What I'm hearing from my friends - many of whom have helped build and scale some of the most successful tech companies on the planet - is that no engineer is an exceptional one without a modicum of ethics and wisdom.
I know you want to believe this is principled, but...
- the Social Security Administration, in the first MONTH of 2025, has outlaid $395 billion of spending.
- the Department of Defense, in the first MONTH of 2025, has outlaid $250 billion of spending.
- USAID's annual budget is $38 billion annually, so we could realistically estimate that, if they've outlaid $3 billion this year thus far, they've spent 0.4% of what those other two departments have.
Let's call this like it is: USAID is a bogeyman to Trump and Musk and is a threat to the administration's efforts toward becoming a "hard power" country. If they really cared about spending, they would have gone elsewhere first.
Thankfully it took less than a month to save its 38 or 47 billion dollar budget, whichever is the case. I am 100% certain that more extreme measures will be taken after this small, quick victory to address the deficit.
Their priority is well placed: This org sent a lot of money to shell corps, chosen political operators, and other intelligence operations that was a clear and net negative to the tax payers. It establishes bona fides that DOGE is serious and capable. It gives them experience cutting through the bureaucratic morass on a small target. It's supporters are outed as being in on the take. You are correct that they should move to bigger targets at some point, but those outlays you mentioned are far more favored in the public eye and should be approached much more cautiously and with planning. In the meantime, the intelligence operatus of the American Empire has been off its leash for some time, so cutting its funding will hamper its ability to harm the American people further.
"This org sent a lot of money to shell corps, chosen political operators, and other intelligence operations that was a clear and net negative to the tax payers."
As someone whose organization has benefitted from USAID grant funding, I should make it explicit that not everything is as you see or hear through Elon's Twitter feed.
It is deeply unwise to eliminate an organization entirely without exploring its net effects.
Oh? Was your org in charge of overthrowing small governments or was it charged with spreading feminism, atheism, or other American propaganda to people who do not want it? USAID was as close to objectively evil as it is possible to be. Show me otherwise if you'd like but there doesn't seem to be much to hold up as positive from that org.
The question you're really wanting to ask is "why don't tech companies want to be good corporate citizens?"
It's because of profit. Amazon opposing the per-employee tax that would provide critical city services should help explain exactly where their priorities lie.
Ed Lee proposed a plan a while back to not base business tax on what we pay our employees but to look at company's revenue/sales amount, and sector. For example schools would have a lower business tax.
He also proposed instead of a flat tax, it would be progressive like income tax. Larger companies would pay a higher effective rate than small ones in the same sector but the Board of Supervisors didn't approve.
The City of SF has trust of over $24 billion and also administers a defined benefit retirement plan for ~65,000 current & retired employees of SF. And the President of the Retirement board who manages 24 Billion I believe is not someone from Goldman or finance background but a police officer?
SF priorities: Get electric bikes and scooters out of SF but create an unsafe city and homeless to walk around naked and dropping their poop and needles everywhere is okay
Did you read the response of Amazon and other companies? It was less "we want higher profits" and "you have enough money, you're just spending it in the wrong places".
Ahhh yes. And Amazon has no incentive to mis-characterize the reason they want to lower their tax burden. I dislike the waste of tax money on defense boondoggles. I still pay my taxes.
"Can a company that's not even close to profitable be considered a "market leader"?"
Sure it can. Uber and Twilio are generally considered, far and away, as market leaders in their respective spaces; Uber is massively unprofitable and Twilio was operating at a loss at the time of its IPO.
Market leadership is a function of production and capacity, not profitability.
- Two feature branches were created based on master at the same time.
- Branch1: committed a change to readme and it's pulled into master via PR.
- Branch2: committed a change to readme, raised a pull request (PR#3), and the diff doesn't show the line that was added with the branch1 pull request.
In this example, the PR is telling me there's a conflict and I need to merge master with the PR branch (this is good). What it doesn't tell me is where the conflict is.
Solution, merge the base branch into the interim PR branch. The result will show you the conflict and properly represents what would happen if this PR is accepted. (Bitbucket does this)
No, I'm saying that the "contribution activity" timeline thing is leaning towards information overload (hard to follow; there is a lot to look at). I felt that the last implementation (which focused on the high-level activities that one could click into) made sense.
I'm not a designer or anything so take my feedback with a grain of salt.
Got it - appreciate the feedback! We've been hearing some requests to provide flexibility over what's shown on the profile timeline, so your sentiments are being echoed.
