The US is busy making the biggest own-goal one could imagine.
From a position of world-wide dominance and respect, it is being destroyed at a rate that is too quick for most to even start to comprehend what the outcome of these actions will be. I suspect the consequences of these actions will be carried for the rest of our lives, as they are not so easy to turn back.
Lots of other countries are standing by watching while the USA has seemingly found enough rope to hang itself.
It’s like the “fish don’t know they are in water” saying. As an American if you weren’t educated to be aware of Pax Americana you very much struggle to understand it. The current world order is far from perfect and many suffer as a result but the people in charge of this effort absolutely benefit from it far more than they seem to understand.
Dugin had ideas of spheres of influence. Roughly speaking, he thought that America should be dominated by the US, Europe/Africa by the EU and Asia by Russia.
This however coincides with the much older ideas of the technocracy movement, which was championed by Musk's grandfather Haldeman:
Europe is a bit slow in picking up on all this: Russia, the US and China are carving up the world and Macron calls a summit to determine how to make Russia and China eternal enemies. The EU (and Ukraine!) have been played since 2008/2014.
> In the Americas, United States, and Canada:
Russia should use its special services within the borders of the United States and Canada to fuel instability and separatism against neoliberal globalist Western hegemony, such as, for instance, provoke "Afro-American racists" to create severe backlash against the rotten political state of affairs in the current present-day system of the United States and Canada. Russia should "introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social, and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics".
It sounds like he’s less concerned about the west, but knows that there needs to be political chaos in order to prevent the US from interfering with Russia’s political goals.
I guess that seems obvious at this point, but worrisome that the US government is now actively supporting of those goals.
If you take an objective view that these are geopolitical conditions that would be beneficial to Russian objectives, and pair it with the concurrency of these things playing out, then it’s hard to see it as coincidence.
The seeds for this were set in the cold war if you believe Soviet defector Yuri Besmenov. He stated that the soviets removed malcontents from their society, the revolutionary Marxists that paved the way for the USSR. Eventually they figured that instead of killing or gulaging them, send them to the USA where the egalitarian society would allow them sow their revolutionary ideas into future generations.
The idea of spheres of influnce is far older than Dugin sure, but you are not considring that the tactics being deployed are consistent with Dugin, and support the overall strategy outlined by Dugin, in service of goals listed by Dugin.
I think it is safe to say that the west is experiencing Duginism.
Russia can not dominate *ANYTHING*. Its economy is about the size of Australia's despite having nearly four times the population. Its much-vaunted military could not defeat a minnow like Ukraine.
Yes, Russia has nuclear weapons but no one would commit suicide by using them.
Russia is dying, so are Italy, Japan and China etc.
I believed this at the beginning of the Ukraine war and went to read Dugin's philosophy to get a sense of where this was all headed. I believe that the Dugin-centric view of Russian _realpolitik_ is an intellectual meme moreso than an accurate view of reality.
Dugin's thought is being used as a rosetta stone in Kremlinology, but I believe that _Foundations of Geopolitics_ has been coöpted as an intellectual veil for a bare Russian imperialism. There is not a lot of evidence that Russia is trying to enact actual Duginist political thinking (which is a specific kind of ethnocentrism highly influenced by Heidegger; he outlines it in _The Fourth Political Theory_). It's being used in a way not dissimilar to Marx being co-opted as a means to domination in Leninism.
We are looking for a more complex answer to a simple problem, which is that an authoritarian leader obsessed with dominance wants to expand that sphere of power where he feels wronged. It doesn't have to be intellectual.
Marx isn’t being co-opted by Leninism. It builds on Marxism. Have you read The State and Revolution or Imperialism or What is to be Done? Unless you mean dominating the bourgeoisie which is what Marxism is about too.
Not driven. They influence right wing people and probably Trump himself to set the environment that moves towards their policy goals.
Lenin had a newspaper called “the spark” the concept was that a spark would light the flame to revolution. Trump was the spark in the US, but the tinder had been laid out over many years amongst political weirdos who are now prominent.
Putin isn’t a communist, but he’s a former KGB guy who wants the USSR back. They want the outcome, the ideas are a means to an end.
Pre-USSR, he sees himself as a Czar akin to one of the Greats, a resumption of the Russian Empire. Culture wide revanchism, it's not exclusive to Putin and will still occur without him.
It does seem quite implicating that both Musk and Trump have had multiple reported private calls with Putin. I dont recall other ex presidents meeting with Putin so frequently.
Missing dossiers of Russian Intel from Mar-a-Lago...which of course we never got to hear the full story of thanks to Judge Cannon and SCOTUS.
This is so on the nose it would be rejected if someone wrote it as a novel or film.
In the same vain and USA's politics it driven by Unabomber.
Dugin's influence on Putin/Russia is a total fake news. Aleksandr "Putin's favorite political/historical/cultural icon/advisor according to Western media" Dugin, has NEVER even met with Putin, as in not a single time.
And where is the evidence for such influence, on the only person that matters (Putin)? There is none.
Are you a powerful dictator? Is Wallace living under your rule? Is Wallace's writing influencing your policy? Is Wallace proclaiming everywhere that he is close to you, that he is your advisor (you can't advise without the connection), that you are worshiping him?
Don't be goofy and intentionally misunderstand my arguments.
Brexit pales in comparison to the damage that has _already_ been done to the US federal government. The dust just hasn’t settled yet so most of it not visible right now.
There's an old saying in Tennessee -- I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee -- that says, fool me once... shame on... shame on you. Fool me... you can't get fooled again!
You sure there will be a change allowing a reversal in four years? I doubt that this kind of steamrolling power will be contained by law or institutions. They came into office while blatantly disrespecting law and institutions in the first place. There will be not enough left to get back to last year's state of affairs. This is not going to be a short hiccup. This is changing the world and the path of the future and I hate to witness it happening.
Which is good for those countries. In my home country of Bangladesh, China is helping build infrastructure. While the U.S. was bankrolling left wing social and activist programs to destabilize the government (and ultimately contributed to the recent overthrow of the government, which will derail a decade of consistent growth).
The damage to the US’s global influence and stature. Whether that’s morally a good or bad thing is a separate question. There is no question the US has screwed over a lot of countries. But be aware that the Chinese will step into the void as they already have in Africa. And those countries may find themselves out of the frying pan and into the fire.
As bad as the USA is (and it’s pretty bad) it’s still better than China (though at the rate it’s digressing this may not be true for much longer).
It’s instructive that you mention only USAID. Based on past conversations, you were born and raised in Asia, right? So maybe you have an ax to grind. What about all the other agencies that are being gutted?
It’s more than that I’m Asian. The same arrogance and disregard for popular sovereignty in other countries that you see at USAID/State/NED has metastasized and been turned inward. “Deplorables” is how Acela types see Iowans and Bangladeshis alike.
