I worked as a developer in electronic payments for 5 years and we had to go through a months long process to certify the code with the financial system. My bosses were paranoid of any changes I made (to a silly degree) and we had a silly amount of automated tests.
We were a small startup with an underpaid staff and I’m not sure if more than 1000 people used our software. What they’re doing is completely reckless.
You’re telling me you want to update a typo from ‘teh’ to ‘the’ but it’s in the same package as this important file? Fuck that, that’s another 3 weeks of certification.
I guess there are no checks and balances that apply?
Sorry, no. We’d need 60 votes in the Senate and a majority on the SCOTUS to stop this.
Sorry, no, he meant there are no checks -as in bank checks- because all the balances -as in account balances- are now zero after all the money has now disappeared.
So, literally, no checks and balances.
Why do we need both congress and the judiciary? Can’t congress kick him out all by themselves?
SCOTUS declares the impeachment was done wrong for some magical reason. Trump refuses to recognize it. And cue the pre-documentary Civil War that released recently.
To stop it through the government
Technically, this is the executive branch working within itself.
Now, the check on executive stupidity to this extreme is impeachment, but that’s never gonna happen with the Republican party in charge of both houses of Congress.
US is fucked. Is this going to be a Reichstag moment?
We are one rm -rf away from away from being absolutely fucked.
You didn’t say sudo, so it’ll be ok.
Simon says sudo.
This 25-year-old always logs in as root
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. I hate ittttt
They’re past that, honestly. The SCOTUS decision on the POTUS being above the law was that moment.
The POTUS has the same power that Hitler wielded after the Reichstag fire. Then they elected the worst person to have that power.
You know the person weighing Hitler down was warmonger president Paul Hindenburg. There’s none of them in the US, and the only judiciary that could, won’t stop him.
Yeah but they still need some sort of excuse to declare an emergency, impose Marshall Law and round up all the Democrats and “DEI” workers. The functional collapse of the government would be very convenient for them.
Fyi, it’s martial law.
Nah if this happened, trump would say that each person now owes him millions of dollars (scaling based on assets) and MAGAS would line up to thank him for shielding them from the evil banks
Just wait until they allow bitcoin transfers over tor… Its a featured not a bug…
What happened in Albania was that a bunch of people, basically, stole most of the money in the country. It caused a civil war, sort of. Nobody ever got their money back either.
I would like to say it’s more complicated than that, here, but I’m not sure that it is. My one consolation is that Musk and Trump have not the slightest idea what they’re fucking with or what they’re up against, if it really gets its dander up at them, but that’s at minimum 40% wishful thinking on my part.
They’re specifically putting in place a measure to hide that they blocked payments. So the government books will read that it was properly paid but the money won’t go.
I wonder what they could possibly want to do with that money. Politically they could just lie about paying it. They’ve done that to great success already. So for what possible reason could they want to spoof the accounts book?
I would like to say it’s more complicated than that, here, but I’m not sure that it is.
The US has infinitely deep pockets, practically speaking. That produces a lot of fraud and embezzlement, but its not like you can just walk away with the real material assets of the country (particularly since so much has already all been carved up and privatized out).
What you can do is break down the flow of commerce passing through the federal government and send a bunch of contractors and federal staffers spiraling into bankruptcy. All those hospitals that rely on Medicare/Medicaid payments, all the MICs that the Pentagon has to pay to keep delivering goods and services, all the folks on SS getting a direct deposit… You could fuck up a lot just by stalling when those payments get processed.
It’s more complicated, without a doubt. But that doesn’t improve the situation. We already saw what happened when the private sector financial flow got snarled up in 2008. God only knows what’s going to happen when Musk and Trump decide to start labeling half the Treasury’s recipients “DEI”.
Strap in, folks…
Yeah. American’s wealth is not in the computers of the federal reserve. We have a continent’s worth of resources; armies upon armies of smart, committed, talented people; education; strong businesses; technical knowledge of an incredible variety; and most importantly, we’re still attractive enough (or were, as of last year) to be attracting the best and brightest of the world to come and add to the fire and keep it going. For as much as we’ve been fucking it up for the last fifty years, that all still remains true to a pretty large degree. Everything that happens in the treasury department draws off of that capital. Nothing that happens out in the world depends, at the root, on the computer that Musk now has access to.
But, it’s also true that the financial world is a city in the clouds. Pop the bubble, and sometimes it takes quite a long time to rebuild and inflate back to its former size. Maybe it’s a good thing. Maybe it’s a catastrophe in the making. I don’t know, to be honest. But “strap in” sounds just about fucking right, it’s not going to be simple or smooth.
