? You may have a plan, but what does that have to do with the people in charge? If it's not their plan it doesn't matter one bit. Despite your assurances, I see no sign they aren't acting without a plan (or, as you put, as clueless idiots).
He didn’t convincingly reject it, though, and his distancing was only convincing to people who were looking for an excuse to ignore it with the way he pretended not to know the people behind it when 31 of the 38 authors were members of his first administration, his campaign was in close contact throughout, and he certainly didn’t put much effort into rejecting specific policy proposals.
I think this is a case where different audiences got different messages. The hardcore base knew he was lying since it had all of their red meat issues, informed Democrats knew he was lying because actions speak louder than vague denials (e.g. if you don’t agree with someone’s policies, you wouldn’t let them have a role in your campaign and you’d be able to say what you’d do differently), but he gave the media and casual voters just enough to make it harder for Biden/Harris to land attacks which we now know were fully accurate.
Well, it's obvious to some us, anyway.
- deliberately following Project 2025 to the letter, or
- completely ignorant of Project 2025 and not doing what it says
...when it seems very likely that the truth is somewhere between.
Trump himself is doing things the way he always does: in a mixture of long-standing bigotry and idiocy, his own whims, and whatever someone said to him 10 minutes ago (or he saw on Fox & Friends, or whatever).
His administration is heavily populated with people who either helped write Project 2025 or are close with those who did.
DOGE is only loosely connected with the latter, and it's DOGE that has been instrumental in wrecking federal agencies—and while that destruction largely aligns with Project 2025's goals, it's not clear to me that they're specifically following its playbook. Rather, I think they're doing things their own way with high-level guidance from the people who care about Project 2025. It's very possible that their goals could end up conflicting, depending on what Musk wants.
Edit to add: It's also true that Trump said he knew nothing about Project 2025. Whether or not this is true, he said it during the campaign, when Project 2025 had just been widely reported on as a negative thing. I don't think we can read much into Trump's campaign statements intended to publicly distance himself from something he sees as unpopular.
While MITRE does have contracts with DoD (and many other agencies across the federal government as part of the FFRDCs they operate), they are not the same as a stereotypical DoD contractor as their non-profit status motivates them to work in the public interest.
But now that CVEs form the basis of a very lucrative ~$16b/year industry[0], wouldn't it make sense to let those companies take over?
Privatizing the Internet enabled much more innovation than if it had stayed govt-funded.
0: https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/security...
It’s a stretch to describe it as an arm of the government.
There's flaws with every approach, but I much prefer the approach where this sort of thing is treated as a public good, rather than as yet another soon-to-be walled garden.
At that same time, though, I worked for a contractor that I do believe saved states money compared to doing things in-house. The work we did really required specialists. But no one state had enough of the work to keep one busy all year. So sharing a pool of people to do the work among many states meant there was room for both saving the states money and allowing some profit for the company.
The idea that you can just blanket assume that private industry is inherently more efficient than public works really needs to die. There doesn't seem to be any more evidence to support it than there is to support the idea that it's inherently less efficient. Life just isn't that simple. It's all case by case.
But serious question -- what is the difference these days anyways? Our entire government is effectively privatized anyways from the local level up to the federal. We rely on contractors for almost everything that matters. We just maintain this facade that they are not privatized.
Just for the most ready to hand example for me, PG&E in SF vs public electricity utilities on the peninsula - the privatized electricity costs twice as much per kWh - and of course it does because the PG&E CEO needs to make $17M from somewhere, the share price needs to go up etc. the rich need to skim from the top, that makes the cost higher.
If you have an essential industry the cynical play is to privatize to save cost, then do a bad job and then effectively make your losses public through bail-outs while still making profit.
No, the basic premise of privatization is that, assuming the product or service has multiple potential customers, private industry can operate at scale which, alongside competition from other companies, drives down the price and the government can purchase it "off the shelf" at the prevailing commercial rate. Those assumptions don't always hold, utilities being a great example of this, but it's not inherently blind or naive to consider privatizing some components of government function. We don't expect the government to operate its own vehicle assembly lines even if the government needs cars; they just go buy one from Ford or GM.
I'm no expert, but I'd guess that these factors are more likely to line up in manufacturing and construction, or even R&D, than they are for things like maintenance of specialized IT systems or administration of services.
The government often acts like it has infinite money. Sure, they'll make a lot of noise about the national debt, but it's all just about getting votes.
I expect privatization to be a way for a politician to stuff their pockets. They'll either buy their stock before the large government contract is announced, or the corporation will kick some money back in the form of campaign contributions, or find some way to just give cash directly.
Nobody ever gets charged with insider trading because everyone that would be involved in that is in on it as well.
Or maybe I'm just cynical.
For your question, the difference is if a government spend succeeds, it should lead to more things that the people can do. If a private company succeeds, it largely funds just the company.
And, ideally, it should be fine that both the government/nation gets benefits while rewarding successful contractors. Nothing wrong with that.
This is hilariously viewable with Musk. People love to point out how he risked so much on Tesla. Ignoring all of the capital that the government risked in the same venture.
To add a wrench to both "sides" some of the most effective have been state/federal-owned /state/federal controlled corporations -- or generally, arrangements where you still maintain capitalistic economic incentives and drivers, but have government oversight and (effective) regulation. I think everyone would that is good, but sometimes it takes different forms.
I took your specific claim to be privatization of government functions having many success stories. I'm still curious which ones you have in mind, but would more largely be interested in studies on this. Nothing wrong with knowing the wrenches in there.
Beside that, though, I was trying to engage your question. The difference is if growth is privatized into a few, or if it is more broadly available. With a large agreement from me that a mixture of both -- your wrench, effectively -- is fine. Good even.
The difference is the government and public entities like mayoral offices or parliaments get to decide how the entity (doing the contracting) is run and approve costs, and the entity is under no obligation to return a profit.
...Yep, we're done as a democracy. Pack it up, boys.
Edit: I know it is doom and gloom but the CVE program could easily delay information and leave holes on purpose.
I've been playing recently with putting [fixed] at the end of the original title to indicate this sort of state change to the reader. Not sure if that's the best way, nor if the situation has genuinely been fixed or not, but I guess it's better than nothing. Swapping out the article and title would probably be too much of a rug pull on the existing thread.
NIH.gov DNS servers down, making PubMed, BLAST, etc. unreachable [fixed] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43229201 - March 2025 (385 comments)
Mozilla site down due to "overdue hosting payments" [fixed] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43226089 - March 2025 (102 comments)
Ask HN: Stripe Atlas messed up my 83B election what do I do? [fixed] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40825802 - June 2024 (3 comments)
The contract expired today, but had an option period through March of 2026. DHS just needed to exercise the option.
Edit: Note the contract ended today April 16 - so performance would stop midnight tonight if the option wasn't exercised. Government contracts routinely go down to the wire like this, and often are late getting exercised. Why the uproar over this one? Did CISA signal to MITRE that they weren't going to exercise the option?
An internal letter sent to CVE board members was making the rounds yesterday warning the current contract ("contracting pathway") would expire. The letter was authenticated by Brian Krebs[0]. Once Krebs authenticated the letter, people more or less assumed CISA was pulling funding, at least based on the infosec social media posts I saw.
CISA officials responded to multiple media inquiries (including the OP) with a statement that more directly said the contract would expire:
Although CISA’s contract with the MITRE Corporation will lapse after April 16, we are urgently working to mitigate impact and to maintain CVE services on which global stakeholders rely.[1]
1 - https://www.csoonline.com/article/3963190/cve-program-faces-...
> It’s unclear what led to DHS’s decision to end the contract after 25 years
and then suddenly it gets extended. What does it have to do with DOGE?
0 - https://virginiabusiness.com/nova-govcon-firm-mitre-to-lay-o...
1 - https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/11/doge-axes-cisa-red-team-st...
What was I thinking?
Or that the people responsible for renewing the contract were previously fired without enough notice to effect an orderly transition of work.
Which seems par for DOGE's hamfisted approach.
* The group is question (DOGE) is tasked with cutting spending deemed superfluous or wasteful.
* The group in question is actively cutting spending at the agency in question (CISA)
* The group in question is actively cutting spending with the vendor in question (MITRE)
* The leader of the group in question (Elon Musk) has said, more or less explicitly, that they have a bias more towards cutting spending and less towards getting the spending cuts right. They expect mistakes to be made. (If you want to dispute or nitpick this, I'll link you to the video where he laughs about cutting ebola prevention funding.)
* The boss of the group in question (Trump) really doesn't like CISA. See: the Chris Krebs debacle.
So, that's what I'm doing. What are you doing? It seems to me that you are trying to fit the available facts to your preferred narrative, instead of the other way around. And what does the contract having existed for 25 years have to do with anything? DOGE has admitted to cutting programs that have been funded for far longer. It is completely irrelevant.
Yes, DOGE is slashing budgets. Yes, CISA and MITRE took hits. That’s all true. And still doesn’t prove DOGE made the call to let the CVE contract lapse and then magically reverse it within hours. If this was a top-down DOGE directive, why the immediate reversal? Did DOGE suddenly change its mind? Or is it more likely that DHS made a blunder, got backlash, and scrambled to fix it? You’re calling your chain of assumptions a "reasonable inference" but here’s what it actually is: guilt by proximity. DOGE cuts here, DOGE cuts there, and now suddenly every erratic government decision is DOGE’s fault? That’s lazy logic.
The fact that the contract lasted 25 years _is_ relevant. It shows that this wasn't some minor side project. CVE is foundational infrastructure. You don’t accidentally let something like that expire unless someone either massively screwed up or there was serious internal confusion.
So no, I’m not ignoring the facts. I’m refusing to pretend correlation equals causation just because it fits the narrative everyone loves right now: "blame DOGE for everything". It’s easy, it’s trendy, and it completely bypasses deeper institutional dynamics.
What am I doing? I’m resisting the urge to jump on that bandwagon. You should try it.
From the man himself:
“We will make mistakes. We won’t be perfect. But when we make a mistake, we’ll fix it very quickly,” Musk, a Trump-appointed special government employee, said Wednesday in defense of his group’s haphazard cuts while looming over the Cabinet table. “So for example with USAID, one of the things we accidentally canceled—very briefly—was Ebola prevention."[0]
See previous quote about ebola funding, another long-term government program.
Look, if you want to play this game where because a DOGE spokesperson hasn't directly come out and said "yep, it was us", then I'll point you back to my original post: I said it was reasonable to assume, not that it was proven fact.
But, if you look at the totality of this situation and think 'nope. no way DOGE was involved. This is just people "blaming DOGE for everything"'. Fine. You do you. I don't think there is any point in continuing this conversation.
0 - https://newrepublic.com/post/192082/elon-musk-fact-check-dog...
I wonder what level of compartmentalisation inside DHS means they didn't see this as having sufficient downsides?
I ask this, because I don't think anyone in the subject matter specialist space would have made a strong case "kill it, we don't need this" and I am sure if asked would have made a strong case "CRISSAKE WE NEED THIS DONT TOUCH IT" -But I could believe senior finance would do their own research (tm) and mis-understand what they saw in how other people work with CVE, and who funds it.
This was not a carefully-weighed decision based on a cost-benefit analysis. This was a political order, consistent with the administration's policy of "cut everything, recklessly, indiscriminately."
In reality, this entire process is insanity. We've had examples of government spending overhaul in the past - early(?) 90s - both sides worked together, cut lots of spending across programs, downsized tens of thousands of federal workers, and balanced a budget, to the point where we had a surplus. It was tough, took time, wasn't perfect, but was deliberated and debated and far far far more open and transparent than all this. But their goal was actually improving government (even if that meant reducing some areas). The current 'leadership' goal is to dismantle/destroy as much as possible, as this is led by people who think government in general should not exist.
Mostly discriminately, tbh.
If I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt (which I hate), it's a shotgun approach; cut things relentlessly and see what falls apart. Chaos engineering applied to a country and / or the world.
Perceived, not actual, because spreading lies and misinformation is what makes the most money for the ad sellers that make up 90% of our industry.
“Wunderkind” mispronounced as “Wonder Kid” is a running joke in that show.
https://www.reddit.com/r/TedLasso/comments/132rw9v/what_the_...
Other example includes: Endgegner (final boss) or Endlösung (final solution)
I would suggest to avoid such terms.
The parallels to Nazi Germany's striking but impractical weapons seemed intended every time I heard or read Wunderwaffe in English.
Endgegner originates from Endlösung and while it indeed often is used without thought, the question if it should be used lightly.
I did not know about this, thanks for die Vorwarnung. In context, I'd assume "ultimate enemy" (Gegner=opponent) as "final boss" sounds videogame.
Either the philosophers or the mathematicians/physicists likely coined them.
https://www.openculture.com/2016/12/when-ayn-rand-collected-...
One of her wonderful worldviews was to rejects altruism as a moral imperative, arguing that individuals should live for their own rational self-interest. Social security, based on the idea of supporting others, contradicts this principle.
Which means anyone whose wisdom matches their self-interest is going to understand that different things have very different efficiencies at different scales.
And some things happen to be dramatically more efficient/person and more effective, the larger the scale they can be coordinated at.
This exactly. All of these people who profess to believe in objectivism could easily move to a failed state and do anything they want to with zero government intervention. But they don't do that. They want all of the benefits of a working government with none of the things required to actually create a working government.
This position was already pointed out by Plato (in the Gorgias IIRC) as being inconsistent. Political systems are made up by people - if a society, in particular a democratic one, has certain systems in place, then this is probably because it was (at least believed to be) in the people's self interest.
[0] https://www.404media.co/anyone-can-push-updates-to-the-doge-...
[1] https://www.npr.org/2025/04/15/nx-s1-5355895/doge-musk-nlrb-...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-03-14/doge-staf...
The DOGE crew are incompetent. Witness their firing of all the people who look after the nuclear stockpile and Ebola research.
Unfortunately “capitalism” has two quite different meanings. Which are rarely clarified in use.
Capitalism with a big C, a too common overarching ideology, gets bent to mean whatever the greedy, unethical and rich want it to mean so they can get more money.
But small c capitalism, evolving from both practical and ethical foundations, is a system so useful it has multiplied the benefits of civilization. But it is just one such system.
It can’t do everything, it needs other independent systems (justice, dispute resolution, rules of clarity, risk & trust limiting systems, for starters) to work, and extending it to places it doesn’t work causes great harm.
(Like when perversely applied to those enabling systems, in big C form, as is happening now.)
It's almost as if no economic, social, or political system known to mankind will stand up for long under a determined onslaught of corruption.
Indeed.
Most of vulns will go unaddressed because company like palantir will most likely want only really good vulns like 0-click RCE.
When the citizens realise this, the structures to clamp down any revolution will be in place.
"CVE" is trademarked and emphasized (e.g. included in the shorthand notations, e.g. CVE-2014-0160), explicitly to prevent other groups from using "CVE" in a way that causes confusion in the marketplace. And yes, this is the same reason trademarks exist for commercial purposes.
But imagine if Microsoft could issue CVEs against Apple ... or OpenAI against Anthropic, etc.
The label "CVE" has to have a known authority to be useful. And the only way to ensure that is to trademark it. See also: "Linux™".
"We are paying MITRE how much? Bigballs and co will write a better ststem in 1 week and have it integrated with xAI. How hard could it be? Send out a first draft of an xAI contract to our DHS contact"
The National Vulnerability Database has been unable to keep up with the flow of CVEs for over a year now:
- https://anchore.com/blog/national-vulnerability-database-opa...
- https://www.cyberreport.io/news/cve-backlog-update-the-nvd-s...
- https://www.ibm.com/think/insights/cve-backlog-update-nvd-st...
- and many, many, many others
It has been a complete disaster for months. At this point, perhaps the thinking is to radically change approaches?
If there had been a replacement or reform plan for even one single iota of the things this admin has cut, I might give them the benefit of the doubt. But there's not. It's just kill, kill, kill.
All of this is criminal behavior on the the current regime.
There is no rhyme or reason to what gets cut, other than someone under pressure to hit KPIs (dollars cut) was desperately searching for things that looked easy to cancel.