My dad spent his career in public health. He did things like convince villagers in Bangladesh to trust hospitals instead of midwives. So I’m thrilled to see cuts at NHS and CDC, which torched public trust by making exceptions to Covid lockdowns for protests. Those people are just bad at their jobs—everyone in public health knows you don’t do shit like that.
I can’t wait to see what Tulsi does to the intelligence services that lied us into the Iraq War, and what Kash does to the FBI that investigated conservative parents as domestic terrorists. These agencies are full of disloyal people who think they know better than the public, and few people are going to lament them getting canned.
As a train nerd who took Amtrak every day to work for two years I hope we fire every manager at Amtrak.
I hope the social security checks keep coming. The FAA and FCC generally seems to do a pretty good job. That’s about it.
The Tulsi that pushes Russian disinformation? That should do well for rooting out lying. Also some facts: Intelligence services did not lie us into the Iraq war - politicians did. Politicians manipulated intelligence reporting to fit their narrative. Since you seem to like conspiracy theories, it should be obvious that this was so Halliburton, the company vice president Dick Cheney was CEO of, could profit from government contracts. Guess what CEO will now profit from government contracts due to all the lying from the current slate of politicans.
And by conservative parents as domestic terrorists, I assume you mean the people convicted of crime due to their actual criminal actions on Jan. 6?
I randomly sampled a few articles. And I think you’re right and I’m wrong. The economic messaging is aggressive and was wrong, but I’m not seeing famine and war.
Here is an article that sampled various expert opinions:
“ This event will unleash the kind of uncertainty that Keynes had in mind when he said “we simply do not know” when referring to the likely effect of war. Such uncertainty can only be disruptive for financial markets. We will enter a new era of volatility that is likely to last until these difficult negotiations are completed.”
“it is more likely than not that we will witness political instability.”
“ Such market reactions could sharply contract economic activity, further depressing asset prices in a self-reinforcing cycle”
>“it is more likely than not that we will witness political instability.”
We have had 5 Prime Ministers since 2019.
Some of the problems we are seeing are due to the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. But Brexit is the biggest factor by far. And 100% self-inflicted. It is the elephant in the room that the politicians can't even talk about it, as it's electoral poison.
I live in Texas and contract for a company based in Europe. Comparable UK software engineering salaries are about 1/3-1/2 of what my salary expectations are.
The UK’s GDP per capita trajectory diverged around the end of the Great Recession. That was before the Brexit vote (2016) and long before the actual Brexit (2020). France and Italy have been stuck in more or less the same doldrums since the same time: https://datacommons.org/place/country/FRA?utm_medium=explore...
It would be somewhat unusual if they didn't all look similarish given the level of trade between them.
The UK government predicted a 2% reduction in growth over 15 years with a soft brexit compared to what it would have been otherwise, but seeing it on a graph may be difficult given those countries were also hurt by Brexit.
I'm not disagreeing with your main point (by a host of metrics, the UK and EU have stagnated economically compared to the US since the end of the great recession), but I also don't think GDP per capita is the best metric to use here given widening levels of inequality. Median income levels taking into account government transfers are much more informative in my opinion.
As a fairly regular visitor (for work), what particular doldrums are you referencing?
Admittedly, the loss of the US market will be a big blow for exports, but the anti-US (Trump) feelings strongly would put up with a financial hit rather than dealing with Mr. Loopy.
And Tesla's are becoming very unpopular...and unsellable.
I'm as anti-Brexit as they come, but it didn't change the UK's direction much. It's still the 2nd richest European state (with the 1st declining fast), the 3rd largest tech ecosystem worldwide, one of the premier military powers. Brexit wasn't great, or even good, but it's not disastrous.
That’s because Europe overall is declining fast. However the rest of the world is rising fast and the next ten years should be interesting from this alone.
As someone who has studied the American constitution and been actively engaged in much civil discourse locally, I firmly believe and comprehend the logic of an unmanageably large “government” being a very bad thing on many levels. Please explain to me your obsession with a massive tax funded “government” and your thinking behind a comment such as the one you made. Why do you think this way? Nothing could be more in line with the American forefathers vision than what trump and Elon are doing by dismantling a grossly overweight, fraud ridden, and useless system that the US calls much of its government. I’m eager for a cogent argument, that blends constitutionality and logic, for such a broken system. Hoping you’re the one to make this argument
Nothing could be more in line with the American forefathers vision than what trump and Elon are doing
the problem with people like you (I sincerely do not mean this in ANY derogatory way, just generalising people that make these arguments) is that you are using “American forefathers” as you see fit. American forefathers would be ROLLING IN THEIR GRAVES seeing and hearing what Trump and Elon are doing. They literally fought against people like the two of them.
If I have too choose between bloated federal government and having a President who thinks he is above the law and his Supreme Court cronies saying so in so many words and having a fucking african immigrant with god access to government computer systems I choose bloated government any day of the week and twice on sunday
There have been a lot of times over the past couple weeks where I've thought "OK, is the US toast now??", and the thing that finally did it for me was Trump's prominent post "He who saves his Country does not violate any Law."
Trump announced the rule of law is dead and there has been basically no pushback. I mean, sure, it may have just been bluster, but the Republicans used to put the idea of the Constitution on a pedestal. Now the president is saying, loudly and prominently, that laws don't apply to him (or anyone who is "saving" the country), and it's crickets.
There is no way the US comes back from this in my opinion. I'm not saying something like "collapse" is imminent, but I think the decline is irreversible once the rule of law has been declared null and void.
Also, while I obviously have my opinions, I honestly would be genuinely interested in someone who has a different take (i.e. who thinks Trump's statement isn't as catastrophic as I think it is) to explain their rationale.
The whole issue with the idea that "Trump is destroying democracy," isn't that what Trump is doing is NOT damaging to democracy, or corrupt, or what have you. It is. But Trump will be gone in 4 years. There will be a new Republican nominee. Whatever (and I mean, whatever) that nominee says will be the new party line. And the idea that the Republicans are willing to continue an actual overthrow of law and order in the US is...close to a fantasy. The Republicans are with Trump as long as he is the most popular candidate. As soon as he is no longer useful in that function, he's toast.
> the idea that the Republicans are willing to continue an actual overthrow of law and order in the US is...close to a fantasy
No, imagining them continuing to do what they have been doing in the open is not fantasy.
Imagining them somehow "snapping back" to supporting constitutional order is much more fantastical. Especially in the face of the anti-judiciary salvos of JD Vance -- a leading candidate for the next nominee.
Yeah, TBH I find throaway89's comment a little baffling.
I'm not that concerned that Trump said what he said. I'm concerned that he said that and there was no pushback from Republicans or probably about half the country (and I'm guessing that at least a third of the country vehemently, enthusiastically supported the idea).