The “wealth” of empire is in petrol-dollars, saudi tyrants, environmental destruction, international exploitation/theft, endless violence, etc.
armies upon armies of smart, committed, talented people; education;
lol.
Yeah, true that. There’s a whole history of theft and oppression that I’m glossing over there. I do think that about 50% of it was legitimate hard work.
I also think it is fascinating that, after 50 years of the working class going to open war with capitalism to fight for a decent way to live and a decent system (1880-1930), the US spent the next 50 years becoming the most powerful country on earth. I think those two are highly related and the connection is almost never talked about. We spent a lot of the years before 1880 stealing and oppressing just as hard, and it didn’t really do shit for us in terms of building a modern-US-style type of wealth and privilege.
The implications under that theory for what’s about to happen, based on what the current system is for how long, are pretty unsettling to me.
It was also kind of sort of every other first world economy getting bombed into the ground twice in a row which left the US as the only major manufacturing centre for a long time and able to reap massive benefits from that position.
Yeah, but there are always big world events that someone could have capitalized on. China could be the dominant power today, or South America. The US just hit on a successful formula for it in a way that a whole lot of other governments and groupings of people did not, and I’m saying that having a massive population base that genuinely believed in the program that the government was selling was a big part of why that happened.
It didn’t happen on its own, the people had to fight for it against active deadly government resistance. But once it happened, it turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to either the people or the government. And then, not knowing what they had, the government and the people let it fall to ruin, and now we’re fucked.
it’s not going to be simple
Sadly, while the myriad ways that this could play out from here are yet unknown, some things really are just flat that simple that we can guarantee them.
e.g. tell a child “you better do this before I count to 5! 1… 2… 3… 4… 4 and a half… 4 and a quarter… 4 and uh…” - do you see what we’ve lost? This was a test, in the same way that every single thing everywhere is always a test. The goalposts are now shifted: this much they can do - there is no use pretending that we will suddenly decide to halt their next set of actions, or the ones after that, or the ones after that, etc. “First they came for” is happening now, LIVE.
The ruling by the Supreme Court that a sitting President could do anything he ever wanted - including assassination of any American citizen anytime for any reason, iirc without much if anything in the way of oversight (although I never did get clarity on that point) - already ended our “democracy”, months before the voting. Biden may not have chosen to use it, but the goalposts had already been shifted even then.
Even if we had elections again 4 years from now, and I see no reason that we would bother (for the same reason that Trump promised us that he had never so much as heard of Project 2025, during the election, except in this case he’s outright said that we will not), the ratchet has already been sunk in, and the do-nothing Democrats will do… absolutely nothing about it. Man I sound like a crazy conspiracy theorist or even a subversive agent but… the facts and conclusions should stand or fall on their own merits regardless.
This is the new normal. You’ve seen the link I’m sure, but here it is again for easy reference: https://youtu.be/5RpPTRcz1no. And the Democrats are silent, to save their own families from the death threats that they are literally and actually receiving (https://www.reddit.com/r/Connecticut/comments/1ieiom5/senator_chris_murphy_on_why_the_democrats_are/?share_id=Ce7meV-39mMJsjvxXgn9N).
Democracy has been on the decline now since before I was alive, so it’s not exactly unexpected, just nerve wracking as we go through this transition. It’s also simply a natural consequence: this is what the people want: to not have to make decisions anymore. We could have… well, in the past we could have done things, whereas instead, this is what we’ve done: nothing. And it is what we will continue to do, I predict, bc it’s what we are good at, so long as the price of eggs and gas isn’t too awfully high…
Democracy has been on the decline now since before I was alive, so it’s not exactly unexpected, just nerve wracking as we go through this transition. It’s also simply a natural consequence: this is what the people want: to not have to make decisions anymore. We could have… well, in the past we could have done things, whereas instead, this is what we’ve done: nothing. And it is what we will continue to do, I predict, bc it’s what we are good at, so long as the price of eggs and gas isn’t too awfully high…
This I 1,000% agree with. We get the quality of government that we deserve. And, since most people have been absolutely checked out from any attempt at controlling or even taking an interest in what’s happening, what we’re getting is a bunch of plundering thieves in charge of the granary. It’s been okay, sort of, not really. People have been hurting. But what’s about to happen is going to be astronomically worse. Whether people wake up and start trying to wrestle the levers of power back into their own control again, or whether it’s even possible to recover from this point, I don’t really know. I have some level of hope but I have no idea.