This is happening everywhere the federal government touches. Most people aren't aware of it until they come around and pull the rug on something that intersects with your own life.
Even my die-hard Republican distant relatives are suddenly shocked because programs they benefited from are being cut. They thought they voted for something different.
Like what exactly? I mean the guy ran on cutting the budget by 2 trillion. In his last term he gave tax breaks yo the rich. Where did they think the cuts were coming from?
He ran very hard on raising tarrifs. Which demonstrably raise prices (thats literally their goal.) But now people claim "I didn't vote for this."
In truth they voted for him because he was the Republican on offer and they're die-hard Republican. The Republican party has made no secret of its agenda for decades.
I get it, people are good at cognitive dissonance. But this is the place for blunt truth. They voted for this. I'm not letting Republicans got off the hook here. They voted for this.
Just like to my Republican friends who are upset that CVE is cut. You voted for this. The general public benefit from CVE even though they dont know it exists. Just like you benefitted from dozens of other programs you didn't know existed, but have also been cut.
That's the problem with cuts. They ultimately end up hurting everyone.
Now clearly there's some fat that could be trimmed. Companies do it all the time. Done well its good. Swinging a hatchet in a crowded elevator does not seem like "Done well".
This is actually simply not true. The Republican party before the Tea Party looked nothing at all like this. Trump won the presidency last year riding a wave of distinctly not-your-typical-Republican lower class voters. As he rose the old guard Republican establishment formed the anti-Trump wing of the party until they were forced out one by one.
To put some numbers to this: Bush won the upper income brackets by 5+ points in 2000, with a lead that widened as you went up the income ladder. Trump lost the equivalent brackets in 2024 by 5+ points, a 10 point swing away from what Bush won them by. The lower brackets are even more stark, with a whopping 18-point swing towards Trump in the $30k-$50k bracket (inflation adjusted to $15k-$30k).
These numbers show that Trump is not a Republican in the George W Bush sense and he's certainly not a Republican in the Ronald Reagan sense. He's a populist and won on a populist agenda by putting together a coalition of rabid social conservatives (who probably really did go Bush in 2000) and poor people (who largely did not).
Starve the beast is older than the Tea Party.[1]
Obamacare and communism are along the same axis too, but the Republicans who claimed they were the same thing were obviously wrong.
I would agree he's not George Bush, much less Ronald Reagan. Nevertheless those who voted for Bush and Reagan also voted for Trump.
This has been "decades" in the making in the sense that since Obama was elected (in 2008), Republicans have embraced racism at the heart of their populist message. That swing rightward was made palatable to center republicans with a woman democratic candidate in 2016 (one not terribly well liked in democratic circles) and a black woman candidate in 2024.
While racism, and misogyny gather a bunch of votes, long-term distrust of institutions is sown, and fostered. Republican policy becomes protecting white guys, and especially old, rich, white guys.
Reagan was popular and competent, and worked for the good of America. Today's president is nothing like him, but wins because a bunch of people "vote Republican".
There's a component of that, but it's not the primary cause. A lot of former Republicans stopped voting Republican with Trump, including a lot of old rich white guys, and a lot of the current Republican voters didn't vote for Bush. He wins because of the new wave of voters that counterbalanced the flight of the educated core of the Republican establishment.
When someone hands you a pencil, you don't wonder what variety of tree the wood came from, or what paint chemistry was used for the coating. It's a pencil. You might have broad opinions on whether the one in your hand is comfortable to use, and sharp - but you leave the details to the pencil makers.
About 70% of the population engage with politics the same way: Leave the details to the people who do this stuff for a living.
Do they expect to be disappointed? Sure, but everyone who engages with politics expects to be disappointed.
If people in the US aren't starting to notice what Musk/Trump are doing it will bode very poorly for the future of the US.
> Do they expect to be disappointed?
Aurornis said their relatives were shocked.
They voted for the leopards to eat other people’s faces, not their’s.
You'd think that lessons would incite learning but that has never seemed to be the case throughout history.
This isn't speculation or hyperbole, it's specifically laid out in their published plans: By hobbling or outright eliminating federal agencies responsible for executing the laws passed by Congress, the administration can circumvent the democratic process and impose their extreme vision of limited government on the country, regardless of popular support.
The U.S. system of government relies on established norms as much as it does law. Conservatives realized that they can ignore precedent with impunity if they had an executive willing to do so. They then spelled out exactly how, and are now enacting that plan.
Then SCOTUS's decisions last summer turbo boosted their agenda. The ruling that only Congress can hold the President legally accountable essentially means executive power is unchecked if the legislature is unwilling or unable to Impeach and convict. The President can now confidently ignore the law and judicial orders with a veneer of legality. And this is what he's doing.
(The fact that all this just so happens to benefit Russia after their decade long campaign to destabilize their opponents in the West is a topic for speculation.)
DOGE is about permanently altering how our country works modeled on the right wing worldview, plain and simple. Since that's their overall goal, they're not concerned where they swing the wrecking ball - it's all going to get destroyed eventually.
And it's also happily breaking the law. The Executive doesn't legally have the power to allocate resources (or not), not to mention the power to arbitrarily suspend due process.
You make it sound like poor DOGE employees are being forced to do this on this kind of schedule, which definitely isn't the impression I got. They're all a bunch of incompetent overconfident weirdos who think they know better and what to do. Is there any pressure to do anything quickly?
And the US federal budget is quite easy to trim. E.g. remove an aircraft carrier from the planned construction pipeline and you've saved $15 billion with no actual ramifications.
> The NSC [National Security Council] staff will need to consolidate the functions of both the NSC and the Homeland Security Council (HSC), incorporate the recently established Office of the National Cyber Director, and evaluate the required regional and functional directorates.
> Given the aforementioned prerequisites, the NSC should be properly resourced with sufficient policy professionals, and the NSA should prioritize staffing the vast majority of NSC directorates with aligned political appointees and trusted career officials. - Project 2025, pg 52.
> ... History shows that an unsupervised NSC staff can stray from its statutory role and adversely affect a President and his policies. Moreover, while the NSC should be fully incorporated into the White House, it should also be allowed to do its job without the impediment of dually hatted staff that report to other offices. - Project 2025, pg 53.
The goal is to build up a political organisation to use as a weapon, and to scrap the rest - as a legal excuse to say that the political appointments will be necessary.
Out of curiosity, which programs? And is this enough to change their opinion about Trump, or do they still think it'll be worth it?
Come on, are you living under a rock right now? There are massive indiscriminate funding cuts to anything that Elon/Doge deems to be "fraud", and they explicitly do not care about the collateral damage.
This is not about the DHS or "compartmentalization". This is just a politician running amok and having real consequences.
Anything that weakens the US or puts our cybersecurity in a place that Russia can exfiltrate data will happen. This is not about the US needing anything and it's silly to think otherwise. See also the NLRB whistleblower and the security backdoors that DOGE demanded to allow data exfiltration and the subsequent death threats to the whistle blower.
You mindset is behind the times and needs to adjust to a, frankly, insane current reality.
Your comment embraces and spreads the powerlessness they want you to feel and spread.
Of course you can stop them - like any other negotiation in life, especially non-friendly ones, you need to make it in Trump's interest either by carrot or stick. Trump has interests; identify them and identify your power in those regards ('power and interest' is the term), and use it.
Also, stop helping them make DOGE the scapegoat. It's Trump.
I'm going to be to the point here, if you guys over there don't start to heavily push and organise, and I said it already, you're one Reichstag fire away from something very bad, and from my point of view, there is probably one kristallnacht pending in the mix.
This is not a hyperbole and if someone wonders why this has relevance to the discussions, in this case most of the people around here are blue team, and it does feel like the red team has already taken anything that wasn't attached and now taking the time to take what's bolted on...
I guess the silver lining of all this, is in their hubris, they forgot the bread and games motto, so they're might still be a chance to turn things around somewhat... But the window is closing at an impressive speed.
The rest of the world is mostly against Trump.
Forget about them feeling sorry for anyone but themselves. They will feel resentful and as if they were being treated unfairly even when actual clear criminal investigation happens.
Why are you protecting Trump, the President, from responsibility?
What leverage do you have for the DOGE boys? What power? Resigning? Because on the Defense side of the government the best leverage that some teams have found is mass resignation, meaning that nothing happens.
There is no negotiating with bullies, it merely breeds more concessions.
DOGE follows Trump's direction and acts on his behalf, as you must know. They make a big deal out of DOGE so Trump's name is less attached to these actions. Then they can take much of the blame with them when they go away, with Trump and the GOP blaming them for 'excesses'.
> Trump is not going to negotiate anything here, that's ridiculous.
> What leverage do you have for the DOGE boys?
You don't understand how negotiations work. Everyone has interests, strengths and weaknesses, and power. You need to make it in Trump's interest to keep the CVE program.
Everyone saying they are helpless, and that anything else is ridiculous, are panicking. Very unfortunately - dangerously - many people legitimize the panic. It's so normalized that it's "ridiculous" not to panic.
Every day you continue this behavior, you fall further and further behind and lead others in that direction. Will you wake up in time?
The amount of disrespect you have shown for someone that is just telling you 99% of federal workers have absolutely no leverage says a lot.
That's an assertion without any any argument. It means nothing.
> The amount of disrespect you have shown for someone that is just telling you 99% of federal workers have absolutely no leverage says a lot.
What does it say? Why is such a person somehow special?
I would not dare not mention the revolutions in England and in France. And before that some Greece city states, and definitely Rome. The US declaration of independence is just another point.
This guy is ~80 years old and bragged about "person, woman, man, camera, TV." He recently got into a Tesler and exclaimed "everything's computer!" Have you seen the way his aids explain executive orders to him (like a child) before he signs them?
He doesn't have the foggiest notion of comprehension of what the CVE program is, or how it would benefit him. Unless you're greasing his wheels, it's not going to happen.
one it costs the us and is needed by everyone, so he thinks but paying it someone will pick it up and then the us will be the free loader.
second, he understands that helps he and his pals wash dirty money.
Do you mean things like handsfull of like-minded countries selling t-bonds? No one in the R party has any leverage, and it's not clear that even a few US billionaires could exert any influence.
Do you really think Trump has ever heard of "CVE" or could comprehend them?
it might also be deliberate: that they actually don't think the government should be involved in this sort of thing. after all, someone could be making a profit on this, and that seems to be their highest value. if gov is involved, that makes it a communal effort, and you know what else starts with "commun-"?
yes, those reasons are stupid and ignorant AND intentional.
but is there any evidence against that interpretation?
Yes, there are apparently various ways of profiting from vulnerabilities. The interesting question would be whether any of the regime insiders have a way to profit.
For instance, most people find healthcare middlemen (pharmacy benefit managers, etc) to be grotesque parasites. But to a laissez-faire fundamentalist, they're smart for finding a way to liberate some profit, even laudable.
(Leaving aside that there's plenty of evidence of malice here.)
But, having known about it for a dozen years now, I also find it inadequate alone as a razor without the following caveats/corollaries:
Hubbard's corollary to Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice or stupidity that which can be explained by moderately rational individuals following incentives in a complex system". ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor#Exceptions )
Or (HN) Nerdponx's punchier simplification: "When money is at stake, never attribute to incompetence what could be attributed to greed." ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41066724 )
You can only get into such a position if you've ignored smart people telling you "No". That's malice.
A large amount of things related to Trump fall into that category, and it's important to recognize when you need to instead treat it as a superposition: It is both malice and incompetence, unless the perpetrators decide to plead just one or the other.
That's why the current approach seems to be to axe everything, listen to how much screaming there is, then reinstate only the projects where the screaming is really loud.
The "Musk algorithm" is described in detail, and can be summed up as a "reverse Chesterton's fence"
"If you are not forced to reinstitute 10% of the rules you slashed, you have not slashed enough".
What happens while the 10% are slashed is left as an exercise to the voter.
Hopefully, the cve db will be deemed part of the 10%.
It isn't impossible for a commercially-funded organisation to avoid this kind of capture, but it isn't easy either. My mind immediately jumps to the relationship between the Mozilla Foundation and Google.
Plus the proposed "Foundation for Standards and Metrology (FSM)" to build on NIST, https://democrats-science.house.gov/bills/the-expanding-part...
My concern is that a capture of the administration would become a capture of the entire programme. Looking at the structure, it seems possible that CISA are in a position to prevent any such capture but, given some of the recent positions taken by the US government, we'll need to wait and see how that plays out.
Shouldn't the most powerful country has something like this? Being even in the forefront of it?
The USA was doing cyberprotection against Russia and cyberattacks across the world.
Now suddenly it doesn't need it anymore?
Like just did Russia go away (or has russia won and sits now in the white house)?
I don't understand why the EU wasn't funding it and isn't funding it now. I thought they're united against Russia?
please, stop spreading your weird anti-europe views
It’s a security matter for the EU.
Both countries should pay for the security matter, as they were previously. Stop twisting the other poster’s words.
Your nerd card had been validated for today. Go forth, ethically.* :D
* Oops, I introduced 2 more programming languages, my bad.
For-profit private journaling is working really well for academia!
The scores are mostly useless, I would not care if they disappeared, I do not look at them. I don't really understand why people get so upset about garbage scores though. If a high CVSS score creates a bunch of work for you then your vuln mag process is broken IMO. (Or alternatively, you are in the business of compliance rather than security. If you don't like working in compliance, CVSS scores aren't the root cause of your misery).
Having a central list of "here's a bunch of things with stable IDs that you might or might not care about" is very valuable.
So, most businesses. They all need their ISO/NIST/HIPAA/etc certs.
If you're working in compliance either
A) you're stuck in your compliance job, that sucks, CVSS scores aren't the reason why though.
B) you enjoy compliance.
C) you should change jobs.
a) If you are having to do busywork for compliance reasons, you are either disempowered to push back on bullshit work (case A above, unfortunate, but your job was gonna suck anyway), or it's not really a second order effect, you work in compliance in a meaningful way.
b) Compliance bullshit seems to expand into the space available to it. Nobody thinks CVSS scores are meaningful, the fact that they feed into compliance processes is not the CVSS scores' fault it's the compliance machine just globbing onto random bullshit as its expansion continues. If you took away CVSS scores it feels like it would just glob onto something else instead.
Anyway, in the end I think we aren't disagreeing about that much. I think they're silly, if someone wanted to get rid of them I wouldn't try to defend them at all. I just wouldn'e be the person to push for that.
I expect your field is probably teeming with AI proposals or offers on how to manage vulnerabilities, but that is doubtful the way, because again it is adding complexity, and no classifier is perfect, especially when scanners fail to understand scanned applications and their threat models or environment.
Stop selling external scanners, start simplifying code? This will never work, of course, because security vendors sell the promise of security to those willing to buy it, in the form of add-on products and capabilities.
Empower people to ignore scanner reports without so much red tape? That would never work either, because megacorp wants compliance and reduced liability.
Build secure systems as opposed to cataloging and scoring flaws? That would never work, because building secure systems is hard, nature tends to favor otherwise.
Charge people for adding complexity and credit them for removing complexity? Sadly, there is no way to do that, especially since products must ship and quality is hard to observe, since it is often invisible and only surfaces when things are broken.
Off the top of my head, would be nice to require proof of exploitation, by adding CTF-like capabilities to apps, such that only if the flag is captured do we consider the report real. This places more burden on scanners, in that it is no longer enough to report an outdated library. Requiring some proof of exploitability reduces noise and increases SNR, reducing false positives. Naturally, not all vulnerabilities have working exploits, and scanners can never fully simulate an adversary, so we may get more false negatives, but at least we would not have to waste so much time upgrading pointless modules and breaking applications to appease a false report. So the idea is "here is a dummy asset, show me how you leaked or compromised it". Adding the dummy asset should be cheap, but would force scanners to better simulate an attack.
At the very least, there ought to be a knob to decrease scanner sensitivity.
There are far too many bad actors for us to operate as an industry with no yardstick.
its all just surface-level box-checking. most companies required to get 'penetration tests' just get an overpriced Nessus scan sold as a pentest and that meets their reqs.