I saw a good post recently that described what is happening as essentially a "'cold' civil war". That is, in normal times, there may be strong disagreements about policy, the role of government, etc., but there is general agreement on the framework of democracy, the role of institutions, etc. But it feels to me now that we're past that point, where each side essentially sees the other in "existential threat" terms.
For me personally, I don't want to be there, but if you believe that it's fine for the President of the US to declare the rule of law null and void, then there is no middle ground, primarily because if you're declaring the rule of law null, then the only option for both sides is non-legal conflict. I can't think of a statement that is more "anti-American" to me than that. Which is again why I'm open to the idea (TBH actually I'm really hoping) that I'm either misinterpreting the statement or there is some other reason to think it's not as catastrophic as I view it.
I'm saying the reason there isn't any pushback is because the whole system is working as "winner-take-all," hence pushing back on ANYTHING that Donald Trump does, when there is no other Republican who can challenge him for leadership, is like scoring on your own net. It's a bad strategy if you're trying to win the game!
Adolfo Franco (interesting name for a right-wing strategist..) said it best on Al Jazeera. "How can he be a spokesperson for a man like Donald Trump?" He was asked. his answer was that he's a spokesperson for the REPUBLICAN PARTY, and in 4 years, there will be a new nominee. Simple as that. Time will tell what happens.
Polarization has reached "existential threat levels." It will eventually go back. Vance may find that moderation is in his party's interest after all the chaos of Trump. They are very different personalities.
As someone from LATAM who is more aware than they should be about the US system of government, I agree that the statement and lack of pushback is catastrophic for what it says about the current climate, but rule of law has been as weak as gypsum board for decades. The US system is full of shiny toys for a populist to cement power, and the only safeguards are decorum and the threat of eventual impeachment (good luck with that!). These issues exist because the American system is old and full of incremental cruft; newer democracies have had the advantage of starting with better safeguards, and there's an inability to actually change the system due to the legal system and Congress being a mess.
Practically speaking, common law is the judicial branch using moonlogic upon moonlogic to create pseudo-laws (Roe v. Wade, Citizens United v. FEC) that may be good or bad but should be made by Congress. If the Constitution is unclear, it should be modified through a democratic process that can actually pass, not be continually reinterpreted in absurd ways by a 9-person court that can be corrupted and has no term limits. Congress is unable to fix itself; the unlimited filibuster in the Senate proves that, and the "pro-forma" session is simply embarrassing. Clear systemic change is excruciatingly difficult, so actions must be taken through fuzzy emergent messes without guardrails like executive orders.
"Is outrageous thing X from this EO illegal? Idk, let's wait months to check with the courts."
The popular comment I see is that institutions are people at the end of the day, so "strong institutions" is just a buzzword, and the current crisis comes from cowardice and inaction. But if the mechanisms aren't there to stop a bad actor in the executive, the best they can do is make some noise (which they should). If they truly bend the rules, the executive can always just write a more unhinged EO, so it all reduces to who has control over actual enforcement.
The problem is widespread; for example, the election system is simply dysfunctional, like Flint water tier. From the basics of gerrymandering, to the electoral college creating absurd things like "swing states" (if you want to give more power to some states, just weight the votes), no real universal national ID, voter suppression, voting by mail is a horrible idea that invites conspiracy theories and is a crutch for the lack of accessibility, voting machines are bad and a crutch (see the French). Not even the schizophrenic rules-set is actually followed; the 2000 election was decided by Supreme Court fuckery. Trump would've been stupid not to try to interfere in 2020; an election was successfully stopped 20 years ago and nothing happened. The most basic democratic institution failed and the priority wasn't "let's fix this immediately, oh my fucking god." So yeah, rule of law has constantly been chipped away for some time, good luck with the midterms.
To be fair to the average American, the idea that "gradually, then suddenly" also applies to the state is something people learn firsthand and hopefully teach their descendants. The history of outsiders only goes so far.
The US just decided to negotiate with Putin directly, leaving Europe out of it even though they're the ones affected by the Russia-Ukraine war, not the US.
And Vance explicitly said that Russia can't be expected to go back to the pre-war borders. In other words, Russia gets what they want (Donbas).
The perceived return could be timing and presentation.
If he has to spend the rest of his term negotiating back and forth over which flag flies over a particular outhouse in Western Crimea, he may not see that as being a successful deal-maker.
Being able to say "we got buy-in for our first proposal, took me four days to end the conflict" fits his image.
It's not embarrassing reversals, that's the problem. People who want the government to work well for the general population will leave, and those that can't find employment in the private sector will stay. So we're immediately left with a less capable government.
Those who stay will be doing so with the full understanding of the vindictive nature of the current administration. What makes you think these employees will stand up to illegal requests? What makes you think they'll go the extra mile? It's a bad situation all around, and it's going to get worse before it gets better.
Americans should care because America isn't the world. So much wealth and power derives from people seeing you as the good guy. Blowing that up will make America poorer.
The US is far less dependent on trade than the average country. We could close our borders to the world entirely and be fine after an initial discomfort.
And nobody has has seen America as the “good guy” in my lifetime. We’re the country that destabilizes Latin American and Asian countries, bombs the Middle East, etc. I used to think there was at least a logic to all that, but it turns out our elites were just ideologues and morons.
Canada is the source of more than 80% of the US's potash, the source of fertilizer. Without that, the entire farming industry and its crops withers and dies. It is not something easily sourced and not something easily replaced, and the crops all die long before it can be sourced or replaced. Your suggestion to close the border is absurd, jingoistic, empty, and meaningless.
Again, I'm not an economist, bear with me and explain what that's got to do with the trade deficit being a deficit? You could have a GDP of a quintillion dollars a year but if you're consistently running a trade deficit (which the US has for decades), that strongly implies you cannot close your borders with impunity.
If you could supply the goods cheaper than importing them, people would, no? Simple capitalism!
While American, I've lived most of my life abroad, and share with your world view of the US.
But after having spent years living in China, and being very familiar with the political situation there and their global ambitions, I'm afraid that the alternative to the US is even worse.
Have a democratic system has somewhat of a moderating effect on the worst impulses of the US elite. China has no such guardrails.
What “democratic system?” American are checked by anti-democratic forces at every turn, from a judiciary that overturns duly enacted laws based on “emanations from penumbras” to an executive branch that is run by the same people regardless of who wins the election to institutions that are captured by people that abuse their positions to peddle their fringe ideologies.
To paraphrase Churchill, "democracy is the worst system, except for all the others".
There's a lot you don't know about how things actually work in China. The levels of autocracy, corruption and lack of true legal framework, make the US look like a democratic haven.
Would this be the same China where jaywalkers' portaits are automatically shamed on electronic billboards and fined social credits? Is that a worthwhile trade for universal single-payer healthcare?
