zlacker

Urgh, this is nasty:

  curl -i 'https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook'
  HTTP/2 302 
  content-length: 0
  location: https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/spotlighting-the-world-factbook-as-we-bid-a-fond-farewell/

They didn't even have the decency to give it a 410 or 404 error.

Same for all of the country pages - they redirect back to the same story: https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/morocco/

The thing was released into the public domain! No reason at all to take it down - they could have left the last published version up with a giant banner at the top saying it's no longer maintained.

>>simonw+(OP)
(Shrug) This is what the American people voted for. Destruction of institutions, abandonment of traditions, concealment of resources.

>>Camper+T6
Actually I don't think he did win. Not legally, but he is there now.

>>sylos+Gb
nope, us Americans are truly the kind of people to vote for him, no matter how bad a reason each of them had

>>Camper+T6
I'd be surprised if there was a single American who had the CIA Factbook as the deciding factor in determining their vote. It being shutdown is more evidence of how broken the American political system is rather than an indication of the will of the people.

>>slg+Ck
I think it's a pretty strong condemnation of the CIA that they can't find something more important to flamboyantly kill though.

https://www.creators.com/read/thomas-sowell/03/13/budget-pol... (you can stop reading after the first couple paragraphs, it goes into federal budget politics circa 2013)

>>slg+Ck
Right, World Factbook single issue voters probably don't exist.

That aside, something that frustrates me about US politics is that I rarely see any evidence of consideration given to taxpayers who want value for their money as opposed to having their taxes cut.

I pay taxes here. I like it when those taxes spent on wildly ROI-positive initiatives like the World Factbook.

The Trump lot appear to be killing off a huge range of useful things that I like getting in exchange for the taxes I pay.

>>simonw+hm
Sure, but this is based on a fundamental trust in governments ability to spend money effectively. The ineffective spending has been in the news way more than the effective spending, so some people take this to mean all of the spending is ineffective.

I don’t know how to square this skepticism of government against very vocal “patriotism” coming from the trump camp, but humans can contain multitudes, I guess?

>>slg+Ck
As a single issue, probably not. However, the meta-issue that they did vote for was eliminating anything the government pays for (other than military, ICE, or related to drilling oil)

>>bdcrav+ro
Maybe in the philosophical sense in that this is what their vote wrought, but there is absolutely no way to conclude that people wanted their institutions dismantled. The number of Americans who voted for Donald Trump was nearly identical in 2020 and 2024 once we compensate for population growth (22.4% of the population vs 22.7%). Anyone making drastic conclusions on the will of the people is just making something up whether they are conscious of that or not.

>>daedrd+gh
Very much "that's not who we are! ... Checks history book, oh, oh ,oh my".

Much more apt to say "that's not who we aspire to be'

>>slg+0q
What changed is the number of people who decided they were ok with dismantling institutions. That grew by about 7 million, who voted for the opponent in 2020 but stayed home in 2024.

So perhaps the number of people who wanted institutions dismantled remained the same. But the will of the people as a whole changed sharply, mostly because of people who decided it wasn't worth the effort to oppose it.

>>slg+Ck
> I'd be surprised if there was a single American who had the CIA Factbook as the deciding factor in determining their vote

That's just the specifics: Steve Bannon explicitly made it clear that one goal was to "dismantle the administrative state"