Maybe I have a dependency on Foo which has a critical vulnerability in a feature that I don't use. I suppress the warning and all is well. Then two weeks later someone on my team decides to use that feature, not knowing that there's a problem with it. Now we're fucked, and we'll never know because the vulnerability has been suppressed.
Trump must be receiving a lot of emails from companies wanting to fill the void, and I bet the Trumpiest of them all is going to be awarded a contract worth 10x the budget CVE had, and do a much worse job.
What a shame on this current gov. administration, if you can even call it that.
I think the question everyone in this thread should ask is: why is it the government's job to do this, especially given the prior widespread view that they're doing a bad job? Is the software industry so immiserated by poverty that it cannot organize its own distribution of security bulletins? Clearly not: GitHub already runs its own vuln tracking scheme that's better integrated with the tooling we use for open source software. The industry routinely sets up collaborations like standards bodies, information sharing groups and more. And there is as whole ecosystem of security companies to help you understand vulns in your stack.
So there seems nothing specific to CVEs that requires government involvement, but the existence of the tax funded scheme does discourage the creation of competitors that might function better.
But, to CVE or not to CVE ... that is not the question. US deficit spending is out of control. This sort of thing had to happen some day. It's what Europeans in the 2010s called "austerity" and it always makes some people scream but this graph:
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/natio...
... is not sustainable. Up to 1984 overall US debt was stable. Since then its growth rate became dangerous. Debt/GDP ratio is now worse than just after WW2. The federal government is currently spending more on interest than on defense or Medicare:
https://www.crfb.org/blogs/interest-costs-have-nearly-triple...
The US is currently getting its first taste of what parts of Europe started going through in 2008, and unfortunately there's bad news: the cuts you're seeing now are mostly cosmetic. They're what can be done within the current framework of laws, sort of, with lots of bending of the rules and creative interpretations of them and maybe some oversteps. But it's just the start of what's needed. Large scale reform of the laws themselves will be required regardless of whoever wins the next elections.
This is like, exactly the sort of thing that the public sector should be doing. There's no profit incentive for this to happen in the private sector.
I don't disagree with your overall sentiment re: unsustainable debt. But the answer must be reform and taking hard looks at the military budget, not just randomly cutting programs that you disagree with politically.
More like the Clinton approach.
Note that many of these entries start with GHSA not CVE.
Agree that the military budget should face large cuts too, unless I guess a major war breaks out.
The public sector is exactly where you need things that are important to society but don't make money.
At any rate, even if they give it away for altruistic reasons, Microsoft is a sustainable going concern that brings in more than it spends. It can afford charity. The US government isn't and can't.
Because the private sector can't see past their profit motive to the national defense motive.
I suppose more people would be more amenable to these wholesale cuts if the current administration weren't blowing through even more money than before [0]:
> The new Treasury Department data shows a deficit of $1.307 trillion for October through March, the first six months of the fiscal year 2025. And spending is $139 billion more in the first three months of 2025 compared to the same period last year, with borrowing over that period $41 billion higher.
We're currently fighting no wars and yet Trump is proposing a record $1 trillion defense budget [1]:
> “We’re going to be approving a budget, and I’m proud to say, actually, the biggest one we’ve ever done for the military,” he said. “$1 trillion. Nobody has seen anything like it.
And that's before proposed cuts to tax revenue [2]:
> Extending the expiring 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) would decrease federal tax revenue by $4.5 trillion from 2025 through 2034. Long-run GDP would be 1.1 percent higher, offsetting $710 billion, or 16 percent, of the revenue losses.
So this whole "we're just imposing much needed austerity" to justify penny-wise-pound-foolish policies is kind of laughable when the proposed increase to our peacetime defense budget alone wipes out Elon's most recent estimate of DOGE's total savings [3].
[0] https://apnews.com/article/trump-biden-budget-deficit-spendi...
[1] https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2025/04...
[2] https://taxfoundation.org/research/all/federal/trump-tax-cut...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/us/politics/elon-musk-dog...
Elon is a libertarian and has been allowed to go do some spending cuts around the edges. This gets support from Republican members of Congress partly because the USG turns out to be spending a lot of money on highly partisan Democrat projects, but mostly because it's someone else doing the cutting and not them. Even if they know they should be doing it themselves they don't want the crazies trashing their cars, so if some outsider does it for them that's a deal they'll happily take whilst it lasts.
All that said, it's inevitable that the administration would be blowing through more money than before even with DOGE. It's the nature of debt that it compounds. The level of cuts required to even keep the deficit stable would be huge because interest payments are accelerating, and the cuts DOGE are allowed to make are small (even when they go further than they might technically be allowed).
Right now there's just no mainstream support in US politics for serious austerity. There never is in any country, but sometimes the public can be convinced to agree to some amount if politicians do a good job of communicating the deficit problem. The UK in 2010 is an example of that, where the Conservative/Lib Dem alliance was able to convince the public to vote for spending cuts (albeit not as deep as were actually required... but it tided the UK over until the economy started growing again).
Absolutely. And if the headline was "DHS proposes improvements and streamlining to the CVE program" we'd all probably be cheering.
Leaping from "This is Flawed" to "Let's kill This" is a logical fallacy. A flawed security registry is clearly better than no security registry.
In honesty to say "logical fallacy" is spoddy, I advise against for aesthetic reason.
CVE is simply identification of a flaw, not a scoring system.
It's the way it is because there isn't a good alternative. They cannot possibly know every environment that we operate in.
To this day we still have large corporations down playing their issues, and it was way worse 20 years ago.
Why do people do this, to down play all the destruction of the last few months? Seems to be some type of coping mechanism.
All this does is help Putin and other rich grifters.
It's because it's like if someone had forgotten to validate the user's role in an endpoint in a Django app, and someone said that they should have used Rails because it's easier to understand. In reality both are easy enough to understand to be able to do an authorization check, and the framework isn't the issue. So the person suggesting Rails is bikeshedding.
Likewise, if someone made another vulnerability database it would likely have the same issue, and this isn't really the place to solve it. If somehow this does trigger the realization to solve it, then it will be by luck.
April 2024, https://nvd.nist.gov/general/news/nvd-program-transition-ann...
NIST maintains the National Vulnerability Database (NVD).. This is a key piece of the nation’s cybersecurity infrastructure. There is a growing backlog of vulnerabilities.. based on.. an increase in software and, therefore, vulnerabilities, as well as a change in interagency support.. We are also looking into longer-term solutions to this challenge, including the establishment of a consortium of industry, government, and other stakeholder organizations that can collaborate on research to improve the NVD.
> Security and vulnerability handling in software is of ever increasing importance. Recent events have adversely affected many project's ability to identify and ensure these issues are addressed in a timely manner. This is extremely worrying.. Until recently many of us were relying not on the CVE project's data but on the NVD data that added that information.
Five years ago (2019), I helped to organize a presentation by the CERT Director from Carnegie Mellon, who covered the CVE backlog and lack of resources, e.g. many reported vulnerabilities never even receive a CVE number. It has since averaged < 100 views per year, even as the queue increased and funding decreased, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmC65VrnBPI
Edit_1: found a proposed bill, April 2025, https://fedscoop.com/public-private-partnerships-bill-nist-h...
> A bipartisan bill that would establish a nonprofit foundation aimed at boosting private-sector partnerships at the National Institute of Standards and Technology was reintroduced in the House and the Senate.. the proposed foundation structure was described as replicating similar nonprofits that support public-private partnerships at other science agencies.. we encourage a strategy that leverages NIST’s leadership and expertise on standards development, voluntary frameworks, public-private sector collaboration, and international harmonization.. NIST’s funding has been in focus following a budget cut of roughly 12% to $1.46 billion in fiscal year 2024.
Edit_2: is there a shortage of database rows, or people to write a shell script? Why not pre-allocate N CVE IDs for every CNA, while a new plan is worked out? At least one random commercial vendor could foresee the shutdown early enough to reserve CVEs.
> Garrity posted on LinkedIn, “Given the current uncertainty surrounding which services at MITRE or within the CVE Program may be affected, VulnCheck has proactively reserved 1,000 CVEs for 2025,” adding that Vulncheck “will continue to provide CVE assignments to the community in the days and weeks ahead.”
> A coalition of longtime, active CVE Board members have spent the past year developing a strategy to transition CVE to a dedicated, non-profit foundation. The new CVE Foundation will focus solely on continuing the mission of delivering high-quality vulnerability identification and maintaining the integrity and availability of CVE data for defenders worldwide. “CVE, as a cornerstone of the global cybersecurity ecosystem, is too important to be vulnerable itself,” said Kent Landfield, an officer of the Foundation.
MITRE CVE/CWE contract, $29M for 2024-2025, https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_70RCSJ24FR0000018...
The funding appears to have been cut off today, and both of these comments seem to talk about continuing work and how important it is.
Do you mean to say that some form of threat to the NVD has been around for over a year now? Just want to be sure I'm parsing correctly!
May 2024, https://therecord.media/nist-database-backlog-growing-vulnch...
> Moving forward, cybersecurity companies will have to “fill the void” .. NVD said in April [2024] that it is “working to establish a consortium to address challenges in the NVD program and develop improved tools and methods.” .. CISA acknowledged the concerns and outrage of the security community and said it is starting an enrichment effort called “Vulnrichment," which will add much of the information described by Garrity to CVEs.
The second VulnCon event took place last week and no silver bullet has appeared, https://ygreky.com/2025/04/vulncon-2025-impressions/
Vulnerability enrichment was mentioned in many talks. However, most organizations seem to handle it internally. There doesn’t appear to be momentum toward a shared or open source solution – at least not yet.That article is about how the volume of software vulnerabilities are increasing, resulting in difficulty keeping up by the CVE and NVD projects.
Please stop spamming this thread with political spin.
> Since February 2024, the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) National Vulnerability Database (NVD) has encountered delays in processing vulnerabilities.. caused by factors such as software proliferation, budget cuts and changes in support.. NIST, an agency within the United States Commerce Department, saw its budget cut by nearly 12% this year.
People who actually work with CVEs have been posting about this problem on HN for 18 months.
If you still have a cached copy of their original post you should publicly edit your earliest reply with their original quote.
NIST budget was cut 12% in FY 2024 (Oct 2023 - Sep 2024).
An earlier bill to supplement NIST funding has been reintroduced in 2025, https://fedscoop.com/public-private-partnerships-bill-nist-h...
There were 65,000 cases of salmonellosis in the EU in the most recent data I could find (2022). Thats a lower per capita rate than the US, but definitely not zero.
Being 26 times less worried about something translates, at least for most things, for me, to not being worried about it any more.
According to https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11945640/ most of the outbreaks in humans (where exact cause was found) were caused by foreign vegetables.
On other hand countries like Italy find positive samples from 27% of their flocks ( https://efsa.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.2903/j.efsa... ). USA doesn't do testing at that level as far I understand, I only found that 8% of the tested chicken parts have salmonella (https://www.propublica.org/article/salmonella-chicken-usda-f...).
https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/04/15/nx...
https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/04/15/nx...
"The vast majority of chicken processed in the United States is not chilled in chlorine and hasn't been for quite a few years," says Dianna Bourassa, an applied poultry microbiologist at Auburn University, "So that's not the issue."
This is one of those things the government does for the benefit of the whole.
Tragedy of the commons - NVD and the CVE project havr been backlogged and facing funding issues for a couple years now, and most security vendors are either cagey about providing vulns in a timely manner (as it can reduce their own comparative advantage), or try upsell their own alternative risk prioritization scores.
Every company will gladly use NVD and CVE data, but no one wants to subsidize it and help a competitor, especially in an industry as competitive as cybersecurity.
Multi-trillion-dollar companies benefit from and contribute to this system, surely they can spare 0.01% of their revenue to this bit of critical infrastruture?
They would, if we made companies pay their taxes.
Yes, you can also run such a system based on donations. But I personally think that such a system is important enough to be paid for by the government. When you run on donations, there will always be conflicts of interest and the risk of running out of funds.
But yeah, Mitre being a private organization that was paid for by the government was a problem.
Steelmanning is a neologism that serves no purpose other than in-group signaling. There was already a perfectly acceptable term for the same concept, one with more nuance and a rich history: Charitability.
The major difference is that charitability is about treating your interlocutor with respect. Steelmanning is about using one's own intellect to make your interlocutor's argument better than them. Because charitability is based on a concept of mutual respect, if somebody clearly doesn't respect you one iota, then why would you be charitable? Steelmanning tries to divorce the person from the argument, and is ironically both arrogant and naive.
Threat intelligence firm Flashpoint noted in March 2024 it was aware of 100,000 vulnerabilities with no CVE number and consequently no inclusion in NVD. More worryingly, it said that 330 of these vulnerabilities (with no CVE number) had been exploited in the wild.. Since the start of 2024 there have been a total of 6,171 total CVE IDs with only 3,625 being enriched by NVD. That leaves a gap of 2,546 (42%!) IDs.
A funding shortfall and strain isn't a funding cut. And from what I see there was a funding increase.
2025 article claims 30% increase in 2024 workload, https://www.securityweek.com/mitre-signals-potential-cve-pro...
> According to NIST, while the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) is processing incoming CVEs at the same rate as before the slowdown in spring and early summer 2024, a 32 percent jump in submissions last year means that the backlog continues to grow.
2023
> CISA had previously been supporting the NIST NVD program with approximately $3.7 million per year in interagency funding, which they have discontinued
2024
> While NIST has since reallocated $8.5 million to NVD for fiscal years 2024 and 2025
Assuming that's spread over both years it wasn't as big of an increase as I said, but is still an increase even inflation adjusted.
> 2025 article claims 30% increase in 2024 workload
Underfunding in the face of more workload isn't itself a funding cut.
> While NIST has since reallocated $8.5 million to NVD for fiscal years 2024 and 2025, this funding remains a fraction of the $300 million to $400 million estimated to be needed annually to fully restore capacity, with an additional $120 million to $150 million required to prevent further system “deterioration.”
Did NVD receive 300MM annual funding pre-2024? That would be a 98% funding cut.
MITRE CVE/CWE budget is more transparent than NVD since it's a contract, listed on USAspending.gov.
This isn't just a rapid disassembly of economic structures, any trust and goodwill is completely obliterated as well.
Now if you want that (even just funding) to be a thing ... you have to go through Trump & Co and pay your bribe to get it back up.
Still shortsighted and stupid, but it's plausible this is intended as leverage to get someone else to pony up.
Why? This administration is not acting in good faith, you don't have to act as if they are. People and institutions doing that is part of how we got here in the first place.
As you say, that's exactly what got us here. But the alternatives are very unclear, and seem deeply unpleasant.
They could attack the non-steelmanned version, but that just opens them up to having their own comments attacked. You quickly get derailed. (It's sometimes called "sealioning".)
They could propose alternatives, but that too is subject to sealioning. Real alternatives are always subject to tradeoffs, and the answer to "how about you do X instead of attacking me?" is always "no".
They could refrain from discussing it, but that just allows the offenses to continue.
So what often happens is that people persist in acting as if this were a sincere discussion, and hope that a majority will recognize the quality of your argument. It's a lousy plan but I don't have much else to suggest.
Surely there's an antibody response.
Why? The decisions are pretty well politically aligned with the ideology which detests the size and scope of the government (realistically, those aspects which the ideologues feel are not in their interest). What is unexpected is the swiftness and the brutality of action, but revolutions tend to be messy, and make no mistake, this is a revolution.
> This is the actions of a foreign bad actor
Now this sounds like a coping strategy: everything is so preposterous it couldn't possibly be homegrown. Foreign influence and underhanded actions are as old as human interactions, but IMO outright plants can't succeed without a massive economic and power asymmetry between the adversaries.
Trump's actions towards Putin are highly irrational. Maybe he's being blackmailed, maybe he's being bought, maybe he just has likes Putins style but there is a reason people suspect him despite it being unlikely in the general case.
This is exactly the process that conservatives take to privatise services into their own friends pockets. Destroy services until they're ineffective and use it as an excuse to privatise it.
There's no such thing as small government, only large sprawling private services that the government hands money to.
The entire world seems to be able to 'cope' with that assessment.
In reality this would never happen so all these people playing steelman are just detached/insulated.
If the steelmanning fails then you can you can be even more confident that it is in bad faith.