The US is extremely dependent on trade because the US needs the USD to be the currency of trade and reserve to sustain its debt and deficits, without which GDP would drop precipitously.
The US isn't far less dependent, China is at 37% GDP from trade to the US's 27% but doesn't have the structural dependency on trade from having the reserve currency.
USA exports are idling around 1/4 to near 1/3 of the GDP. Our economy is heavily tied to imports from other counties.
When it comes to isolation I think of this:
The word invasion itself is a good example of this.
A French ironmaster says: "We must protect ourselves from the invasion of English iron!" An English landlord cries: "We must repel the invasion of French wheat!" And they urge the erection of barriers between the two nations. Barriers result in isolation; isolation gives rise to hatred; hatred, to war; war, to invasion. "What difference does it make?" say the two sophists. "Is it not better to risk the possibility of invasion than to accept the certainty of invasion?" And the people believe them, and the barriers remain standing.
And yet, what analogy is there between an exchange and an invasion? What possible similarity can there be between a warship that comes to vomit missiles, fire, and devastation on our cities, and a merchant vessel that comes to offer us a voluntary exchange of goods for goods?
Laws are being broken to make the omelet. Will the executive constrain itself to breaking only the laws you don't like, and stop when you want it to? Will the legislative branch cede it's authority and responsibilities only temporarily?
It might hard to unscramble that omelet if we want the rule of law back later.
The laws were broken in the 1930s when we created the unconstitutional monstrosity that is the modern executive branch. If you want to turn that back then I’m on board.
But if not then it must at least be democratically responsive. When republicans win the presidency—or a progressive or populist democrat—the 90% of the administrative state that’s comprised of Acela liberals should be asking how high to jump. Otherwise you have a system that’s not worth saving.
> The laws were broken in the 1930s when we created the unconstitutional monstrosity that is the modern executive branch
That's bibliolatry, directed to a long-obsolete interpretation of the Constitution and the role of the federal government. FDR was analogous to Copernicus and Kepler, rescuing the country from Ptolemaic interpretations of the Constitution that were based on outdated data sets. He pushed successfully for a pragmatic reinterpretation — not inconsistent with the text — that allowed effective federal government action to deal with a global crisis.
No, FDR's New Deal didn't end the Great Depression (that was done by World War II). But the New Deal did help hold off what could easily have turned into authoritarianism of the Huey Long variety.
The "living constitution" angle doesn't get you anywhere. If we are going to "pragmatically reinterpret" the Constitution to allow the modern administrative state, that just makes it more exigent to "pragmatically reinterpret" the law to ensure effective presidential control over the administrative state. I'd start by reinterpreting the Hatch Act to allow prosecuting anyone in the government who "resists" policies such as DOGE and mass deportations.
> The "living constitution" angle doesn't get you anywhere.
Says who? The Constitution is in essence the basic operating manual for American national government. Conditions on the ground have changed — and we've learned more about the world — since 1787. It'd be unpragmatic (read: insane) to insist that the original modus operandi MUST stay the same forever and ever, just because that's how they did things in 1787, as long as the new M.O. can fairly be said not to be inconsistent with the constitutional text.
It doesn't help your case that Article V provides an amendment process: Nothing in the Constitution prohibits reinterpreting the existing language to accommodate new evidence and new insights, at least not as long as the reinterpretation doesn't do violence to the text.
"The executive power" in Article II is just as open to interpretation as anything. Interpreting that power as being subject to Congress's Article I authority is clearly well within the hash marks, to say nothing of the playing field as a whole.
Article I can fairly be read as allowing Congress to expand, and/or to cabin, presidential authority. That includes creating, and delegating power to, administrative agencies under general presidential supervision; that could include delegating expansive powers to agencies and perhaps limiting the president's ability to hire and fire agency personnel.
The "unitary executive" interpretation — with a president asserting the right to unilaterally disregard or revoke congressionally-enacted arrangements — is dangerous in the extreme. We've seen that in other countries, and we could well see the same thing happen here.
Decades ago, the head of the Reactor Department on my ship [the USS Enterprise] had a list on the office wall of Great Naval Quotes that we were forbidden to use. The #1 prohibited quote on that list was, "But we've always done it that way!" followed by #2, "But we've never done it that way!" Both of those are violated by using a bibliolatry-based approach to the Constitution as a purported justification for unilaterally up-ending longstanding practices — especially when, on the whole, those practices have worked passably well.
==========
> that just makes it more exigent to "pragmatically reinterpret" the law to ensure effective presidential control over the administrative state
That's clearly one of your ideological priors, but it wasn't handed down from Mount Sinai on stone tablets.
But the “living constitution” is nothing more than imposing one’s ideological priors onto the document. I happen to think the crisis of a permanent bureaucracy that is ideologically divergent from the population is far more “dangerous” than anything else the country faces. If we are going to “pragmatically reinterpret” the constitution, that’s the challenge that such interpretation needs to meet.
> But the “living constitution” is nothing more than imposing one’s ideological priors onto the document.
That overlooks a key distinction: An "ideological prior" that's proved to be supported by real-world evidence (i.e., experience) is no longer an ideological prior.
Analogously: Special- and general relativity were just theories in 1905 and 1915 (their respective publication dates). Over decades, real-world evidence proved that they were, in the main, correct — but we still don't treat either as a sacred, immutable text.
The unitary-executive view is an untested theory, an ideological prior. In contrast, our existing administrative state is supported by close to a century of real-world experience.
That's not to say that modifications aren't needed in the modern state. We don't want to make a golden calf of the granular details of FDR's or the Warren Court's approaches, any more than we want to enshrine the unitary-executive model or the Alito-Thomas perspective.
But in a country with some 340 million people that's been the source of the reasonably-successful Pax Americana, it's incredibly risky to go unilaterally f*cking around — it's the equivalent of a teenaged driver insisting that he can refuel his car and change the oil while driving 75 mph on a crowded freeway.
The administrative system never worked. For much of the 20th century we had prosperity deriving from the post-WWII boon and the tatters of the Old Republic protecting private industry. But since 1980, we have had 12 presidential administrations. Of those, 9 won elections by expressly promising to cut government, several by promising to drown it in a bathtub. The only reason the system still exists is because American democracy is like those crosswalk buttons that aren’t actually hooked up to anything.
Regardless, we find ourselves in a new time. If the Old Republic could be overthrown by “emanations from penumbras” we can just as easily wave away the current imperial interregnum in which we find ourselves.
The “Acela class” is a term used, often pejoratively, to refer to the elite political, business, and media class concentrated along the Northeast Corridor of the United States, particularly in cities like Washington, D.C., New York, and Boston. The term comes from the Acela Express, Amtrak’s high-speed train that runs between these cities, symbolizing the connectedness of this group.
