UnderpantsWeevil comments on A 25-Year-Old Is Writing Backdoors Into The Treasury’s $6 Trillion Payment System. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 33 points 2 years ago* (10 children)

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...

My one consolation is that Musk and Trump have not the slightest idea what they’re fucking with or what they’re up against

I think they've discovered, over the last twelve years, that nobody is guarding the hen house. You really can just send four schmucks with a basic understanding of Quickbooks into the US Treasury and have them start meddling with trillions of dollars in cash flow.

What they're "up against" is a paper tiger.

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[–] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat [S] 14 points 2 years ago (9 children)

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.

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[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 13 points 2 years ago (4 children)

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...

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[–] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat [S] 5 points 2 years ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 4 points 2 years ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat [S] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

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.

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[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 2 points 2 years ago

No no no no no, you are supposed to reassure me with nice-sounding "factual" statements!? Everything will be okay bc... Cap't America, or sumtin.

What I know is that if people have principles but not convictions, then they have neither.

And unfortunately, greed is a principle.:-(

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[–] technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 2 years ago* (3 children)

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.

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[–] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat [S] 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] CheeseNoodle@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

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.

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[–] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat [S] 2 points 2 years ago

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.

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