> Why?
It's a sensible practice and good practice
Like you get that right? This administration does not discuss or debate, it shits out lies and laughs as people play make believe high school debate games, and give them infinitely more effort than they did.
There is no such thing as "effectively arguing" against a Gish Gallop, that's it's entire purpose.
The issue we have is that republican every chance they get since the 1970s have cut taxes. And then blamed democrats for causing the deficits. We don't need smaller governments. We need a reasonable tax system that taxes people. It can be progressive like it was before we decided rich people just need it easier than poor people.
Yes, I will pay more taxes sign me up, especially if they can finally fix the roads and fund research. The problem is my taxes as a middle-class person go up and rich people get a tax cut. It's stupid. I like water provided by government utilities, I like planes that don't crash into stuff because there are air traffic controllers. These things used to work because we paid for them. When you buy cheap you get cheap.
Lockheed only has a $100b market cap. Raytheon has $200b. General Dynamics $74b
The reality is that US defense spending pays American designers and American laborers high prices for their American effort. We pay basically the same prices for ammo and supplies and services as other countries.
When we pay $13 billion for an aircraft carrier, that's just what it costs to build a gigantic boat with nuclear reactors. The French paid $4 billion for their aircraft carrier, and a $12 billion Gerald R. Ford class is over twice as large as the Charles de Gaulle (40k tons vs 100k tons), and much much much more advanced.
Americans love to misunderstand the cost of military things. They will scream about the F35's $1.5 trillion "price tag", ignoring that the estimate is for 50 years of operations and maintenance as well as initial purchase. Actual purchase price is about $90 million a plane, which is reasonable. Which makes sense, since being not stupidly overpriced was a key point of the program. The operational cost is about $40k a flight hour, which is roughly the same as the F-14, another high tech superplane program.
Seemingly MITRE hasn't been advised yet whether the option to extend the contract from 2025-04-16 to 2026-04-16 will be executed. And there doesn't appear to be any other publicly listed approach to market for a replacement contract.
[1] https://www.fpds.gov/ezsearch/jsp/viewLinkController.jsp?age...
So you’ll get a bunch of “hopefully this week” up until it expires.
In the UK the some "entrepreneur" was after monetizing access to the Land Registry a couple of years ago. Apparently the free UK Gov service was not fit for purpose it needed a paywall to make it better. Nothing as globally significant as the CVE database, but you can see if the vultures are going after small UK Gov services, something like the CVE database is absolutely a chance to add to the executive bonus pool.
Given its enormous value, isn't this something that the community, especially FAANG (MAANA?) could step up and fund as a nonprofit?
Companies can definitely fund it. But to be fair the gov, including NIST, also relies on CVE.
I mean doesn't big tech and the people they give salary money to pay taxes? Ground transportation companies rely on public roads and but we fund it because having the infrastructure is an economic multiplier.
I'm not arguing in favor of funding the CVE program, I just don't think that's a good reason.
A modern Open Group, perhaps?
> Hearing a bit more on this. Apparently it's up to the CVE board to decide what to do, but for now no new CVEs will be added after tomorrow. the CVE website will still be up.
If I'm developing a product built on 20 libraries, it won't just be a matter of scanning CVEs for major vulnerabilities any more, so I'm more likely to miss one.
"always update" doesn't always work, when to manage a product you realistically have to version pin.
I would imagine the only SANE option would be some kind of git repository where CNA's can collaborate. Probably run some code across to make the website that people can easily access.
It's going to be a mess.
This is dangerously stupid.
The US isn't supporting it out of charity, it's good for US businesses to have someone coordinating this for everyone. Why would we want to rely on other countries to be supporting our tech sector? At least now we are subject to only the capricious whims of our own government, as little comfort as that is right now (if another country was funding it we would be relying on the whims of a foreign government, which isn't ideal when tech is the golden goose of your modern economy).
The funding requirements can't be that high and I'm willing to bet that other countries and entities would have happily stepped up if they had the chance.
Up until recently CVE was very centralized and only in the last few years have there been steps in more decentralization with CNAs taking more responsibility, Red Hat as a CNA of last-resort etc. So, the cost of doing all of this work has already been shifted partially (!) away from the US but I have not seen any movement towards e.g. moving the program to a foundation which could have been done.
Personally I would conclude that it was the responsibility of the US to pay for this because they wanted to and it was in their best interest to control this program.
And perhaps if there had been more than a days notice, some consortium could be pulled together, but who's going to pay? Why would private companies do this, how do they profit? CVE program was the roads that everybody could drive on.
The basic lack of understanding of how the world works is killing the US. Why do people think we have such a massive GDP? Where do people think that comes from? We've given control of everything in society over to our dumbest and greediest members that have no clue about how anything works.
> I'm willing to bet that other countries and entities would have happily stepped up if they had the chance.
The EU. They can have all the massive advantages that funding MITRE will give them. Why won't they step up to the plate? It's killing the EU and they have absolutely no idea how anything works. It's why they're a dying empire.
In my opinion it's mostly the industry needing to adapt to a new setup that needs to happen. It was just "easy" to rely on what's already there. A lot of company policies need to be adapted etc.
So, since the US government needed that (it provides security to US businesses), they organised and funded it (as everything else, with US taxpayers money, and savings from investors in US and abroad.)
Now, the US government decided to commit temporary-seppuku, so a number of things will happen:
* state-level government will use their local-taxpayer money to fund similar efforts (with duplication of effort), or share it with everyone
* another country or block of country will do it, and decide whether they want to "share". (I suppose Russia and China have more of an incentive to keep their CVE DB private, given their level of dis-integration with US economy ? EU maybe ?)
* an international, ad-hoc organisation is created to share the funding (something like NATO.) Multi-latteralism is not exactly in fashion this days, but if EU does it, it will be "international" by design since we're not really a federation ; so, states in "Southern Canada" are welcome to join.
* or none of that happens, the CVE db rots for a while, until a sufficiently embarrassing cybersecurity problem occurs, and the CVE db is deemed worthy of the "10% you need to bring back" by President Elon.
Pray your company, families and friends are never on the wrong side of the "reverse-Chersteron's fence".
Other countries have their own programs, some cooperating with the US, others separate. China has the CNNVD if you're interested in helping Chinese society safe. My government operates https://advisories.ncsc.nl/advisories to serve my country's interests.
Of course, the US is free to abandon their programme and rely on Chinese, Russian, and European vulnerability databases to keep their country safe. It does save them a couple of million after all!
Now of course USA is ceasing (voluntarily, by stripping down every international soft power effector in government) to be a superpower, to the great glee of dictators all around the world.
The "we can't afford being great" is a direct admission that USA is no longer a superpower. And is not going to become great again, just another nation again (at whims of China).
It was to the advantage of the US and allies to coordinate and lead in tracking and fixing such errors.
Multiple countries, companies, and individuals contributed finding and fixing bugs.
The administrative task of keeping track was one part of a greater picture, a part that came with first to be advised and other perks.
It's not that the US had a responsibility to take on the lead admin task, more that in past times the US saw an advantage to being at the centre of global action.
This is just another part of increasing US isolationism.
From what I understand of the article, none of these allies were funding it.
> Multiple countries, companies, and individuals contributed finding and fixing bugs.
Clearly that itself isn't enough. Someone has to pay for maintaining this service. It appears that no one other than USA spent money in funding it.
Why would it be shut down without asking for others to fund it, if it's some sort of burden on the US?
Programs like this pay for themselves many times over. There are only two reasons for cutting this: absolute idiocy, or active sabotage of the US.
Researchers also don't directly talk with MITRE they go through one of the intermediaries that assigns the number.
I’d trust a European version a lot more.
China will be able to fill some voids but ideologically they’re not fit to fill them all.
I guess it's one of those things you never think about until it goes wrong.
The world would do well to move this kind of stuff out of the US quickly, just like ICANN and stuff.
Who is still stunned by these things? They want you to be stunned; they want you to tell everyone else that you're stunned to spread feelings of terror and powerlessness. If you actually are stunned, you are stunningly ignorant. If you are not and still saying it, perhaps to emphasize your unhappiness, you are a 'useful idiot'. Either way, if you are saying it, you are a useful idiot.
You should have known decades ago: The GOP impeached a President for lying about sex; they fabricated intelligence to invade another country (killing thousands of Americans and 100,000+ Iraqis) - and that was all before 2004. They've voted almost unanimously, multiple times, to bankrupt the country (by refusing to authorize debt for existing obligations). Nobody (i.e., the Dems failed to) stopped them or made them pay a price, so why wouldn't they keep doing those things. (Edit: And if you object because the analysis criticizes one side and therefore you reject it as partisan, that's a big part of the reason nothing was done.)
This time they published Project 2025, telling you what they were going to do.
If the US is willing to give up influence and control over the cybersecurity sector, we should accept that gift and use it to our advantage.
Open season on American corporations for domestic and foreign hackers.
If program isn’t brought back then CVE database likely to be fragmented amongst the “private” CVE databases.
Sec Corp A has 700 well documented CVEs but Sec Corp B has 702 CVEs in their database since NIST funding pulled. What do corps do? Maybe some of them with massive budgets setup contracts with both to get “full spectrum coverage”. Maybe other non-technical companies that think of IT as strictly a cost will go with the cheapest or forego it all together.
Who knows maybe we get ~~~free labor~~~ open source community to pick up the slack?
This country with the orange man administration is quickly going to shit. Not in a “I dislike {opposing party} way” either. In a “I dislike authoritarian regimes” way.
Just imagine if it happens in three years, after the midterms - someone will be able to blame the Dems for it :) !
Maybe the Dutch should go ahead.
And CIRCL in Luxembourg are providing vulnerability-lookup which can also assign IDs but in a more decentralized way: https://www.vulnerability-lookup.org/documentation/
VulnerableCode can help with discovery etc. https://vulnerablecode.readthedocs.io/en/latest/introduction...
So, parts of this are already in place and I assume this will be a big boost towards a new vulnerability ecosystem.
Do we already have an ETA for the ENISA vulnerability database?
An EU solution would probably be much better. Would suck for Americans, though, they'd need to get up early to meet European office hours.
It's enough of a public good to have a common advisory for vulnerabilities that FAANG should just kick it a few million a year. How much can it possibly cost to run this anyway?
I always suspected that "Department of Homeland Security" would lead to Banana-republic-like shenanigans --- could we defund them?
(Edited to be less salty, sorry)
Step 1: Post discreetly to a forum with minimal information and an absurdly short deadline
Step 2: Phone your friend, the former board member, to make your case on LinkedIn
Step 3: Ring up a friendly journalist and give them a tip
Step 4: Reference the insuing chaos as justification for keeping your project funded
Note that the article carefully avoids pinning the blame on DOGE or the Whitehouse while heavily implying it. MITRE is technically a private entity, albeit a non-profit. And the very last paragraph of the article states:
> A CISA spokesperson told CSO, “CISA is the primary sponsor for the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposure (CVE) program… Although CISA’s contract with the MITRE Corporation will lapse after April 16, we are urgently working to mitigate impact and to maintain CVE services on which global stakeholders rely.”
To be clear, the point isn't to say that the CVE program isn't valuable, nor is it to say that it's good for a shenanigan like this to be necessary.
The point is that, unless you're directly involved in this subject (not impacted—involved), it's probably best to maintain a "wait and see" attitude rather than succumb to catastrophizing this news.
Your post was implicitly invoking Occam's razor and so the premise of the question was about deciding which explanation to believe. I rejected that premise because it wasn't necessary to decide between the two explanations—they weren't mutually exclusive.
The only proof I had was that I've seen enough of these events resolve themselves very similarly to the way this one was resolved—which is why I was recommending a "wait and see" approach.
Call it wisdom or "lived experience".
Just because they're scattershot cutting doesn't mean they're stupid.
I think it speaks a lot about a person who assumes "a smart person would resign from DOGE".
The government is not particular (in the sense of particularism) and cannot be easily tuned to fix particular problems; rather, its best solutions come through institutional procedure and design, such as the tension between the FAA and the NTSB that, at a first glance, would seem like obviously needless duplication and waste.
It is a broad, blunt, wasteful instrument to solve broad, blunt problems in a way that may not be the best but that work far, far better than alternatives that have been tried.
That the effort to treat government like a personal budget has ended up destroying important things is a sad inevitability of such efforts. I hope it goes remembered.
It won't be. Willful ignorance is a cornerstone of the movement. You can't lie about what you don't know. You can't have a bad take if you don't know. Upton Sinclaire said in the 1930's: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." Now add to "salary" "identity", "relationships", "sense of belonging to the group". This is why critical, independent thinking, speaking truth to power, must be separately honored and encouraged by a healthy culture, because these attributes are by default mercilessly punished. (Physical courage and heroism are honored by a healthy culture for similar reasons.)
Democrats are repeatedly pilloried simply because they govern while the Republicans cosplay as a permanent opposition, and therefore became 'the power' to speak against. Governing inherently involves trade-offs, compromises, and complex realities that never match ideological purity. Thus, an atmosphere developed where people who engaged in governance—and therefore took responsibility for difficult, real-world outcomes—became easy targets for criticism that was more interested in the aesthetics of "truth to power" than in providing accurate analyses or constructive solutions.
As a result, "speaking truth to power" became a performance, disconnected from accountability or genuine insight. The loudest critics weren’t necessarily those with the most accurate or useful truths, just those who most visibly positioned themselves as opposing power structures. This reinforced public cynicism and undermined nuanced understanding of governance and policy, further obscuring genuine critique and necessary reforms.
What the fuck are you supposed to do about this. This is something that should have had multiple MONTHS of warning in order to allow those who depend on the CVE infrastructure to plan what to do next with their security posture.
If it was $5000/yr it's very different to if it's $5M/year for what amounts to little more than an instance of mediawiki.
Some volunteer will set up a GitHub pages and mailing list to fulfill the same duties.
- What disease did the CDC ever prevent?
- What improvement did the NHTSA ever bring to full self driving?
- What improvement in airline safety did the FAA bring?
- What good did FEMA do in any disasters?
I don't want to quip about how their achievements are invisible because they prevented the disasters that would have brought the spotlight on them, even when they were too underfunded to properly do their jobs. But I sure would like to see the people making these smart comments to give it a try and see how that goes. Then again, I have no complaints - at this rate, we'll get that chance soon.
Anyway, my opinion is that CVEs have a very low signal-noise ratio and vulnerability databases in general should be revamped to try and fix that problem. The current system - I don't claim to know the root cause - is simply horrible. It could be the management, the entry requirements, some loophole perhaps, etc,. I also don't claim that this is the motive behind this move, I am just hoping it gets revamped anyway as a side effect (There's another article on HN floating around that says someone else has picked up the baton - good luck to them). I also don't care for your country's politics which you seem to be eluding to in your final paragraph.
I did not. I said that the signal noise ratio has to be improved. I explicitly used the word "revamp". I know, hyperbole <= hot head => low reading comprehension.
> So perhaps what's needed to improve their quality is to increase their funding, not cut it further.
Sure, if that is the blocker, funding them more is fine by me.
I guess this must have been by somebody else who thinks it's OK to shutdown CVE db because it isn't good enough for them.
> I know, hyperbole <= hot head => low reading comprehension
Try starting with the list in my first reply. Reading comprehension comes later.
> Sure, if that is the blocker, funding them more is fine by me.
Perhaps you should have started with that first before belittling their work. This is exactly what I have been saying all along.
Yes, shutting it down is completely fine by me, letting some other database take its place. It has a chance to be better.
> Perhaps you should have started with that first before belittling their work. This is exactly what I have been saying all along.
I very much intentionally criticised their work - I think the CVE system (the way it runs today) is garbage. You proposed a solution to this situation involving increased funding. I am fine with that solution. Just like I am fine with the solution "nuking it and starting afresh".
They tried to reject the election result and do a coup, and were rewarded for it by getting back into power. They are refusing to follow the law or the courts. They are sending people to gulags in foreign countries. All the checks and balances were destroyed last time. The party has been stripped of anyone who would fight the admin or reject this illegality. They have set up a power grab over elections.
