Advisors can be in government… if it’s a government department even an advisory one, it’s part of government… and thus its employees are in government.
It’s currently just in name only. But that is likely to change soon in some form yet to be revealed when the new government is sworn in.
So legally it isn’t in government yet, however as it is officially part of the elected governments plans, you can make a sensible argument that it is part of the incoming transitional government that has been elected and while having now power due to not being sworn in yet, is indeed part of government by nature transition teams and the president elect having status in government by way of things like security briefings and other rights and privileges normally only held by the incumbent government like increased security protection…
It would be like saying a government in exile (a well established precedent of history) isn’t a government and none of the people in it are in government…
It is not going to become an actual part of the federal government, as a new agency, unless Congress makes it an agency. And if they do, then Musk likely would not make the transition to head it as that would involve too many conflicts of interest for him (at least if we still consider laws as things that matter in this country, that is definitely a concept that's quickly being discarded by both the elected leadership and the electorate so you may be right).
Ok, I’m really not sure why the simple answer isn’t getting across here.
His position as co-head of the nominal “department of government efficiency” only exists due to the legitimacy it has been granted by the recognition granted to it by the incoming administration… otherwise we would all be calling it some variety of the first buddy’s pet think tank and arguing over if the incoming administration would even pay attention to it or not… that is a government granted position of power, a position that it is pretty hard to argue is not part of the government that grants it legitimacy… therefore making it a position in government… even if it’s unpaid and advisory… it’s still practically in the government if not legally (for all the conflict of interest reasons you highlight)…
I’m not trying to make a civics or political science case here… I’m talking politics as the exercise of power by government upon the governed… he is currently having breakfast lunch and dinner with the incoming president, making arguments and shaping the cabinet, and contributing to the transition team… he’s involved with government… he’s “in” it.
They in all likelihood, have already started… to some extent…
Given the geopolitical context it’s extremely unlikely that they were willing to make a statement, even as vaguely shaped as the whole, “nato or nukes and we choose nato” thing was… in essence, why mention nukes are a possibility if you don’t think you can realistically build them?
And this makes a lot of sense, because Ukraine was at the heart of a lot of the most sophisticated work done in the Soviet Union, and as befits their legacy as the birthplace of both nuclear weapons and nuclear power in the Soviet Union, they were (prior to the invasion and war) the 7th largest user of Nuclear power in the world by total output at 13 gigawatts, and they are only beaten by France in terms of how much of their national energy production is powered by nuclear at 55%… they have retained a significant nuclear industry and they were even considering starting up domestic nuclear fuel fabrication prior to the war, which is indicative of them being able to do a lot more than just “run a nuclear power plant”, coupled with their domestic uranium reserves and the wartime entrepreneurial spirit they have brought to the entire field of drone warfare… I don’t doubt that someone somewhere in the government had a thought one day cursing about the failure of their allies to follow their obligations under the Budapest Memorandum, and decided to get some pretty smart people to work out just how hard it would be to get back their nuclear capability. With such a significant nuclear industry, getting plutonium and just skipping all the difficult uranium enrichment stuff would be comparatively easy for them.
And from prior published research on the matter of nuclear proliferation, it’s not as hard as a lot of people would likely presume… in 1964, the USA commissioned the “Nth Country Experiment” which can be sort of summed up as “we took 3 brand new phd physicists with no idea how to make a nuclear weapon, and timed how long it took them to work out how to build one without letting them peek at any of the classified info on how the existing nukes were built, they have to do the work from scratch with just public info and their brain smarts” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nth_Country_Experiment … from scratch with, significantly less information than we all have available to us online today, if took the three of them 3 years to do. Ukraine has all the modern public information you or I have access to, likely a not insignificant amount of leftover classified information from the Soviet era, even if it’s just oral history and the spotty memories of long retired experts who were involved in building Soviet era nukes… and as recently demonstrated in the new domestic tactical missile and long range drone development efforts they have the capability to stand up domestic production of complex weapon systems… I think they know exactly how long it would take, they have a timeline, they have a rough idea what it would look like and they probably have a list of potential delivery platforms from their current arsenal… they just probably haven’t started actually, “making anything”
Well that’s kinda awesome to see, at long last it’s coming out of the development pipeline and now there are legitimate solid state batteries in consumer available products…
Interesting to have a more complete picture of how this kind of YouTube scam works, with all the little differences between the normal and the music half of YouTube pointed out clearly along the way.
They don’t care about that. I mean it’s the opening paragraph…
> I just want to see it. Just once. I want to watch that earthquake ripple through all of global electronic timekeeping. I want to see which organisations make it to January morning with nothing on fire.