Critics use it to describe a political and economic elite perceived as out of touch with the rest of the country, especially with working-class and rural Americans. It’s often associated with establishment politics, bureaucratic power, and coastal liberalism.
It also refers to a political faction in the electorate, comprising about 11% of voters, that has interests and values aligned with that group: https://www.ncronline.org/opinion/ncr-voices/what-if-we-had-.... E.g. knowledge workers who benefit from globalization and upper middle class people who benefit from cheap labor provided by illegal immigrants.
I'm saying that the people who employ illegal immigrants tend to be republican small business owners. They're not a majority of republicans but they are the heart of the party in the way educated professionals are for the dems.
It's funny how hundreds of millions of normal Chinese people belong to the "Acela class."[0] Supporting decent public infrastructure does not make one an elitist.
As another commenter noted, I believe the phrase is used as a metonym (?) here to refer to a class of people that is largely unrelated to support for public transport.
I mean ignoring all the trade that will wither away to/from America and slowly be diverted to other countries instead (lost American money/opportunity), there's also lost tourism money from people not wanting to come spend their vacations there (lost money).
A "disloyal" administrative state for trying to perform their boring congressionally-designated jobs in response to a pandemic, rather than falling in line with supporting the president's personal business interests by saying everything was fine and telling people to continue going to hotels? Uh-huh.
The government is not a corporation and the president is not a unilateral dictator. You're right about other cultures having values alien to Americans, and perhaps you need to do some introspection there before making political arguments.
So is your argument about "disloyalty" or about poor official actions resulting from personal bias? Because the indications of each would seem to directly conflict.
>From a position of world-wide dominance and respect
It already had very low respect (except by paid hacks and client states) and declining world-wide dominance for decades. And the churn rate for those very dissaponting results, reflected in public debt, was huge.
And that's assuming a nation having "world-wide dominance" is a good thing to begin with.
If anything this whole DOGE scenario has illuminated is how confused and overconfident many in this country are. We are stumbling fools without systems and rules (organizations, institutions, laws, regulations, ...) to rely on.
I wonder how much behavior like this stems from weak regulation in the US to begin with. It seems like it would reinforce the rise of agents that assume they can ask for forgiveness after acting wantonly.
> We are stumbling fools without systems and rules (organizations, institutions, laws, regulations, ...) to rely on.
There are no organization or institutions or anything else that matters: only people matter. If people don't bother to have integrity then "institutions" (or anything based around them) are irrelevant.
> Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks—no form of government can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea. If there be sufficient virtue and intelligence in the community, it will be exercised in the selection of these men. So that we do not depend on their virtue, or put confidence in our rulers, but in the people who are to choose them.
Institutions try to make people more than the sum of their parts. The free market pits businesses against each other in a way that harnesses overall economic productivity. We’ve gotten pretty far with our federalized system and balance of branches. Something does seriously need fixing now that polarized parties lead Congress and the courts not to be doing their job checking the executive. And that presidents are chosen more for their charisma than from trust built up by people who actually work with them. A prime minister is chosen by peers, not by a general population that doesn’t know what they’re capable of.
We are told endlessly in the UK that "institutions are strong". This is about as foolishly optimistic a statement as I can recall hearing, from ostensibly serious people. Institutions are not strong. Institutions are made of people. People are weak, corrupt, lazy, stupid, and endlessly self-serving. Institutions are weak.
The problem with MBA’s is that they don’t value what decent men and women bring to the table.
I’d rather pay double for an honest mechanic. Asymmetric information requires a ton of resources to protect against, or you can just know the person you’re dealing with is honest.
The problem with MBAs is that they rightfully recognize that most people can’t identify if a mechanic is honest or not, so they make recommendations that assume nobody is 100% honest — which is true, but elides all of the value of hiring honest people.
The dishonest mechanic is incentivized to make you think they are honest. The honest mechanic appears honest. Knights and knaves problem.
The problem with government institutions in the USA isn’t MBAs. It’s that sources of corruption / bias were identified and counteracted with rules. And rules. And rules. And rules. And many of those rules appear to counter the common sense of the average person. So the average person believes the institutions don’t hold value. That and politics meant that lots of the laws that govern those institutions assume that no citizen is an honest mechanic and they all need to constantly prove to Vogons that they aren’t dishonest.
A great dive into the last park was done by Jen Pahlka in _Recoding America_.
One of the mechanisms that provides for strong institutions is filtering who is accepted and promoted within it.
The systems and concepts, like the Nolan Principles, are nothing more than words -- but if the majority agree to them, then the minority who violate them should be prevented from growing their influence.
In the US, it seems that despite having strong public institutions, the leadership of the country has reached a tipping point where those institutions are no longer valued.
> We are stumbling fools without systems and rules (organizations, institutions, laws, regulations, ...) to rely on.
The wide masses yes - the 1% who is looking to profit immensely from the upcoming chaos not.
DOGE is not about trimming government costs, it is about allowing the large companies to rip off the masses without repercussions (e.g. the planned demise of CFPB or OSHA/DoL) and it is about preparing the transfer of what used to be government-provided services at cost or subsidised to privatised for profit enterprises where the 1% profit (e.g. the dismantling of public schools).
The end game is obvious, neofeudalism: everything that the 99% do shall generate profit for the 1%. We shall own nothing and rent/pay for everything. It begins with five to six figures medical bills at birth and ends with our funeral costs.
I think if you looked at the history of the global economy and geopolitics since 1970 or 1900 pre Federal Reserve, I think you could make an argument that the dystopia that you're worried about already exists.
That's the insiduous thing we're seeing - when you have to work two jobs just to make rent on a dilapidated shack for a slumlord you don't have time to protest, and when your healthcare insurance depends on having a job (because there aren't charity-run hospitals around any more) you can't afford the risk getting fired for going on a strike, much less actual "direct action".
On top of that, mass media controls the narratives way too hard - just look how fast Luigi Mangione got out of the news.
This is the failure mode of the anarcho-liberal awareness premise.
"Awareness" is almost never the limiting factor to policy change.
This is why awareness based movements such as occupy, BLM, and climate protests go nowhere. Everyone is aware of climate change, police brutality, or inequality.
Organized opposition with leverage and a compelling alternative is the bottleneck. Awareness isn't a policy position and doesn't advance debate.
Luigi did not have a thesis capable of changing minds. I dont know and haven't seen a single example of someone having their mind changed. Just people more fired up on their priors.
I dont think that is a policy proposal, nor do I think it is compelling to the voters and policy maker that would need to implement the change.
My point is that acting out until someone else comes up with a solution and someone else implements it almost never works. You have to change minds en masse.