There will not be free and fair elections in four years unless they are simply too incompetent to rig it, the rubicon was crossed long ago. Without mass protest that makes it impossible for them to hold power, American democracy is dead.
They have tried to do it, they say they want to do it, they have the ability to do it, they are actively doing it, and no one is stopping them. How are people still acting like in four years they are going to neatly hand over power to be prosecuted for their crimes?
That would be a good litmus test. "They" have not prevented special elections so far ; if "They" need to prevent the next one, whatever they try will happen then, I suppose ?
I don't see them preventing elections, but just rejecting or altering results that don't support them: the litmus test is already triggered: the special election in North Carolina has an ongoing court case trying to throw out ballots to allow the Republican to win.
They have also pushed a executive order claiming sweeping powers over elections which they will use as pretext to do this nationally. Blatantly illegal, but they have already shown they are ignoring the courts, so who will hold them to account? Mass civil unrest is the only thing left.
If you can't vote your representative out of office, then, well, yeah, you're not really in a democracy anymore.
I guess you can always incorporate and sell bitcoins - then, you have a chance to buy your élections.
Or, admit that you now leave in a dictatorship, and thank your maga neighbors for that.
At some point, both Presidents Musk and Trump die of old age, and a window of opportunity for change opens.
We are going to have elections.
This is your moment! Enjoy it!
Many most voted and most commented submissions were the other things.
If you’ve somehow missed Trump’s systematic dismantling of academic freedom or his disappearing of folks he doesn’t like, then we have a far bigger problem than the limits of what is discussed on HN.
Currently hosting costs are unclear, but it should be doable if we offer API access for like 5 bucks / month for private and 100 / month for corporate or similar.
Already did a backup of the NVD in the last couple hours, currently backing up the security trackers and OVAL feeds.
Gonna need some sleep now, it's morning again.
My project criteria:
- hosting within the EU
- must have a copyleft license (AGPL)
- must have open source backend and frontend
- dataset size is around 90-148 GB (compressed vs uncompressed)
- ideally an e.V. for managing funds and costs, so it can survive me
- already built my vulnerability scraper in Go, would contribute it under AGPL
- already built all schema parsers, would contribute them also under AGPL
- backend and frontend needs to be built
- would make it prerendered, so that cves can be static HTML files that can be hosted on a CDN
- needs submission/PoC/advisory web forms and database/workflow for it
- data is accumulated into a JSON format (sources are mixed non standard formats for each security tracker. Enterprise distros use odata or oval for the most parts)
If you are interested, write me on linkedin.com/in/cookiengineer or here.
- https://vulnerability.circl.lu/
And a few others?
They already did it. Great!
Maybe we can ask them how to contribute to their software, as it seems to be proprietary at the moment?
edit: lol, their manifest.json is still the React boilerplate: https://euvd.enisa.europa.eu/manifest.json
Their database seems to also only contain fairly recent CVEs (up until 2019? some CVEs are missing...) and not before that
"Fourth, national vulnerability databases like China’s and Russia’s, among others, will largely dry up (Russia more than China)."
"Fourth [sic], hundreds, if not thousands, of National / Regional CERTs around the world, no longer have that source of free vulnerability intelligence."
"Fifth [sic], every company in the world that relied on CVE/NVD for vulnerability intelligence is going to experience swift and sharp pains to their vulnerability management program."The CVE program is really important. This Administration is truly the example of the D.O.G.E. - Department Of Gaffes and Errors
The circl.lu might be actually a potential cooperation partner.
(Vuldb is down right now)
Off topic: your username is very appropriate given the situation.
Appeared on the front page, with © 2005-2024 by the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity.
This is just an example of US cultural defaultism.
Indeed. Just as Germany knew their economy is vulnerable to Russian gas and did nothing about it, even after the 2014 invasion of Crimea. Just as the west knew moving their entire manufacturing sector to one country would make them vulnerable, but choose to ignore it because it was too profitable.
I never EVER saw politicians act proactively for the good of the nation or the people, all they do is act reactively after the shit hits the fan to control public opinion and blame someone else to make sure they get re-elected, that's it.
Once you realize our rulers aren't competent at their jobs or acting in the peoples' best interest, it all makes sense. They're in it for the grift and to enrich their monopolistic friends in the private sector, to make sure line goes up in the next quarter, that's it.
Yes, I know there are good politicians out there who care and fight for their local communities, but they never make it to rule at national or international stage and actually change the rotten system because the status quo doesn't allow that.
This is almost certainly because those cases don't make the news.
Politicians react to the public when it stands up. Otherwise it will follow other agenda's.
That is why it is critical to have an informed public. When journalism has to compete with corporate owned Fake News and Entertainment, journalism dies, and democracy will follow. Then, add the spy business of Big Tech in the mix, with algorithmic silo's. The people don't even realize they are locked up in a jar, where they live on a diet of cultural engineering.
Now, pause a moment and think about what happens when you add AI-models to the mix. Your daughter, your neighbor will be totally brain-wrecked.
Which journalism are you referring to? The one owned by Rupert Murdoch? The Washington Post owned by Jeff Bezos? MSNBC? CNN? Are they better just because they're owned by different billionaires and interest groups?
I got news for you, the journalism you knew died a long time ago.
- No real journalism, instead, career in media house depend on commercial ownership. Narratives tailored to segment, but no deep and critical analysis.
- "Let us talk about the tariffs today, they make zero economic sense"
- "I think what he meant is..."
- "Of course this is not entirely correct, but..."
- "President Trump has said.."
- "Rubio did a press conference today"
- Only drama, never the Big Picture.
- Elections? According to the press, those are just
- The latest polls!
- Repeat marketing from spin doctors at affiliated media houses
- "Debate" = Reality TV, scores are given on wit and emotional play
PP is looking for a pattern, finding, and abstaining from questioning or contextualizing it:
Engaging only with the first or most obvious layer of an issue—never going deeper into context, nuance, or systemic causes.
The quickest counterexample that comes to mind is Elizabeth Warren's Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It has returned billions to American citizens.
If your first reaction is putting people into political/ideological camps in order to make their arguments weaker and easier to attack form a holier than though political/ideological angle, it's game over for me as I like to judge actions objectively based on the outcomes, not conservative vs democrat, left vs right, etc. since corruption and incompetence is colorblind.
I don't care which side of the political isle did what, I'm pointing at the systemic failures of the entire system built like a house of cards by all political parties, which collapsed as no thought was put into building it, and only chased short term profits at the expense of long term security. Trying to finger point a single political side only detracts from the issue which is the classic "divide and conquer" tactic politicians have been using to deflect blame and get away with it.
If government is allowed to operate without regulation, it corrodes.
The pattern is clear. Unchecked power imbalances are bad for everyone, but the folks at the top of a power imbalance generally advocate for it, and change the environment to ensure their power and reduce everyone else.
The problem is, if you try to check people's immaturity and call it out, you get labeled a bigot, a fascist, or a $fobe.
So people's immaturity is a consequence of the modern toxic positivity and cancel culture the west has bred where you aren't allowed to say anything that might hurt someone's feelings, so people grow up in a bubble of fakeness that's detached from real world issues.
You're pointing out the end effect but not the cause that has led to that.
The goal is not to call people out, the goal is recognition as a real, active issue at the root of a lot of public figure behavior. Those behaviors need to be called out, and those public figures shamed for their immature behaviors and immature opinions - which non-public figures then mimic in ordinary life. Which is an immaturity that I do not expect to be called out, which sound like you're focusing.
Beneath the immature world view and attitude is self deception, a far harder issue to call out. That self deception is caused by religious claims of answers to unanswerable questions. To accept an unanswerable question's "answer" from another is a self deception, driven by anxiety and fear. Life has uncomfortable unanswerable questions, and facing those unanswerable questions is a critical part of becoming mature - there are no answers to these questions about what happens or if there is an afterlife. By supplying answers to these critically unanswerable questions, religions create immature individuals that are in fact trapped within the cult of that religion's reasoning, which tends to be terribly immature in far too many logical manners. Then you get morons.
Adults don't just spawn into the world like characters in a video game. They're raised and educated into adulthood by the previous generation parents and political regimes. So if you want to point the finger for the issue with current generation, point it at those who raised and cared for them, as it was their job.
>and if that recognition takes place then society will generally recognize the issue, and that becomes internalized as an issue people understand.
The issue with your logic is that you assume society can recognize issues and acts rational to issues, when in fact it does not.
Society selectively chooses what it recognizes as issues, based on emotional manipulation and tribal behavior.
What could go wrong? I'm sure they'll vote rationally and responsibly and not in a vindictive way to watch the system burn to the ground. /s
“A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit.” — Greek Proverb
What our society did instead was cut down the tree to save money on upkeep and increase the value of their property. Sorry, but you reap what you sow.
https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2022/9/2/russias-gazprom-k...
So they just swapped dependencies. And it's not that the new dependency will have no strings attached.
Diversifying while keeping russian energy in the loop, as part of a risk-management strategy, would make more sense. Completely cutting off russian energy just gives more bargaining power to their new energy provider.
Greed got us here. There's a rules based world possible where Russia sells gas to Germany. Russia did not transform from an free and democratic society with respect for human rights and the international community into an authoritarian dictatorship overnight; we turned a blind eye to this when it suited our short term economic needs and that is how we allow ourselves to sleepwalk into the situation we are now. Had we held first to our principles we'd have either had the impact the neoliberal trade focused policies were supposed to eventually deliver or at the very least not ended up with dependencies that gave such governments leverage and eventually blow up in our faces. Had we instead put human rights first and foremost we would not have created and empowered these monsters.
Same thing with Trump's reelection in the US. By all rights in a functioning democracy Trump should be sitting in jail right now along with the January 6th insurrectionists. The Biden administration had 4 years to prosecute, but felt it was not politically expedient to do so. Likewise what is left of the GOP within the republican caucus right now faces a similar choice between short term benefits and upholding the principles which nearly everyone in congress and even the Trump administration has previously claimed they would uphold.
*our alleged principles
Something can't be called a "principle" when it is only selectively applied.
You conveniently leave out that minor detail that it was RUSSIA who stopped the gas.
Germany tried hard to keep it going, even making a sanction-exemption or a Siemens turbine repaired in Canada, which according to Russia was needed. Only that when they were to receive it nothing happened, gas stopped anyway.
There is still Nordstream 2 Pipeline B intact available to deliver gas and it uses Russian made turbines compared to Nordstream 1.
The whole discussion is very special to say the least if you leave out that some adversary blow up the infrastructure.
"Moskau blockiert offenbar Weitertransport von Nord-Stream-1-Turbine" ("Moscow apparently blocks further transport of Nord Stream 1 turbine") -- https://www.rnd.de/politik/russland-blockiert-offenbar-weite...
I'm German, I followed those developments closely at the time. Russia refused to deliver gas! The blowing up of the pipes happened quite some time after that!
You also don't mention that German Gasprom, which controlled German gas reserves, emptied them just before the war! -- https://www.faz.net/aktuell/wirtschaft/gas-speicher-in-deuts... (German, paywall), -- https://www.zeit.de/news/2022-01/21/ungewoehnlich-leere-gass...
That shows that Russia prepared for using gas as an economic weapon against Germany especially well before they even started the war.
From the Zeit article:
German
> "Die Gasflüsse über die deutschen Grenzen sind unüblich niedrig für diese Jahreszeit - mit Ausnahme von Nord Stream 1, die sind konstant hoch", sagt Fabian Huneke. Es sei verwunderlich, dass vor dem Hintergrund der hohen Preise und der hohen Nachfrage die Gaslieferkapazitäten Richtung Europa so wenig genutzt würden. "Wenn Gazprom sich marktrational verhalten würde, würden sie die Gaslieferungen nach Europa auch durch die Pipelines, die durch Belarus und die Ukraine führen, verstärken." Den Grund für dieses Verhalten sieht der Energiemarktexperte in der Ukraine-Krise.
English, translated by Google
> "The gas flows across the German borders are unusually low for this time of year - with the exception of Nord Stream 1, which are consistently high," says Fabian Huneke. It is surprising that, given the high prices and high demand, the gas delivery capacities to Europe are so little used. "If Gazprom behaved in a market-rational manner, they would also increase gas supplies to Europe through the pipelines that run through Belarus and Ukraine." The energy market expert sees the reason for this behavior in the Ukraine crisis.
The unusual low gas storage reserves at the beginning of the year 2022 in Germany with 45% compared to usual 75% while Nordstream 1 is delivering at full capacity could be related to the sanctions which lead Poland to stop transit through the Jamal pipeline and other transit routes through Ukraine and possibly gas market trade activities. Having just the ‘economic weapon’ argument is lacking, especially in regard that Russian gas is still to today reaching Germany and it is in the interest of Russia to deliver.
Tangentially... how did the German name of the city/region get into _that_ form? Is it a loan from English?? Germany and Russia have been closely entwined for centuries.
Wikipedia has a comment which appears to make no sense:
> The [old] form Moskovĭ has left traces in other languages, including English: Moscow; German: Moskau; French: Moscou; Portuguese: Moscou, Moscovo; and Spanish: Moscú.
(There is an English term Muscovy for the region, but wiktionary suggests that it derives from the formal name given to the region in international Latin rather than deriving from Russian. In that case, a /w/ would also generate a letter V, so there's no explanatory power.)
Apparently, when different languages started to make the distinction, they picked a different letter combination: ov, ou, ow, au, ú, etc. probably depending on the local way of pronouncing the word.
Same for latin ivvenis, modernized to juvenis, which gave young, jeune, jung, joven, etc.
We're talking about a period many centuries after Latin phonology might have been relevant. The word doesn't come from Latin. Old English has no confusion between [v] and [w] to begin with; [w] is part of the phoneme /w/ and [v] is part of the phoneme /f/. In Middle English there's a distinction between /f/ and /v/, where we see French-derived words like village and vine distinguished from English-derived words like fill and fire, and from French-derived words like fine.
So what happened?
> Same for latin ivvenis, modernized to juvenis, which gave young, jeune, jung, joven, etc.
Please don't just invent things that sound good to you. Young and (German, I assume) jung don't come from Latin either.
> U, v and w are all derived from the same letter v, for which no distinction existed in latin (same for i, j and y).
Again, please don't just make up random non-facts. Latin has no letter J. It does recognize Y, as the Greek letter upsilon, which it distinguishes from all Latin vowels. The fact that Romance languages name "Y" the "Greek I" should have been a hint of this. You can hardly read any Latin that mentions Greeks without running into it; compare Pyramus, Thucydides.
- You're Germany.
- You join NATO for protection from Russia, an actor with a long history of military aggression[1]
- Your export economy is based on manufacturing.
- The energy driving your manufacturing sector is ~60% cheap gas from Russia, your military aggressive partner.
- Russia invades Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 to no ones surprise
- Leaders of USA and Eastern Europe warn you of Russia's influence on your economy
- You ignore all this and build another gas pipeline from Russia
- You are surprised Russia invades Ukraine(again) and gas sanctions cripple your manufacturing economy
Someone please stop the planet, I wish to get off, my sanity can't handle this level of stupidity anymore.
[1] https://natoassociation.ca/a-timeline-of-russian-aggression/
News from an American here, on an antidepressant and deathly fat from stress eating:
I’m worried about the eventual welfare of those protesting. I’m hearing that people of color are being told by their pastor to stay home rather than protest so as not to risk being used as scapegoats.
My family and friends are divided and still dividing over politics. I recently was crazily ranted to by big-personality entrepreneur immigrant that told me his story of how easy it was to come to the states, rags-to-riches, and how they were supporter of the administration because “they don’t want to pay taxes for illegals”. Part of the half of the U.S. that supports the administration isn’t just brainwashed, but has a very strong, angry, and desperate look, and the other part says “just wait four years and it will be over”, but it won’t; before the election, this party used gerrymandering and legal action to ensure that election, then post-election replaced election officials and many government officials.
The DOE is claiming anti-semitism and the need to have viewpoint diversity to deny funding to schools that are known for their open viewpoints.
And yet somehow I’m still surprised when they kill the CVE program.