Ok… so looking from the outside in Australia… a country with mandatory voting that always happens on weekends to make it incredibly easy for people to do their civic duty, thus allowing us to levy a fine against anyone who doesn’t vote… with electoral divisions and regional boundaries managed by a specific government department that has been structured so as to prevent politicians doing any gerrymandering…
In the USA it’s clear that voter suppression and gerrymandering have allowed for partisan groups of elites with both progressive and conservative views to hold onto power for decades as the voting public they represent feels more and more like their vote does not matter, or that they are unable to vote due to their financial situation (no time off, no money for transit, no money for required identification, required identification needs a fixed address and their homeless, etc)… it’s pretty dire… and I have always been kind of shocked how it’s managed to limp along with such statically low voter turnout for decades… money is speech (citizens united) and media are allowed to treat made up news as entertainment with no need to distinguish really from fiction (FCC vs Fox News)…
I don’t see any way the situation doesn’t eventually lead to demagoguery… because at some point your public is just so disenfranchised that a demagogue doesn’t have much work to do beyond “I’m not them, get the fuck out and vote for me so I can change things”…
But the problem with a demagogue is that even if they don’t turn dictator, they are by nature of their rise to power, going to be very dictator like, it’s their choice, their charisma, their force of will that motivated the voting public… the only problem is that the checks and balances to prevent the demagogue from becoming a dictator, have only been barely tested, first with FDR, then with Nixon, one who died before the change to the system was relevant, the other begrudgingly bowed out before the system had to fully engage with the issue...
Many political scientists believe that the parliamentary system used in most of Europe, and in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, is superior to the presidential system in producing political stability and good policy
Many have also said that Latin America has experienced the brunt of the negatives of the presidential system, while the US largely escaped them due to wealth, cultural norms, and maybe even good luck. But over the last few years, things in the US have been degenerating to the point that maybe they aren’t escaping those negatives any more
Maybe one of these days it will get so bad that Americans will listen to these political scientists and switch to the Westminster system. Maybe what America really needs is a Prime Minister. The Westminister system doesn’t require a monarchy, see Ireland and Malta for examples of parliamentary republics with predominantly British political traditions. In a parliamentary republic, you have a figurehead President while the Prime Minister holds the real power. Other examples of parliamentary republics (albeit non-Westminster) include Austria, Germany and Israel
It’s about abstractions, and a lot of the time visual programming tools don’t get it right. Either they are too abstract and your limited to a set of nodes/blocks that are not powerful enough and adding more is challenging because the abstraction is so high there’s lots of overhead to get there, or the abstraction capabilities are too low and the ability to encapsulate and extend visually programmed code for reuse in other places or larger projects is hampered by the design.
About the only “general purpose” visual programming language I’ve ever come across that is genuinely trying to be able to do all of it, is DRAKON https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAKON
And even then, complexity can be a challenge because depending on how the software is architected the diagrams get unwieldy to read as more logic lives on a single layer… DRAKON does have a pair of little tricks that makes it a bit less confusing to work with than a lot of node based programming tools. The first is that lines cannot cross so you avoid the tangled knot diagram issue, the logical flow is relatively clear from your entry points to your exit or loop back to start. The second is that it serves as an abstraction to other programming languages, allowing for use of traditional tools and techniques to debug and analyse the output programs if needed, and then once you’ve identified the problem you can make changes to the diagram, export and then compile the program again after confirm your diagram changes had the desired results in the intermediate format.
And before anyone asks what’s the point why not just program in the target language? First I’d like to point out that TypeScript is a thing, and then second I’d like to highlight that it was designed to aid in the comprehension and maintenance of algorithms in the aerospace software world, it’s meant to allow you to look at a diagram see the data flow and logical code paths and visually check that you haven’t forgotten things, heck you could confirm you had covered all your necessary conditions with some coloured pencils on a printout… which might feel foolish in an era of automated checking tools which we have today, but this was developed in the the Soviet Union in 1986 as part of the Buran space program, it solved their genuine needs for how to make checking code for correctness easier for humans, and has stuck around because even with automation it’s one of the few visual programming languages that managed to strike the balance between going to high level or giving too few tools for abstraction.
Nothing is perfect of course, it has issues, like every programming language does, but it’s been a useful little tool from time to time when I needed to collaborate on fiddly algorithms with non-programming experts who understood what the software needed to be doing way better than I did, and I understood way better how to make the software do it than they did. I’d encourage anyone who ever gave visual programming a shot to check it out even just for the sake of curiosity, and possibly learning a useful new flowchart diagramming standard even if you never use the compiler.