I'd have expected a debate about healthcare cost and actual reforms resulting out of it because the momentum clearly was there, but hey, here we are... For a while, until he was caught, there was a debate beginning to form what drives someone to execute a healthcare executive on the street - but the day he got caught, the debate got suppressed and no one is talking about it anymore.
> I'd have expected a debate about healthcare cost and actual reforms resulting out of it because the momentum clearly was there
No, it wasn't; if the momentum was there, the debate would have been self-sustaining and not dependent on new news events relating to Mangione to sustain it.
> but the day he got caught, the debate got suppressed and no one is talking about it anymore.
The debate didn't get suppressed and didn't need to be; the “debate” in the major media wasn't a real debate, it was just a way to stretch attention to Mangione news for a few more commercial breaks, and once there were no more news events for it to leverage for that purpose, it was abandoned by the same people who had been driving it. And, to the extent that there were people engaging in social media and elsewhere who saw the debate as genuine, they didn't need to be suppressed, as they never had momentum, they just mistook cynical commercial manipulation for opportunity.
> I'd have expected a debate about healthcare cost and actual reforms
It was all show no thought. The big questions remain unanswered. Where are costs inflated between pharmaceuticals, providers, hospital administrators, insurance administrators and patients seeking unnecessary care? How do we reform insurance when most people hate our healthcare system while simultaneously liking their own coverage?
Luigi didn't add anything substantive to the debate. Instead, his role was in facilitating venting. Someone still has to come up with an idea beyond "I hate this."
> there was a debate beginning to form what drives someone to execute a healthcare executive on the street
On Twitter, maybe. For most people, it was another Manhattan mental-health case murder. The chase and his good looks provided salacious intrigue, but only for so long as he was on the run.
>The big questions remain unanswered. Where are costs inflated between pharmaceuticals, providers, hospital administrators, insurance administrators and patients seeking unnecessary care?
Pharma costs are inflated by R&D costs and promotion.
Insurance overhead is actually relatively lean, but base cost is primarily driven by cost of goods, and to a lesser extent admin.
Provider costs are inflated by high legal and regulatory liability, shortage of qualified staff to offset liability, and high admin.
At a the highest level, cost is driven by an inability to discover and set prices at market clearing rates.
Manufacturer dont sell fixed price product into a market, but negotiate complex bulk deals with PBMs, pushing some prices up and others down. Similarly, hospitals/providers dont set prices at clearing rates, but negotiate 1:1 pricing, with some products above and below cost.
Last, and I suspect most significantly, health plans cant meaningfully vary in provided care, only cost sharing. That is to say, a bronze plan must include the same medications and procedures at a gold plan, differing only in copay. This breaks the price feedback on COGs. (e.g. a generic only insurance plan is illegal, so name brands face reduced competition).
If I were Medical Czar, I would look at banning preferential pricing/institutional rebates for goods and services.
I would allow more heterogeneity in policies (e.g. generics only, no implants, limited oncology, ect). This would crush innovation, but also greatly reduce pricing as it moves from cutting edge, to 10 year old technology.
Provider shortage is a tougher nut to crack, but I think it would require radically altering the residency program as it exists today and loosening requirements for other healthcare professionals.
I dont know that they work well in isolation, as there are multiple market failures at play.
If I had to pick one, I would say heterogeneity of insurance plans as most fundamental.
Consumers must have some exposure to cost savings or liability for downward price pressure exerted and inferior substitutes to be selected. People will never pick a $20 treatment over a $20,000 unless they have skin in the game, even if it is 99% as effective.
I think this has to be instituted at a insurance policy level for a number of reasons. Charges are stochastic and in the future, while policy premiums are predictable and immediate, allowing consumers to see cost or savings across the entire policy and pre-commit.
Measurability is tough on this because it amounts to allowing inferior treatment, and I dont think this could be papered over, even if it brings down the price of all care and allows more treatment in aggregate.
Uniform pricing is much better on the messaging. It is adjacent to collective bargaining, just mediated by a market instead of a technocrat. It can be sold to the left as an attack shadowy rentseekers. It can be sold on the right as a free market reform. On the pragmatic front, it can It has a transparent pricing angle, where you could see prices, which current transparency legislation seems to fail. I also think there is a lot of negative will pent up about negotiated pricing and the idea of companies paying drastically lower prices than an individual because they can throw their weight around when bargaining.
Unless you're paying for it 100% out of pocket, this will never happen.
In all socialized systems the government decides what your doctor can do, 100% of the time. Of course from a patient perspective it looks much less restrictive, but that's only because your doctor never brings up treatments that aren't paid for.
One of the big issues with the US system is that the patient is put right in the middle of the decisions so sees all the rejections, has to deal with all the paperwork, and pays the price when things go wrong.
>One of the big issues with the US system is that the patient is put right in the middle of the decisions so sees all the rejections, has to deal with all the paperwork, and pays the price when things go wrong.
This is the admittedly huge emotional problem, but distinct from cost problem. Hospitals and insurance billing systems can be as dysfunctional as they want because all of the financial liability is outsourced to the patient.
If this outsourcing were not possible, insurance and hospitals would have worked the issue out long ago. I expect all treatment would be pre-approved by default, and hospitals would carry the cost of misbilling (like how a retail store eats a fee for credit card purchases)
There is universal healthcare through compulsory national health insurance (premiums subsidized if needed).
However, the insurance only covers a portion. About 10-20% will come from a forced medical savings account.
Then there is the cash part of the cost.
The government has designed the entire system to make sure no patients pay $0 of their own money. Even indignant patients will work with a social worker to figure out what they can pay. If it's only $2, then they are billed $2.
It's a pretty good system in terms of keeping costs down, keeping patients involved in the cost of their care, yet ensuring nobody goes without critical healthcare.
The issue with the US is that it's kinda set up for patients to be at the center, but misses critical components (like price transparency) to the point that even though patients are required to manage their own healthcare financiing, they aren't actually given the tools to do it efficiently.
Healthcare doesn't depend on a job, and I don't understand why this rhetoric continues. Except in certain red states that refused federal funds, anyone below a certain income gets Medicaid and anyone above it can get ACA insurance, complete with a subsidy based on your income. Preexisting conditions are irrelevant.
Republicans might make big changes but this has been the situation since Obama.
> On top of that, mass media controls the narratives way too hard - just look how fast Luigi Mangione got out of the news.
People say this a lot, but it seems just as likely to me that the media is simply reflecting what we care about. Coverage fades because, broadly speaking, people have moved on from the story. Even more "intellectual media" like the Atlantic has moved on from it. I get that it’s uncomfortable to acknowledge, but an equally plausible explanation is that the public is far more interested in Blake Lively’s lawsuit than in Mangione or the state of healthcare in the U.S.