It’s an ever-escalating circus of chaos, because our administration thinks this was needed to ensure U.S. interests, because those vulnerable in the U.S. were manipulated by outside actors and internal power-hungry politicians and zealots, and all is spun to just feed into the chaotic nationalism that is trying to one-up every other dictator that has ever lived.
To top all of this off, AI, which I use daily, will take my job before I retire, and I have no backup plan.
Despite all of this, I have the will to live, to support those whom I love (even the crazy ones), and to try to make the world better. I continue to pray for direction on all of this.
"German journalist dubbed the ‘Putin connoisseur’ had secret book deal with Russian oligarch" - https://www.icij.org/investigations/cyprus-confidential/germ...
"Russia's best friends in Germany: AfD and BSW" - https://www.dw.com/en/russias-best-friends-in-germany-afd-an...
"12 Germans who got played by Putin" - https://www.politico.eu/article/blame-germany-russia-policy/
https://www.enisa.europa.eu/topics/vulnerability-disclosure
They have a tender going on tracking best practices: https://www.enisa.europa.eu/procurement/vulnerability-disclo...
So they will take 12 months to select for the tender...18 months pondering on the report...and in 3 years they make a tender out for a solution...
looking at average speed of bureaucracy in EU it will take roughly a year to set date for a meeting that will set the date for actual meeting which will decide if this will go forward or not....
(if you think i'm joking - i'm basing this on proposed EU initiative for nuclear power which started with setting a date of meeting to setup a meeting to draft an agenda)
I cannot believe I am typing that second sentence, but here we are.
According to which rule would "owning by the EU" result in an option to immigrate? Immigration is handled on a per country basis. I don't see how the EU provide such an option.
The EU has agreed upon programs in order to bring in, through an immigration policy, high skilled persons from non-member states. More importantly, working within the member nations, as to which member nation would want MITRE to be located within their borders, is not something that is a hard sell given that it has economic advantages for whichever state(s) onboard MITRE.
Where in this is the option that the EU provides an option to immigrate because the EU owns something?
I'm very well aware of knowledge workers. It's not something the EU can provide as an option. What you linked to is the legal framework around how EU members can provide such a thing.
Agree. It'll likely happen that way. Still, dislike the initial incorrect assertion.
What cross-industry organisations exist that could coordinate?
>The POTUS transferred our cyber defenses to the EU
Ouch
So instead I will allow myself to be robbed and we'll all share the cost of a low-key restuarant. Or maybe let's charge each other to eat together, yeah!
On the contrary, I would argue that they deeply care about the environment. The REAL point of all those tit-for-tat tariffs with China including with small mail/packages are to drastically cut cargo/shipping emissions. The threatening of annexation of Canada? That was really to get ~70% reduction in air passenger traffic BECAUSE they care about the environment. Same with creating a few high profile border horror story incidents against nationals from allied countries. The real point of it? Reduce transoceanic air passenger loads and save the environment. /s
It's actually been upgraded to the Sovereign Tech Agency now
I'm also visiting the local CCC chapters here this week, maybe it makes sense to have a separate e.V. where the CCC chapters are beneficiaries?
This might be the optimum time to implement CSAF and to lead by example when it comes to vulnerability disclosures.
[0] https://internetcomputer.org/docs/building-apps/essentials/c... [1] https://forum.dfinity.org/
The reason for the higher price is that both data and running software is redundant and decentralized by design - no need to configure anything.
That phrase does not address where and how to host data and run software, and while I think an e.V. would be a great idea, it also does doesn't address it. So these concerns seem orthogonal to my input.
The IC Protocol is indeed about redundancy and resilience, but also about sovereignty and security, and it does not just host data (like torrents) but also runs software in a verifiable way (in particular, for every message you get from a dapp on the ICP, you get a certificate that proves that the majority of nodes in the subnet agree on the result).
In a nutshell, it's a platform that gives you many guarantees (security, redundancy, sovereignty) out of the box - as opposed to classical solutions which have to be composed of many different building blocks that need to be orchestrated to work together.
There is no need for this though, by it's very nature CVE services are "authorities", that distribute fairly simple data. Also if it costs 500$ to keep it online it's not really giving you much more resilience than regular multi-node hosting and significantly less than torrenting which is effectively free for many volunteers.
Canada may be another friendly option
Let’s not site global critical infrastructure within 150km of US land borders for a generation, please.
As a Canadian, I can confirm it's nothing like what's happening in Ukraine.
There’s nothing wrong with normal GPL.
No, more seriously, just like with shutting down NOAA services, it seems the goal is to:
1. cut services (we saved taxpayer money!!)
2. at some point later: oh, we actually need those services
3. pay <insert your favorite vendor here, preferably one connected to Musk> to provide the service (see! we don't need to pay gov employees!!) (fine print: the vendor costs 2-3x the original cost). But by then no one is looking at the spending numbers anymore.
Slick moves.
Especially when you cut something recklessly, figure out in month that you need back that capability right now and have very little leverage to negotiate with private providers.
When you look at the last cutting effort in the Clinton administration the difference in jarring.
Combine that with the fact that with a few exceptions DOGE has been cutting the most cost effective programs (i can’t think of a better bang for buck science program than NOAA) it’s saved very little vs the amount of pain it has caused.
I was trying to convey (with levity/humor) WHY it should continue to be funded as well as the argument that should be made to the one currently in control of the spineless US Congress.
Yes, fixing the vulnerabilities is important. However what the government probably does gain from it is an inside advantage in the lead time for vulnerabilities to protect against, as well as to exploit on adversaries.
If I violated some rule so be it, and I could care less about internet points, but it certainly feels like suppression of individuals based on individual posts which is a behaviour that could end up being the death of hn.
You can stay out of politics, but politics will always come and find you.
That said, I’m for people being idiots. I’m just done paying for it. If you’re chugging raw milk during a bird flu epidemic and your family gets sick because of it, basic insurance and the public should only pick up the cost after you’ve declared bankruptcy.
People who claim a taste difference between raw and pasteurised, I'd very much like to see someone taste the difference on the same cow's milk blind, before and after pasteurisation. I just don't think it affects the taste much, and certainly not as much as fat %.
And for people who claim health benefits, I would like to see a double blind study demonstrating those benefits.
Pasteurization does affect taste though. Around me there are two different dairies, one does regular pasteurization and one does vat pasteurization and I can tell the difference. There is ultra pasteurization which is just gross. I've never put unpasteurized head to head against equally fresh pasteurized though, and given what I now know I'm not going to.
In Mexico I suspect that almost all milk is ultra pasteurized since it's not refrigerated in stores and has wicked-long expiration dates. It's also some of the best-tasting milk I've had so I think that flavour has more to do with some of the other milk processes (like skimming) and the livelihood of the cows rather than with how it's pasteurized.
[1] In practice this is just milk with the lactase enzyme added at some point during production.
There is ultra pasteurization which is just gross.
Of course the above is subjective. Others have stated they prefer it. To each their own, but I will continue to maintain it makes milk taste gross.
That’s pasteurized. At a higher temp than the supermarket stuff, even.
But hey, I only get to enjoy this if the measles here in Texas don't get me first.
Otherwise I would at least demand it be fermented into kefir so the food microbes can muscle out the bad.
Sickness caused by bacteria doesn't happen as soon as one bad bacteria (bacterium?) enters your body, a certain critical mass is usually required. This is very similar to the concept of "viral load" where a certain amount of viral genetic material needs to be exchanged before the viral infection can take hold.
The "beneficial bacteria" on your skin and in your gut make it harder for bad bacteria to take root in many different ways, one of them simply being they provide competition, "crowding out the bad guys".
Another way is that many, many, many types of antibiotics were originally discovered as metabolites produced by bacteria and fungi (examples include penicillin, streptomycin, chloramphenicol, and tetracycline).
And for completeness sake, milk kefir contains many Lactobacillus species that are also a natural part of the mammal microbiome (which makes sense when you think about it; Lactobacillus are named for consuming lactose, an ingredient of mammal milk).
Before refrigeration most milk was made into butter, cheese and other products. Unless your ancestors actually herded the animals themselves they probably didn’t drink much raw milk.
If so, is there a signup page?
not for long
IMHO there needs to be a mechanism for breaking the loop and then we can have civil online political discussions. Unfortunately most places just ban it or ban those who got into the loop, either way its ugly.
IRL when discussing politics and things don't go badly its thanks to 3rd party who will moderate or calm down the heated debaters.
What additional information do they need to get out there other than they want me and people like me dead? What additional information do I need to get out there other than I don't want them to do that?
Therefore, most of the time you can just ignore them and your experience wouldn't any different than the natives who would also encounter a-holes for different reasons. The problem starts when someone in power to affect your life is one of those but in normal times you still can push back by questioning their actions as they still seek approval from the larger society.
The case with Trump seems to be the same with the case with Brexit: Those a-holes(not everyone who support those but a subset of them who are a-holes) start believing that they are in power and the society approves them therefore they can act on their instincts or plans.
I was working in London on the Brexit referendum day, some of our Spanish developers had trouble with people from their neighborhood right after the referandum.
People who voted for Trump are not stupid. They have real concerns that they do not see being met and so they are turning to something that while maybe not ideal is at least a promise of maybe better. Maybe it will be worse, but they don't see things on the right track as they were either.
The economy is shit, eggs are more expensive than ever but those same people that insisted those issues alone should decide the fate of the country don't seem to care anymore. Why?
People who voted for Trump weren't stupid, they've been molded into it by the most expensive proaganda apparatus that ever existed. Ask yourself, why isn't Trump's popularity declining in the face of such incompetency?
Now, what can a nice talk achieve that material reality failed to convince those people of?
And most importantly, why aren't there any Republicans that care he lied and continues to lie so shamelessly about it? On that and the thousand other issues he promised he would fix and did not deliver jack shit on.
My point is, they're completely detached from reality. No amount of polite discussion can bring them back. If you haven't realized Trump is a lying crook at this point, you never will.
You're prime example, you just shut your mind completely and said "he can't do anything about it" when 4 months prior you, like the rest of them, certainly would have been adamant Biden should go to hell for making eggs so expensive and that Trump would fix everything.
They have valid concerns, and taking steps to minimizing those concerns is just muddying the water in favor of those using political violence against people who don't deserve it.
There's a lot of counter-intel campaigns flying around all at once, and a lot of them are curated to infect brains of people who are willing to accept fascism.
"Well, they're not completely nazis... so you're wrong for likening them to nazis!"
"Well, you've decided to shut off discussion to people opening your mind about the impending fascism. That must mean you're not fit for discussion"
On the other hand:
“Historians have a word for Germans who joined the Nazi party, not because they hated Jews, but out of a hope for restored patriotism, or a sense of economic anxiety, or a hope to preserve their religious values, or dislike of their opponents, or raw political opportunism, or convenience, or ignorance, or greed.
That word is 'Nazi.' Nobody cares about their motives anymore.”
- Julius Goat
What matters is that the current administration is disappearing people with no legal reasons, due process or possible recourse. Either you agree with them in which case fuck you, or you don't and you condemn them. There can be no compromise or civility when one side is so aggressive and dangerous.
%99.999 of the time its usually trolls or people with good intentions(with wrong solutions based on wrong information or understanding of the situation). Trolls can be fun when they play with hypothetical scenarios and edge cases, conducting thought experiments.
You are also unlikely to change the views of the people with good intentions through discussion but they are very useful to understand what their motives so you can develop beter arguments or solutions. Also, you might find out that on some issues you are one of those with good intentions(but misguided understanding of the situation).
Do you know how crazy this all sounds once you're outside of a specific left echo chamber? How is the hyperbole I employed any more unbelievable than that of the poster I was replying to? Another sibling comment to yours says that Trump is rounding up political opponents for a gulag. Nevermind that he has only rounded up non-citizen (most of them in the US illegally) because that's all he can do.
If you look at my posting history, it's wildly left-wing as little as 2 years ago. I've become completely disillusioned with the left after noticing how self-contradictory some of those ideas are and how the language of crisis is deployed to constantly smear their political opponents. Everyone the left doesn't like is Hitler and every policy they don't like is fascism. Give me break.
Edit:
For a little more elaboration, look at the speech codes and compelled "DEI pledges" that American universities have employed in the last few years[1]. How is this not speech policing? You might argue that these are private institutions, and maybe that's fair enough, but when the government pulls funding for crap like this the hyperbole and outrage persist.
Or look at Canada's bill C-63[2]. This bill aims to allow the possibility of life sentences for "hate speech"[3]. To me this is authoritarian. To many left wing commentators, it's another day at the office, I guess - meanwhile the Canadian right wing party is regularly called fascist[4][5] despite being basically in line with US Democrats on many issues.
[1] https://unsafescience.substack.com/p/the-last-four-years-wer...
[2] https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/bill/C-63/first-r...
[3] https://bccla.org/2024/09/whats-in-bill-c-63-why-are-we-alar...
[4] https://medium.com/pigeons-peculiarities/pierre-poilievres-p...
[5] https://cultmtl.com/2025/02/pierre-poilievre-has-racked-up-e...
Trump does not care about the law. SCOTUS, in a historic 9-0 ruling, commanded him to bring back Kilmar Abrego Garcia from El Salvador. He unsurprisingly did not comply. Yet you're still insisting he can't legally do X or Y so everything is fine. When has that stopped him, like ever?
If that's not fascism, then what is? What would it take for you to say "OK that's too much"?
[1] https://apnews.com/article/trump-citizens-prison-el-salvador...
In short: it doesn't convince you of anything, it merely reinforces your existing biases.
In the meantime, Trump is actually deporting people without due process to inhumane torture camps run by a dictator while openly bragging about it and defying court orders.
These two things are not the same.
What I'm replying to is the fantastical Kool-aid MSNBC and alt-left media spin. I'm pretty sure the Republicans are not going to be rounding up and killing minorities despite hyperbolic descriptions like "people who literally want to kill me and deport my good friends to guantanamo bay cuba".
Wait, you're saying El Salvador is a dictatorship? From briefly glancing at Wikipedia I don't see any evidence of that. Why the need to smear another country just to make Trump look worse?
Trump has a gulag in El Salvador, right now, that he uses to send his political opponents to. And you people are still making up fantasies to play the victim. Absolutely disgusting.
Then you shouldn't talk to Trump supporters as that's exactly what they want to do for anyone that disagrees with them, and last I checked, they're capitalists.
They are planning on abducting people off the street, completely ignoring the courts and denying due process, and sending them to another country where they're being deprived of their rights, again, with no due process and no (effective) judicial review.
I'd expect most right wingers would be against this, but the Orange in Charge's supporters seem to hew to the "well if you didn't do anything wrong you've got nothing to worry about" angle because it's something happening to people they think deserve it.
This is literally the left wing reply when people complain about losing their job or their family for voicing the wrong political belief. "They deserve it, they should 'do better'."
Let's keep that in perspective.
After the infekktion of 2015, moderators of Right-leaning discussion boards started amping up their censorship. Left leaning and moderate discussion boards still tend to be more moderate, letting most discussions in and censoring less.
Most of the time, one side is trying to play an equal field, while the other shits all over it and just yells "Winning!"
It's not that the political topics are unimportant but all my feeds just end up looking the same as each other and the same as a newspaper app. I hate election nights because of this.
Honestly did not believe that people commented on porn forums before this incident.
But look at it this way: I see the us political spectrum melting down into authoritarianism and you’re complaining you don’t need to be reminded of it.
A similar analogy would be if we are at your house, and it catches fire, and you complain that it is interfering with watching Netflix while I’m trying to call 911 for help.
From my perspective you are ignoring your own demise and from your perspective I’m just being annoying.
But I would not consider it a political statement to adopt this policy.
For some (including me), politics are, following the oldest definition: 'how do I and fellow humans organize ourselves to live together' this often leads to a belief that everything is politics (for me it's true, but it's a belief, not a fact).
For other, I think that when they say politics, they think of geopolitics and partisanship, which is fair, because it's how politicians and political journalists themselves define politics. For this group, hopefully, not everything is politics.
So to me, this disagreement about wether or not all is political is often semantic rather than ideologic.
The disagreement is semantic and relevant in the sense people who say no politics at work believe their categories of politics and not politics are obvious.
The disagreement is ideological in the sense ethical concerns about products or customers are designated political often.