What will really blow all of our minds, is that once we get this tiny little matter of the fate of the USA under control (I’m mostly joking here bc I think there’s a strong, >50% chance of that never happening), there is still the fact that climate change has radically altered our word forever.
And the internet too.
And globalization as well.
Oh and automation likewise.
Meanwhile, to deal with all of THAT, we have… “Congress”.
No matter what, things will never be the same again, nor would those of us who think about it even want to. You can’t un-pop a bubble, and why would we want to make a new one? (bc that worked out so well the last time)
Damnit, I’m not trying to be fatalistic here.
Yeah. All the problems in the US government are self-created. They’re not small, but they’re also purely solvable, we’re just too incompetent at the government level to get it done.
Climate change is a real problem. The kind that can’t be solved instantly if you can just get 60 people to all vote the right way, one day, when it gets too bad. And it doesn’t go away if you move.
? That’s actually extremely secure
Yes but hard to trace. Not impossible to trace but allows government corruption money to flow.
Is that a joke? Its a public ledger thats easier to trace than USD
that will prove very lucrative to the industrious hacker in the third world.
He also works 18 hours a day and sleeps on a cot in his office. That’s how you know his work is always flawless.
I’ve seen a ton of studies that have proven that the quality of your home life is directly related to your own production which could profit myself and even more so the company I work for, and I have to say, what about next quarters numbers?
We worry about that next quarter.
And I’m sure early 20s adults that hang out with the muskrat are 100% drug free. Definitely not amphetamined or ketamined up or anything.
Holy shit lol
I’m more than a decade into my engineering career. Nobody pushes directly to prod on my team, not even me. Everyone gets reviewed and tested.
I read this and cackled in public. Because my god, however bad you think this is, it’s way fucking worse. Idk what a reasonable reaction to this is but wow. Just wow. Fucking. Cooked.
Like member how everyone talked about graft in Russia resulting in funds meant for military maintenance being siphoned off the top instead of being used for what it was supposed to be used for? This is like that, except you don’t even have to have any excuses or anything, the money just… Disappears.
what i think this really means is that the treasury was hacked a long time ago and marko is making changes that were already written beforehand….
otherwise this would be impossible.
they entered those systems like three days before significantly altering the code….You can absolutely push changes to a system that you don’t actually understand.
You might be right, but consider the alternative: “someone thinks that they’re so much smarter than the people who originally designed, implemented, and maintained a system integral to the functioning of modern society that they dismiss out of hand the idea of caution when dealing with it in situ.”
If someone of that description were in this situation, what do you suppose their behavior would be?
dude it’s not even written in a language this kid understands… he’s just implementing a patch other people wrote
No need you can just get an llm to convert your JavaScript into COBOL
good point
We told people to stop giving Brawndo to crops and now the economy computer failed. Brought to you by Carl’s Jr.
If they completely break the payments system, does that mean government employees stop getting paid?
Like no more federal government? No more ICE? No more military? No more FBI?
It means all of a sudden you have a lot of well armed and well connected people out of a job, while probably the US dollar becomes worthless as a currency. If you live in the US and havent though about owning a weapon, now would be the time to quickly get one. You never know when the currency becomes worthless and police will demand all your food reserves at gunpoint.
Break out the Whiskey, we’re done boys. It was a good run.
I think the worst thing that could happen is capitalism continuing to function as “normal”.
Musk robs the treasury blind then Trump pardons him. Biggest heist ever.
Ugh I hate it.
Fucker thinks hes Gus Gorman in Superman III and thinks salami slicing is his get rich quick scheme.
Honestly this could be the best thing possible if anonymous takes advantage and just… Deletes all data on the US dollar…
Short term, people would suffer. Long term, our children might get a future they currently don’t have thanks to the capitalists.
Isn’t this the plot to Mr Robot?
Yeah, Mr. Robot is based on the Anonymous movement.
It’s a common hacker dream since looooong before that. Bringing the score to zero.
Fight club also.
Someone forgot rules one and two…
Pushing code directly to Prod in a payments system handling trillions of $ is going to end in an almighty bang…
In their quest for ever moar, the capitalists sowed the seeds of their own destruction…
Heads up if you get a lot of tech news/discussion from HN they appear to be heavily censoring submissions along these lines.
Do you mean Hacker News?
Holy fuck.