Yes, it’s a symbiotic relationship, but I think people are often too eager to blame a shadowy cabal rather than recognizing that it’s often just a reflection of what society actually values. Probably because, as stated, dismantling mass media seems like something that could possibly happen while changing the entirety of a nation is essentially impossible.
Your use of the word "innocent" there is doing a lot of heavy lifting. He did not have a day in court, and what he did was indirect. However, a lot of people consider the supposedly "innocent" guy that got killed a mass murderer.
Whether or not you agree with that assessment, it seems like you don't understand a few links in the chain there or are otherwise playing dumb. It is very reasonable for people to not care about the death of someone who is widely considered a mass murderer whether or not our legal systems have caught up to this sentiment.
In a perfect world that CEO would have spent his entire life rotting in jail, his ill gotten fortunes completely stripped and his name as infamous as other mass murderers. We live in an imperfect world where people like him get defended by weirdos online though.
It's not good that he got assassinated. Assassinations like this are a symptom of a failing justice system doesn't deal with human waste like Brian Thompson on it's own. If society widely considers someone like him a mass murderer he should be behind bars. But there's a pretty huge inequality between the ruling class and the poors these days, so the justice system has stopped working for the everyman. It's a natural result of cascading inequality, it will keep happening at an increasing rate if our civilization doesn't start holding people accountable for their crimes.
First hand experience with who, democrats? If that is your point then I have to disagree with you from my own personal experience. I've had a bunch of conversations over the last few years with Republican voters who have had zero interaction with anything except the mentioned straw/boogieman democrats. Almost all of those conversations have followed a path of "what would reasonable policy be for X" and then looking up the Republican policy vs the Democrat policy and then a tantrum.
If one of your family members was killed because of Brian Thompson using an bot to auto deny valid medical claims, among hundreds of thousands of others, you'd consider him a mass murderer too.
Do you have an argument about why you think what he did wasn't mass murder? Do you not like the specific term, do you think he should have been prosecuted but disagree with the wording, what's your actual position or are you just going to make vague irrelevant platitudes? (Left right politics isn't even relevant to this issue either)
No, the democrats lost because their fundamental offering was conservatism but they didn't own it, but rather let their latent expectation for progress be filled in with perfunctory and performative identity politics.
The republicans stepped in with their simplistic answers to complex problems (effectively "kill the patient to cure the cancer"), that the party had been courting to generate grassroots energy for decades before it escaped their control.
If we had had more occurrences of Luigi-accountability over the past several years, we could have likely released enough frustration, had societal conversations about real reforming concessions, and ever-increasingly-squeezed people might not have fallen for the siren song of a fascist strongman. Alas.
Oh, and parroting and amplifying Neo-Nazi propaganda by accusing innocent hard working legal Haitian immigrants of killing and eating dogs and cats in an internationally televised presidential debate isn't nonsense and hysterics and blatant racism?
Seriously... the "irrational and hysterical" stuff reads way too much like "a woman" to me when those claiming it have to ignore all the things like lying about immigrants eating dogs then, after being called out dozens of times, admitting it was a lie and saying they were willing to keep lying because even though they don't have facts they think their point is still true.
The whole thing comes off to me as a gleeful descent into a juvenile, rebellious mindset, flinging accusations like "hysterical" around without a shred of self reflection.
> The left lost the election because the general public got sick of the nonsense and hysterics.
The left lost the election because a ton of people thought "hey, better stay home than vote for Kamala because she's too cozy with Israel", and look where it got them, not only do they now have Trump in power but Netanyahu has no one to hold him in check.
Trump got 74M votes in 2020 vs 77M in 2024, the key thing is that Biden got 81M votes in 2020 whereas Harris got 75M votes.
The Democrats lost more people to non-voterism than they lost to Trump.
Or, we can look at the spectrum of politics that exists and, observe that there are political groups outside of the Democrats and Republicans even within the United States, and see that you're wrong.
Only a proportion of the full political spectrum is viable.
For example, we know pretty conclusively at this polint that communism doesn't work, which is why the "left" these days is social policies overlaid on a free market system.
> rich are endangering their riches in this experiment
The history of modern revolutions is that the rich are fine. Hell, even in the French Revolution, most of the aristocracy fled with their lives and moveable riches. In the intervening centuries, mobility of both people and wealth has substantially increased.
Yeah, there’s a good quote about how they don’t trust people to “eat the rich”, because what they’ll actually do is come at a bunch of doctors and lawyers while the real rich gets away relatively unscathed.
In the French revolution, mobs would smash textile shops to the dismay of the workers, string up the middle class owners, then drink the reagents and die.
The current one is "Musk stole the election by something something voting machines".
Which is, of course, just as stupid as the 2020 MAGA conspiracies. His money sure as shit bought the election, but it wasn't by fucking with the votes.
I'm jacked in to the left wing online political discourse, and your comment is the first time I've heard anything about Musk doing something with voting machines. Provide a link to where you heard that.
No no, it would be "just as stupid as the 2020 conspiracies" if Joe Biden had said "Mark Cuban went to Pennsylvania and boy, he really knows those voting computers... anyway we won in a landslide"
It wouldn't matter. Elections are closely monitored by observers from both parties. If there is credible evidence of fraud across multiple election sites in multiple states, including states with blue legislatures, those observers should probably stop sitting on it.
Assuming any evidence exists, why did none of the people who could actually gather any file injuctions, lawsuits, etc? They had four months to do it, three of them while the incumbent still controlled the executive.
> If there is credible evidence of fraud across multiple election sites in multiple states, including states with blue legislatures, those observers should probably stop sitting on it.
Gerrymandering is legal, if done by the books, which is the entire point of doing it. And the voter suppression caused by apathy due to FPTP (in the US and UK) or minimum-vote thresholds like the 5% rule here in Germany is built into the system, so even harder to legally challenge even though Germany may lose up to 20% of all cast votes in next week's election in the worst case because they are summarily dismissed this time.
I'm not arguing there is fraud, I'm arguing a meaningful set of things would need to be different for it to be "just as stupid" to claim so, including "the potential fraudster appearing to publicly brag about committing fraud."
There are a lot of conspiracy theories around Trump and Musk etc.
Just remember that not all conspiracy theories are wrong, but there being so many popular ones from the left now is not a good sign regardless if they are right or wrong.
That is still a conspiracy theory, some conspiracy theories are right as I pointed out.
So everything I said was right, the people who responded to me validated it, they think there are conspiracies! That means there are a lot of conspiracy theories, I explicitly noted that I didn't say they were right or wrong.
> Trump and Musk are working according to their own fickle natures and whims.
The effect of network organizations like Heritage Foundation or the decades-long work of the Koch brothers or the Murdoch clan on what Trump is doing is not to be underestimated.