Politicians, political journalists, and people who say no politics at work do not define politics as geopolitics and partisanship.
If what you want is a "don't piss off your coworkers by discussing topics unrelated to work that you know will annoy people" policy, that is fine, but don't pretend you are not engaging in politics.
I wish people were at least honest about "no politics" to mean "lets avoid to unsafe, potentially divisive issues relative to our geographic location, and take the basic tenets of neoliberal, capitalistic society to be assumed". And yeah, that is a more than reasonable policy. Its a difficult policy in international spaces, because its very hard to not trespass that line when political contexts differ so strongly across the globe
I find someone's heuristics for deciding which category a statement falls into chiefly turns on if they agree with the statement. If they agree with the statement then it is not political, and if they disagree, it's political.
Well, then any discussion about an illiberal oclocratic executive (such as 47's) should be fair game...
Say your company has a possibility of working with some client company who is directly or indirectly involved with cause X. If it is “political” to talk about not working with them because of X, but it is “not political” to talk about working with them, then you see what I mean.
It doesn’t have to be a destructive conversation: one employee might say we should avoid them, but you might say we need to work with them because we need the money now and can drop them later when we are in a better place. Other employees could talk how cause X is not that unethical for reasons. If someone balks at a point of view incompatible with theirs and is incapable of expressing a viewpoint in a way that respects other views, maybe that someone is not mature enough and next time your HR can avoid that type.
Personally, if I have a personal political position and my colleague has an opposite one, I don’t see why we can’t talk about it. If you have a workplace rule about no politics during working hours, you better have this rule for all non-work discussions at work, or I personally would feel uncomfortable.
— If politics talk happens at work too much and affects productivity, then it is a problem, but then it is a problem with any non-work topic.
— If it causes heated debate, ruins morale, and makes people dislike each other, then it is a problem, but then it is a problem with any topic that causes heated debate. For some people it’s golf, for some philosophy, for some music. How many topics should be banned?
Work is about making money. Politics is a distraction unless there’s an issue that directly affects the business. Then it’s fair game. Like this one. Many teams of individuals will have to figure out how to navigate this situation so discussing it in context is apropos and can be done objectively.
If someone calls me a racist bigot or a beta cuck, that is a problem. That problem also has nothing to do with politics. It has to do with someone not being emotionally mature enough or equipped to handle a discussion with someone who has different views, or someone having a mental breakdown.
I am not from the US, but I had enjoyed some reasonable conversations with people from the US (among other countries) with very different views, and I was never called names. There are awkward moments when you have to hear something you don’t agree with, but that is most of life if you ever interact with people.
The key is to be like an HTTP server: liberal in terms of what you can accept, but strict with what you put out there.
> Work is about making money.
You have just thrown another political position into the mix, I hope you realize that?
Any moderately sized company is practically guaranteed to have a few people like this. So getting into these discussions has a high risk of becoming an HR issue as tempers flare and conversations become vitriolic.
There's also the issue that the company founders and leadership have political opinions of their own that might inform company policy and any political opinion to the contrary may be perceived as pushback from a "troublemaker".
Here we can forget that IRL face to face people are much less likely to be offensive to each other. If they get to literal name calling and aggression, sure, that’s an HR issue, HR gets paid to sort this out, doesn’t it? I don’t see how politics is different from any other topic on which people can have strong opinions.
> There's also the issue that the company founders and leadership have political opinions of their own that might inform company policy and any political opinion to the contrary may be perceived as pushback from a "troublemaker".
That is why “no politics” is somewhat dishonest. In my view, either blanket forbid all off-topic talks, or don’t censor by topic and handle fights if they arise. There can also be softer guidelines about how to behave at work without an actual ban of any topic.
The silliest part: what was his thesis? Well that using race and gender based quotas during hiring and leveling made Google less competitive. Certainly not a privileged white male tech bro just barreling through the company on a racist bigoted spree leaving tears in his wake. There is more interesting discussion to be had here about how the Civil Rights Act has been weaponized in the US and companies feel they have a legal obligation now to prove that their systems don’t yield “unfair distribution of protected classes”, or whatever the actual wording is. And how that is at odds with a world where you can openly discuss politics at a company without fear of falling afoul of the Chief Diversity Officer (ffs, there are executives installed to maintain the order now). And related: just look at how pockets of people respond to Trump’s second term insisting that he’s a fascist dictator and anybody who doesn’t see it is a de facto fascist. But I digress.
Nobody wants to bet their job on being on the losing end of a kafka traps and thought terminating clichés.
At least now you can say it out now without being downvoted into oblivion.
Further, there are entire segments of political groups who just want to assume your beliefs like a political straw man so they can denigrate you.
It’s an unhealthy waste of time and that doesn’t truly hit you until you invest the time in talking to an otherwise rational person, provide the closest thing to proof of your perspective in a situation and then watch them deny it anyway.
What you said can be true if you approach the discussion with an attitude of “I want to change everybody’s mind” instead of trying to get to some agreement and truth.
Not only stating an opinion is compatible with a constructive discussion that could lead to a mutual adjustment of opinions—in fact, stating your opinion is a precursor to having a discussion that can change it.
> It’s an unhealthy waste of time and that doesn’t truly hit you until you invest the time in talking to an otherwise rational person, provide the closest thing to proof of your perspective in a situation and then watch them deny it anyway.
The magic happens when one person realizes that another, obviously sane in every other way person can think very differently about topic X. Repeated exposure to alternative views from other people in your circles leaves no alternative except to adjust your own opinion on topic X.
Thing is, it’s tricky or impossible online. Aside from a handful of well-known people with some reputation or infamy, most of us only know each other as handles with no context. On the Internet, no one knows you are a dog or a basement dweller who lives with his parents and could never hold a job. Meanwhile, access to a group of like-minded people is always at your fingertips when you are online. However, when you are in a company of people who clearly are similar enough in what they achieved, in their choice to work for the same company, maybe good in their software engineering skill, etc., it makes their opinion something that may count.
Not being able or willing to freely exchange and consequently converge on opinions with people whom you routinely meet in real life, and only discussing said opinions in your respective online bubbles, strikes me as a path to having more and more divergent, incompatible, extreme opinions (which I rather suspect might have been happening a lot in recent years).
I have not found this to be true when it comes to politically aligned beliefs.
Over the past few years I’ve even begun to wonder about that though.
I think the issue is that when people debate someone, they want to "win" by having the other side accept defeat. You are right, that rarely happens, especially in politics.
However, as someone who has participated in countless formal debates, I'll share a secret: your goal in a debate isn't to convince the person you're debating. It's to convince the audience. And that happens quite frequently, even if it's not immediately visible to the debate participants.
I think the "everything is political" statement is technically correct but practically useless. In the workplace the discussion is mostly about allowing or disallowing politics that are irrelevant to the business.
You can believe something without proselytizing.
New or improved technologies shape communities.
Ignoring that is a political statement as well.
Just see how online media has changed discourse, how Amazon changed retail business, how business analytics change the way businesses work, how always being connected changes relations, ...
When developing technologies one can be Wernher von Braun "(where the rockets land and whether they contain explosives is) not my department" or one can consider consequences.Both are a political position, with consequences.
So what stance does The Art of Computer Programming take on communism?
I asked about the book. Everything is inherently HIGHLY political, thus this should be an easy question.
However, yes, some people would say that, for example, almost everything is political to some degree. I don’t know if I agree with them entirely. In case of Knuth, they would probably say that the choice of what to write about in the book (just like the choice of whether to be a computer scientist in the first place) cannot be divorced from his politics. Like the choice of someone to work in nuclear science or environmental science or “anything that pays good money” is informed by individual’s political positions. “Politics is water” is a great metaphor.
But a bit more serious there are different angles to this:
One is that the formalization Knuth did, is basis for the way other research on computer science has been setup.
His work on TeX as part of writing the books has great impact on how scientific reports are being written, which themselves have consequences.
And then there is all the consequence while implementing technology. How optimisations by better algorithms enable data mining, replacing manual labor, ...
Now of course impact differs. Not everybody is building V2 rockets (as well as Saturn rockets) like von Braun did, but there are many wheels in the machinery.
I myself am a small wheel in building database engines. The software is used by sports clubs to manage their members, shop owners to manage their inventory, companies to run their ads and air craft carriers to replicate strategic data across the ship, so that if one part is damaged, the other can still operate. If I were to leave, the organisation would continue developing, but the work has impact.
Discipline isn’t found in hiding. Someone who cannot discuss politics without polluting conversations isn’t disciplined, they’re unpracticed in conversing and thinking through their views.
You can talk about politics without proselytising. Why should discussing a topic even invoke the words like “belief” and “proselytising”?
Not only stating an opinion is compatible with a constructive discussion that could lead to a mutual adjustment of opinions—in fact, stating your opinion is often a pre-requisite to having a discussion that could lead to it being changed.
The magic happens when person A realizes that another, equally sane person B can think very differently about topic X. At that point, the person A has to either 1) write the person B off as crazy (not so easy when that person is obviously sane in every other way), or 2) realize that there may be something to it and ever so slightly adjust own opinion on topic X, or at least become more tolerant.
Not being able or willing to freely exchange and converge on opinions with people whom you routinely meet in real life, only discussing them online in your respective bubbles, is a sure way to having only more and more wildly incompatible and divisive opinions, and I suspect it is exactly what has been happening in recent years.
Only a small percentage of people are able to handle fundamental disagreements calmly and without it bleeding over to other interactions.
Will the SE and sales guy work as well together if the former knows the latter donates half his commission money to organizations that help kill babies?
> Will the SE and sales guy work as well together if the former knows the latter donates half his commission money to organizations that help kill babies?
A friend of mine is a vegan. Anywhere he works, to him, most of his coworkers not just help kill conscious beings that have self-awareness and feel pain, they literally eat them. Does this mean talking about what you have for lunch should be banned? Does this mean he should throw a fit any time he talks to a non-vegan?
Incidentally, we sometimes have good debates about the nature of consciousness, the effectiveness of individual veganism on reducing suffering, utilitarianism and deontology, vegan food options, etc. I feel being converted and I don’t mind it.
You're making the opposite case of what you think. Your Vegan friend is avoiding taking about politics constantly because they're not bringing up the fact that everyone is consuming the flesh of innocent animals every time they go for lunch. If they started talking about the politics and beliefs of veganism at every meal shared with coworkers, I think it would have a negative impact on those relationships.
What he is doing by expressing his philosophical position simply through his order is turning me subsequently ordering something with eggs into a philosophically loaded action as well. That, of course, shifts my opinion on the question.
I am making the point I am making: if we worked together, we should be free to discuss veganism or paleo diet (which I have discussed with a coworker previously) whenever either of us wanted, and he demonstrated being an adult about it when we do. If he asked to not talk about it because it made him uncomfortable, then we wouldn’t. I do not see why political discussions have to be different.
Politics are across all layers, including at technology decisions.
never find out about their shared passion is kind of cruel, too?
Maybe at a work function, team party, conference, etc.
That said, HN already has an extremely wide range of subject matter, so I wouldn’t say politics should be out of place here. It can, though, become a divisive distraction that disrupts other conversations, so I can appreciate that some limits are needed.
Like fish, most people do ignore it until it turns foul.
For me, ironically, the worst casualty of "politics" infiltrating everything is... politics. I mean the respectful and reasoned discussion of politics. Not that it was ever in great supply, but now it is non-existent.
What we should really aim for is thoughtful, civilized, and maybe even aesthetically pleasing discourse. That’s what educated people strive for.
Trying to “avoid politics” is like collecting seashells while a tsunami is rolling in.
Moreover, avoiding politics is impossible. It's all around you. Labor, entertainment, food, housing. Burying your head in the sand will only get you to have your ass in the air.
Maybe "be polite" should be a better rule than "avoid politics".
People who say "I'm not political" are deflecting to avoid conflict
That's what makes working democracies successful. But it seems that it also makes democracies vulnerable because people don't realize they have these benefits because they live in a working democracy. They start to think these benefits have nothing to do with politics and are just the way things are, like the laws of nature.
>citizens (...) largely don't have to care about politics
I didn't mean that it wasn't harmful if they didn't care; I meant that there was no clear, immediate incentive.
What about tariffs, that causes price increased. What about changes to the law, like congestion pricing in NYC
Authoritarian - leaves people alone in general as long as they stay out of politics. Examples: 90% of regimes throughout human history. Almost all post-soviet countries, almost all of Middle East and Africa, Singapore, etc.
Totalitarian - forces people into actively participating in leader's political goals and penetrates the daily life. North Korea, USSR, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy.
Directly, yes, but their policies still affect people.
For example, if an authoritarian leaders enacts economic decisions that damage the economy everyone is affected.
If I pay more for goods and services due to Tariffs aren't I being forced to participate in the leader's political goals?
So it would be totalitarian leaning for a leader to make a speech (watching is mandatory btw) saying that buying foreign is anti-patriotic and generating social censure, in addition to the tariffs, for people seen with foreign goods.
People literally do this on social media and they aren't even being forced.
As for the remainder, I do see the forced part but I'm not sure of how meaningful that is. If I don't agree with Trump but I'm forced to watch his speeches what does this do?
As for supporting state ideology, while not forced, there are hats, bumper stickers, flags to identify yourself
Imagine Trump forced everyone to wear his MAGA hat. What effect does it have? I don't think being forced to do this and that has much value
I think applying the authoritarian-totalitarian distinction in a democracy gets weird because democracies like totalitarian systems but unlike the archetypal authoritarian system expect the average person to engage in politics. So it's not a straight spectrum from democracy to totalitarian with autocracy in the middle.
And if someone forces everyone to wear their symbols, then it becomes obvious who the open dissenters are, and it becomes hard to tell who is neutral, who is enthusiastic, and who is silently dissenting, everyone looks like a supporter and people may start becoming more supporting simply because of apparent social consensus.
Anyway, here's what Wikipedia has to say. Maybe it clears up
> In exercising the power of government upon society, the application of an official dominant ideology differentiates the worldview of the totalitarian régime from the worldview of the authoritarian régime, which is "only concerned with political power, and, as long as [government power] is not contested, [the authoritarian government] gives society a certain degree of liberty."[6] Having no ideology to propagate, the politically secular authoritarian government "does not attempt to change the world and human nature",[6] whereas the "totalitarian government seeks to completely control the thoughts and actions of its citizens",[5] by way of an official "totalist ideology, a [political] party reinforced by a secret police, and monopolistic control of industrial mass society."[6]
The citizens elect the government so how can you not care about poltiics?
And remember voting is not mandatory and a lot of people don't vote. Those people are ultimately letting others decide, and a lot of them are hoping the voters are going to pick well, or at least decently.
Is that what people are worried about? What about the economy, civil rights, wars, etc.
I'm very confused about your argument. Is it that who you vote for doesn't matter because they won't personally attack you and the policies of whatever politician won't harm you?
>lot of them are hoping the voters are going to pick well, or at least decently.
Considering how the popular vote is almost always close to being split (you know like +10/-10) why would a non voter have that trust when from their view it's a coinflip
If someone doesn't particularly care about the outcome given the available options then it follows that how close or far the odds are isn't going to matter to them.
> Is that what people are worried about? What about the economy, civil rights, wars, etc.
It's important to be clear about the context. There's the thing, and then there's the thing relative to the election where only a few outcomes are possible once the ballot has been set. It is possible to care deeply about the former but not particularly about the latter, either because all options are either good enough or pointlessly bad from your perspective. And of course it is also possible to simple not care (ie be emotionally invested in and go about broadcasting your opinion to others) about the things you listed to begin with.
It's also important to keep in mind that "not caring" can be at odds with "ought to care", although that is obviously a subjective third party judgment.
I meant this more like what people could be worried about. In a functioning liberal democracy, there are things people usually don't worry about, which allows some people to just ignore politics. Sure the economy is an issue, but there isn't a serious communist contender in the election or a candidate wanting to start wars of conquest.
Imagine this election. Candidate A you think will deliver GDP growth of 2+-0.5%. Candidate B you expect to deliver GDP growth of 3+-2% growth. No other big difference between them. Maybe you prefer A, maybe you don't, but in the end you'll probably be relatively fine either way.
