You have successfully killed "toxic masculinity", formerly known as initiative, drive, and motivation. Now you complain that you can't find men that you consider engaging.

Another side effect of this is the Social Security web site, which millions of people depend on, has crashed five times in the last month. That couldn't have anything to do with the vast majority of its IT staff being fired, could it?

According to The Washington Post , "The Social Security Administration website crashed four times in 10 days this month because the servers were overloaded, blocking millions of retirees and disabled Americans from logging in to their online accounts."

I suspect that the greatly exaggerated press reports of the demise of Social Security has dramatically increased the number of people logging (and calling) in to check their accounts that the decrepit systems running their software are handling more traffic than has ever been seen before. Then the press can use these crashes (and long times on hold) as proof of their exaggerated reports.

The hosting site is a Chinese propaganda site.

This is the more abstract problem: We have a vaguely defined concept that we wish to estimate the extent of, but which we do not know how to directly measure. Therefore, we substitute a proxy metric that we can directly measure which we believe to be correlated with what we cannot directly measure. We then use that metric as a measure for what we do not know how to measure directly. Then, over time, people who are being measured find out how to game the proxy metric and it starts to lose its value. This is a frequent problem across many fields of human endeavor (e.g. "lines of code")

Actually, that is not true—it is merely an journalistic accusation. Elon has stated publicly that what guided the DOGE team on what to first focus their attention was agencies that refused to cooperate with the Presidents order. They interpreted the refusal as an indication that the agency had something to hide.

The article revealed that the US funding that enabled these attacks was USAID, the agency just shut down by Trump and Musk. I expect that we will be seeing a lot less of these types of attacks now.

Since a direct cut&paste wasn't used, that implies some kind of automated (AI) process was used to create this article. Is this the fault of the poster, or is that Slashdot's new MO?

the company had accidentally left more than a million lines of data available unsecured

"a million lines of data"? This tells us a lot about the quality of the journalist and of the article.

Your first sentence was a fair comment. But the rest of your comment exposes complete ignorance of economics and investment, and shows that you have completely bought into the propaganda of the left, such as AOC's claim that, "No one ever makes a billion dollars. You take a billion dollars."

The reality is that creating wealth does not take it from anyone. Rather, it is created from nothing for the benefit of all. Think for a moment: none of the wealth our society has today (either material wealth or money) existed a thousand years ago, and almost none of it existed 200 years ago. Where did it all come from? Someway created it from nothing but an idea and the willingness to take risks to turn that idea into reality. And by doing so, and creating paying jobs for those who didn't have them, everyone benefited. You could do it, too, if you wanted. This is where our toilets, our washing machines, our refrigerators, our automobiles, our telephones, our airplanes, our computers, our mobile phones, and everything came from. None of that was stolen from anyone and we all benefit from it.

The richest people in the world are only rich because other people find what they created (both the things and the companies that created them) so valuable to them that they were willing to exchange their labor to possess them. The billionaires are "rich" not in cash (which they tend to have very little of), but because people have shown a great desire to possess shares of what they have created (i.e. shares of stock in their companies), running up the prices for them. For example, two of the "wealthiest" people today (e.g. Elon Musk, Warren Buffett) have almost no cash at all and are worth so much only because people are crazy to own shares in the companies they created and own large portions of.

This deliberate creation of a paperclip optimizer seems to the height of hubris and stupidity. At least the threat posed by the paperclip optimizer was inadvertent, whereas this experiment was more like, "lets deliberately create a goal that we know to be highly risky and dangerous and see what happens."

Wasn't the gain-of-function research that likely led to the creation and release of COVID-19 a sufficient demonstration of this stupidity? Presumably, no one intended for it to be accidentally released out of the lab. So why do AI researchers believe that their monster won't be released or escape out of the lab? It would seem that people in these fields thinks themselves smarter than everyone else and incapable of error.

German productivity is not only down, but has been on a downward trajectory for the past six years.

As a physics grad student at UCLA, I worked out this identical problem in 1982 for undergraduate students in a homework session for an introductory physics course, and my solution yielded the exact same results. The problem had been assigned by the professor for those students, so it doesn't take a "theoretical physicist" to figure out.

Does everything have to be about race? :-) How is solar power a race? If one country does well at it, how does that somehow cause another country to lose anything? In a real race, you lose the award. In solar energy, it only matters that you get there—not that you get there first. The quicker everyone gets there, the better off we all are; we are not somehow worse off because other got there quickly or first.

You can always count on the 50% that are below average to support a union, which seeks to establish the same salary for the same job, regardless of productivity or quality of work; the union negotiates the wages, not the worker. The above-average workers are willing to put in more time and effort and, therefore, can negotiate a better salary; they will only be harmed by a union. The above-average workers are are the target of the envy of the lower-productivity workers that want the union.

Is this an ad?