Now imagine this other election. Candidate A hates your ethnic group and you are likely going to be fired from your government job or worse if he wins. Candidate B is from your ethnic group and will do reverse Candidate A. Now the point is that this sort of election isn't supposed to happen in a functional liberal democracy.
Consequences are rarely this extreme, and even when they are it's not a product of personal or group targeting just a general policy like "ban fracking", which means even affected people can still carry on with their lives.
And also this is one of the reasons elections "work" at all. If the losers think they will be chased by the state after losing, there's no reason to participate in the election, might as well arm up before the polls and take your chances in the battlefield and/or negotiate directly with the other side's elites.
> I'm very confused about your argument. Is it that who you vote for doesn't matter because they won't personally attack you and the policies of whatever politician won't harm you?
> Considering how the popular vote is almost always close to being split (you know like +10/-10) why would a non voter have that trust when from their view it's a coinflip
My point is that it's a coinflip between two acceptable choices. Some of those nonvoters would be literally undecided if asked who they prefer. It may matter, but not that much. And even if it does, it may matter in a way where the consequences are hard to predict or not obvious.
I don't think there's a direct correlation between the ability to vote and caring about politics. People usually care about politics when it affects them negatively. I would guess that most people in most democratic systems don't have strong negative experiences with their governments and, thus, are not incentivized to care about politics.
Note that I'm not making an argument that they should not care. I think they should, but the very system that allows participation probably also decreases the incentive for most people to participate.
Opinion polls about political parties and leaders seem to always hover near the bottom end, at least in the US [1]
[1] there are always bumps after elections (change), war (nationalism), and tragedy (group sympathy)
A great truth. Even isolating yourself from society like a hermit is still a political decision: you are rejecting society as it is, and prefer to live in your own solo society. That's politics.
That is a nonsensical definition of that term. It implies that literally any action you take falls into the set "political" instead of outside of it. That defeats the purpose of the term. The point of qualifiers is to differentiate between different sorts of things.
Obviously the intention of the person using such a term is to distinguish between things. Thus such a rebuttal amounts to intellectual dishonesty by intentionally misinterpreting what was said.
Appealing to "well everything is connected" I'm not sure is useful. It's interesting from a semantics perspective the first few times you come across it maybe, then swaps around into being plain frustrating, then lands on just missing the point.
Finally, I think people who want to stay out of said party political meta I think are doing a pretty big favor to their mental health, and I really can't fault them one bit for it. No coincidence either.
"Party politics" is ill-defined, and so a "no politics" rule becomes an arbitrary hammer that bosses can use to smash employees. If I say "I'm going to get a COVID vaccine this afternoon" is that discussing party politics? In the UK, where I live, the vaccine was provided by the government, so I'm implicitly discussing the actions of the government. That is under any reasonable definition a discussion of politics.
"everyday party politics are spilling out and overwhelming a project's or industry's individual, internal politics" is how "no politics" rules are usually justified, but this was not what happened in the poster child cases of implementing "no politics" rules (37signals, Coinbase). 37signals in particular tried to spin it this way, but it was the actions of a group within the company approved by the founders that caused the problem. (Coinbase was just completely incoherent from the start. Their mission is something like "End economic inequality" which a reasonable person could take to mean anarchist or communist discussion is on topic.)
Every artificial segmentation of the real world is leaky. Just like the recognition that politics is everywhere, this too is not actually inquisitive. It's like arguing that stairsteps are chairs. They can be, but that doesn't make the word "chair" ill-defined.
> but this was not what happened in the poster child cases of implementing "no politics" rules
There is no such thing. These may be notable cases in your cohort, for me it's the first time I heard of these. And I've seen my fair share of these rules.
If it's the former, 1) it should be just that and 2) it isn't needed because it's never ok to start shit with coworkers that is unrelated to work. If someone spends all their time starting shit, whether about politics (however that is defined), sports, food choices, clothing, or anything else you can just fire them. No need to have a "no politics" rule.
Some employees either can't or won't see this, hence rules such as "no politics".
It is also illustrates the problem with discussing politics in an international forum. The KCL study of covid conspiracy theories (carried out during the pandemic) found that in the UK young people and those who identified as left wing were more likely to believe conspiracy theories. I am pretty sure this is significantly different from the US. Also matches things I have heard (e.g. my daughter met people at university who refused the vaccine because "we don't trust the Tories".
It is pretty common for Americans to assume that the Conservatives are equivalent to Republicans, and Labour are like the Democrats, which is very far from the truth. It has always been far from the truth but the reasons why change - e.g. in the 80s Thatcher and Reagan were not far apart, but that that time Labour were far to the left of the Democrats (actual socialists).
It your mental health is harmed while defending your political views it's possible your views are the issue.
For example if my view was that "domestic animals shouldn't be abused and penalties increased for such crimes" I wouldn't have mental health issues discussing this.
The views don't matter as much as how strongly they are held.
1. Avoid talking about politics
2. Learn to control your emotions when discussing politics even if you have a strong view.
I think 2 is a better solution otherwise the worse things get the more people will avoid talking about it.
It's worth the effort because, based on your example, if you really cared about the people of Gaza you need to stand up and defend them, not avoid the topic due to how uncomfortable it makes you feel
it might be reasonable if you have personal close links to Gaza (e.g. you are worried about family who live there), but otherwise it OUGHT to be very unusual.
That's another problem with political discussions at work - you're often not sure why someone has a particular beliefs and so it's hard to know whether disagreement will be taken as an abstract difference of opinion or as an attack on their family, friends, or homeland.
"Wait, you don't give a shit if like 10k families are killed?"
"No, no, it's like I don't care from an abstract point of view"
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Huntingdon_Animal_Cruelty)
Because it would make me pretty distraught, and I don't think that it's because anything is wrong with the idea of not abusing animals.
Even doing this mental exercise for the sake of this conversation is already extremely frustrating for me. And I don't think this should surprise you, or is anything strange or unusual.
Let's just be clear that something can be commonplace while also being a personal issue.
Incidentally, the response you're exhibiting here - a reflexive emotional rejection as opposed to critical thought - is closely related to the phenomenon being discussed here. That exact response is often (but not always) what leads to people becoming distraught in the first place. It's an emotional feedback loop.
Examining the context we see something of a dichotomy. That mental health being harmed by political discourse is likely to indicate a problem with personal views versus that being normal and expected depending on context. I'm presenting a third viewpoint tied to the example you provided. The idea that it is related to an emotional issue which is largely independent of personal views, that this is a relatively common thing to encounter, and that people should not be criticized for taking steps to mitigate personal issues.
In other words, I am largely agreeing with you but going on to point out that it's a personal issue deserving of long term work.
Disaffection lends itself easily to creating a Russia-style society. This all feels pretty Dugin-esque, and his proposition (return to values, reject interest/hope in politics because it is always flawed anyway, bind together under the state) fits perfectly, and is finding prominence at the perfect time.
Just my opinion, but to me this seems far more akin to Dugin than whatever Curtis Yavin is pushing
Not 100% sure what I wanted to say, maybe that said politics (and the political as a whole) wouldn't have invaded almost our entire lives without the help of technology.
Not we, some people got reliant on the funds from government. It is always at the cost of someone else. The tax the rich and bourgeoisie mentality is what led to Mao Zedong and Stalin, but no-one wants to learn about history anymore.
That should sound very familiar right about now.
But I think people are waking up, because things they took as non-political god given right is being made political and taken away.
What is the distinction?
People are not dumb. They know that politics is everywhere but they want to live and love and talk about things that are interesting.
Sadly, this crew includes the site's moderation.
I mean sorry but I'm not sure if you're being ironic. It sounds like something you'd read on ngate
Same person: Why is the world organized in such a dumb way?
Trump voters are stupid. This is a fact.
Right or left leaning, that's politics.
No, it's just recognising that it is silly to talk about politics, as certain views are just downvoted.
I'm not going to go into specifics of the topic because I don't want to start another episode, though I do have the complaint that such actions distort the discourse unfairly to one side. And I also understand that political biases are human nature and that they can never be fully eliminated. But at the same time, it would be harmful to pretend that the discourse on HN is apolitical, balanced or that it shields you from that sort of censorship. Imagine making a good-faith counterargument, only to have it flagged and removed because the opposition doesn't like it. And when asked, you get cited a point in the CoC, except that it's not applied uniformly and impartially in that thread. Makes you wonder what the purpose of flagging is at all! That will just put certain groups at an undisclosed disadvantage and lets harmful stereotypes flourish without any challenge. All we can do is to be forthright about this fact and try our best to have a civil debate.
Everytime you discuss politics on the internet, you entrench the current administration.
Disclaimer: This is not business advice and should be read using Cartman’s voice.
Step 1: Announce publicly that you are not renewing your contract.
Step 2: If the market has viable alternatives or the service you are negotiating isn’t that hard to replicate, other actors will manifest to fill in the gaps, especially if your business is attractive. (E.g., The top comment is building an alternative; other comments point to alternative services.)
Step 3: Congratulations, you now have leverage for a significant discount with your previous provider because they face the real prospect of losing your business entirely to a competitor. If the competitor is private, you can even double dip by investing in their company before attributing them the contract.
This sucks, plain and simple.
A lot of people seemed to have had this theory, despite all the evidence to the contrary.
It was all opinion. Trump said a lot of stuff before this election, but he said a lot of stuff before his first one too.
When people disagreed on what he might do, it was all guesses. There was no evidence to base anything on. Would his second term be restrained by people around him like in his first? That would be an evidence-based extrapolation. Would tariffs be all talk and little action, like in his first term? Extrapolating from evidence, they would be. But 2025 isn't 2017. Things would be different, but how? It's all guesses.
It's only hindsight that is 20/20.
Saying "there wasn't any evidence" is borderline bot-speak. Anybody who thought Trump 2.0 was going to be like the first round was simply not paying attention at all and anybody telling others it wasn't going to be like the first admin is either a Russian troll, the mainstream media, or just plain irresponsibly ignorant.
"Nobody could have foreseen this" is about the dumbest take I think I've seen so far.
Even the premise of their argument is silly -- "evidence-based extrapolation" lmao that's not how politics work at all.
Hopefully these 4 years energize people to vote. I know protesting and direct action and so on are also important, but the gradient is not negative for voting for every office you can vote for in every election.
The unfortunate part is that education is often also part of propaganda and spinning history for said propaganda. These days I wish education had a bigger emphasis on history and history should be looked at from different angles, like how the same thing is being taught from different angles.
It does. In higher education.
You cannot force someone to learn something. The mean-spirited bully not paying attention in high school history class and barely getting a C- to graduate didn't exactly learn anything about nuanced topics like "The Nazis didn't start the holocaust right away" and "Fascism is inherently incompetent, and that makes it so much worse"
If parents raise their kids to not consider education important (and millions of parents in the US have always done just so, we have an insane level of anti-intellectualism in this country), you won't get educated kids.
Every time someone says "I wish school taught <X>", plenty of schools EXPLICITLY DO THAT, and it doesn't work, because the person complaining was one of the kids crying "When will I ever use this" instead of paying attention.
The same adults who complain that school didn't teach them "critical thinking" are upset that school didn't walk them through the process step by step, as if you can't balance a check book with fucking basic algebra you learn by 4th grade. Meanwhile, 90% of the uproar about "new math" ends up being parents who can't even manage to understand basic word problems, you know, things which take critical thinking to work through?
I've had people complain that school should teach them how to calculate a mortgage, which is funny, because those people sat next to me in Precalculus as we literally did mortgage calculation problems.
The USA is struggling with multiple generations of people who have insisted that education is not only useless, but a liberal agenda, or even a devil-run plot to distract you from god. It's insane.
This euphemism has to end. I think you mean: "Hopefully these 4 years energize people to vote Democrat".
Why not just say it plainly instead of using supposedly non-partisan language? This neutral phrasing seems to be an appeal to a "silent majority" that agrees with you and disagrees with Republican leadership. What if that silent majority doesn't exist?
But personally, the reason I believe it does exist is two-fold:
1. The "My vote won't change anything" rhetoric only ever gets expressed by left-leaning people.
2. Only left-leaning people require endless purity tests for their political candidates and will refuse to vote for anybody that they don't think is the perfect candidate. These are the ones that talk about being fed up for having to choose between the lesser of two evils, then look like a Surprised Pikachu when Trump wins.
Then we are on course to lose our spot on top of the world, and I should probably plan to get laid off. Idk, I get what you mean, but not agreeing with Democrats (I don't really agree with them much) and wanting a stable country with a good economy are way different things. I can hold my nose and vote for someone who doesn't actively try to tank the economy, the same way many conservatives (especially religious ones), held their nose and voted for Trump
You are assuming there will be next elections that are free, fair, and matter.
Trump says a lot of things that ultimately doesn't matter, but he has also said, and is the type of brute to believe it, that he intends to stay in power. He and his cronies have successfully dismantled the checks and balances that should have prevented him from doing they, legally. IMO the only way he leaves the White House without stirring trouble is in a casket.
For example, a lot of people have forgotten, but the phrase "fake news" originally came about in the wake of the 2016 election about all the (actually false) misinformation that was spread on social media in the run up to the election. Trump adeptly then co-opted the term, so any news he didn't like he could just call it "fake news", and who was to say any news he called fake was any less fake than what people were calling fake before?
My guess is the 2028 elections will be marked by fraud, and then when people protest or object, Trump and the Republicans will just say "Hey, you called all those Jan 6 protesters traitors and said the election was secure, how is now any different? Now you're all the traitors."
The only belief that gives me hope these days is "History will judge the complicit."
But maybe this is an opportunity to do CVE better.
Okay, how? This sounds like looking for lemonade in a genocide.
It really doesn't. This level of catastrophising has no point. It would be nice if CVE continued to exist, but it wasn't close to perfect, and perhaps it can continue in another form. There's no particular reason the US taxpayer has to sponsor global security threat tracking any more than any other taxpayer or customer.
The point of having a global, shared database is a single, authoritative (more-or-less), semi-vetted repository that can hold vendor accountable externally without digital amnesia or downplaying issues, and global unique identifiers. If that takes an international nonprofit funded by bits of the free world who are okay with investing in commonwealth infrastructure, so be it. Those who don't understand what they're destroying so casually are ignorant, and possibly evil if they do understand.
No, it's the opposite. Things like this shouldn't be in the hands of a single government. They should be independent and funded by many parties. The part of your message that isn't catastrophisation is agreeing with exactly what I'm saying.
The CVE program is already a public-private partnership, which is BAD. CVE's board has people from Microsoft, Github, CrowdStrike, etc. Public-private partnerships are how the US government gets away with things a State should not be able to do: via private contractors. The US government has also run programs like Vault 7. The NSA has a vested interest in vulnerabilities not being made public until the US can fully exploit them Internationally.
The merger of state and corporate interests seems to be everyone's favorite overused word of the decade.
Thought experiment:
If roads were built by private companies, could a Government justify the expense maintaining a database of all the potholes?
They might take a step back and realize that it would be more cost-effective to just own the roads, in which case your thought experiment ends where we are, because where we are was a place reasoned to(to an extent).
Everyone crying about "Oh no! This government institution is going away! Private companies would never do this! They would use it for financial gain!"
Um.... It's already run entirely by private entities via government money. It's the literal definition of a "Public Private Partnership." You know, that way the US government get away with doing a lot of shady stuff via non-government contracts who are totally not state actors /s.
Some form of a foundation or NGO could be given a reasonable endowment from the industry to operate the CVE program.
O am quite hesitant to trust the DOD to keep track of software vulnerabilities. Some parts are developing and exploiting vulnerabilities. And given a fresh feed of what people find, and usually a delay from notification until publication, which may sometimes just be a bit longer of a delay, would allow the DOD to weaponize the vulnerability for their own use as well.
If it were privately funded, what incentive would these private companies have to track bugs for these open source projects that don't make money?
You didn’t say something wrong or controversial, just an opinion. Some ideologies love to pay things with other people’s wallets, and they’ll do whatever they can to pursue this.
That's why industry regulating itself doesn't work, and why government regulations exist.