“Uppers”? I thought the leading theories were MDMA and Ketamine (and recovering from neck surgery), neither of which are best-described by the word “uppers”, nor is that behavior an effect that “uppers” generally have (e.g. cocaine, (meth)amphetamines).
I don’t think it has empathy-promoting properties when abused heavily and chronically. As I recall, the empathy-promotion is highly dose-dependent to begin with, and can even reverse due to extended misuse.
I think the more important point is that most people were not born yesterday. Some very rich people are either mentally ill, or on drugs, or both. Or enough drug abuse (off camera) caused long term ego/brain changes.
You can barely tell a poor person to change their life, imagine the discussion with a multi billionaire. There's no discussion.
That’s not how chemicals work. It’s not “methylenedioxy” mixed with methamphetamine, it’s an entirely distinct molecule. MDMA is an enpathogen, an aspect which contradicts OP’s key point.
Some might say he was just stretching his neck, but personally I love an electronic music gigs, and I've seen that behaviour enough times before. He's not quiet about his ketamine usage either (not an upper per-se, but close to an alcohol-like hallucinogenic from my experience).
> stems from weak regulation in the US to begin with
I don't know about that, but certainly it has exposed a significant weakness in the US democratic structure: it is based on the supposition that everyone will follow the rules (i.e., accepting the results of an election, following the laws passed by congress, etc.) A president who defies both conventions and laws is hard to stop. The only mechanism is impeachment, and that as we have seen is _extremely difficult_ to do -- in many cases that has been used frivolously by both parties, but even in the case where it should have been a slam dunk -- Trump's attempted coup -- the most GOP senators were too afraid of their own re-election chances because of Trump's ability to "rile up the masses" (look at Liz Cheney). A climate of fear is an essential part of authoritarianism because it paralyzes those who might be able to take action to ensure that the democratic principles are upheld.
When you have an angry mob attack the capitol building and threaten to kill politicians, and they are pardoned by the person who incited them, that generates a lot of fear.
This is correct. I don't think it is possible to design a democratic system that is impervious to authoritarianism when a large enough percentage of the population is in favor of it. After the last election, it is clear that a slight majority of Americans are either in favor of outright authoritarianism or are at least not turned off by it.
I wonder how much is this is "rational" due to Congress being broken as an institution. Hyper-partisanship and an unchecked filibuster means that Congress is stuck in permanent gridlock. The only way to get anything done is through executive power. But the system wasn't designed to work that way and so the checks on executive power can seem stifling to progress. It seems that many are willing to look the other way if they feel like its the only way to get what they want done. Concern only seems to come into play when its the other side wielding power. And this seems to be true across the aisle. Many on the left were frustrated with Biden's perceived timidity when it came to exercising executive power. And I feel like he was pressured into doing things that he wasn't fully comfortable doing unilaterally (especially regarding student loan forgiveness). Of course, the difference is that Biden spent 40 years in the Senate, understands the role of Congress in government, and had no intention of "ignoring the rules". Trump isn't limited by that type of thinking since he had no experience with, no great knowledge of, or respect for American government.
I would contrast politician knowingly enabling angry mob who attacks the capitol building and threaten to kill politicians ... with the same politician refusing to do the right thing for fear of maybe not being elected again.
All the while pointificating about morals and values.
> I don't know about that, but certainly it has exposed a significant weakness in the US democratic structure: it is based on the supposition that everyone will follow the rules (i.e., accepting the results of an election, following the laws passed by congress, etc.) A president who defies both conventions and laws is hard to stop.
This isn't true at all.
The main way the President is stopped is through the courts, which is already underway, but Trump has actually prevailed in several decisions (e.g. right to cancel government contracts, right to fire probationary employees) while blocked other (e.g. birthright citizenship).
But it's not one court decision since it can be appealed all the way to the Supreme Court (which Trump intends to do on several issues).
Impeachment is a very high bar which is usually reserved for serious violations of the law or process. We aren't anywhere close to that.
> This isn't true at all.
>
> The main way the President is stopped is through the courts, which is already underway, but Trump has actually prevailed in several decisions (e.g. right to cancel government contracts, right to fire probationary employees) while blocked other (e.g. birthright citizenship).
It is absolutely true. The judiciary has no mechanism to _enforce_ laws. Enforcement belongs to the executive branch. Therefore, if the judiciary makes a decision, and the president chooses to not follow the court's order, there is little the courts can do. It can certainly threaten fines and contempt of court to executive officials and even the president, but the president has control over both the DOJ/law enforcement to carry out the ruling as well as having blanket pardon powers.
> Impeachment is a very high bar which is usually reserved for serious violations of the law or process. We aren't anywhere close to that.
The current sitting president lead an insurrection against the United States and was not convicted in Congress. We've already crossed the threshold and gone well past the point of Congress acting to hold the executive branch accountable. Now given Musk's threats of financially backing primary candidates against dissenters, there is no incentive to act.
> It is absolutely true. The judiciary has no mechanism to _enforce_ laws. Enforcement belongs to the executive branch.
A few issues with that statement.
First, law enforcement can defy the President in order to follow the law or court orders (which they are required to do).
Second, enforcement isn't always through law enforcement. If the courts decide that an agency can do X, then they can go ahead and do X. No FBI involvement needed. Same if the issue ends up being something the state execute on.
> The current sitting president lead an insurrection against the United States and was not convicted in Congress.
That's because he was never charged. Why was he never charged? It's kind of hard to claim insurrection when nobody was armed and didn't actually have the ability to commit insurrection.
A person trying to break down a door was shot and killed and that ended things pretty quickly.
He wasn’t charged because SCOTUS ruled that acts committed while president were immune from prosecution and because the senate didn’t have the guts to impeach him and by the time he won the presidency he fired those working on the case against him.
If you’re actually defending the events of Jan 6 as not an insurrection then you are part of the problem and we have nothing more to debate.
> He wasn’t charged because SCOTUS ruled that acts committed while president were immune from prosecution and because the senate didn’t have the guts to impeach him and by the time he won the presidency he fired those working on the case against him.
You're getting mixed up.
SCOTUS didn't rule on that until years after Jan 6th. And the SCOTUS ruling doesn't cover crimes committed outside the scope of the President, which an insurrection would most certainly fall under.
And "by the time he became president"? You mean "four years later". You're saying the insurrection case was so solid they couldn't bring him to trial within 4 years?
No.
The truth is that the prosecution knew they didn't have evidence to support convicting Trump of insurrection. As for impeachment, they tried and failed.
> First, law enforcement can defy the President in order to follow the law or court orders (which they are required to do).
Any law enforcement officer defying the president or attempting to enforce a court order against the executive branch can and will be removed by the president. You say "which they are required to do" but again, the executive branch is the enforcement mechanism when they don't which is at the discretion of the president.
> Second, enforcement isn't always through law enforcement. If the courts decide that an agency can do X, then they can go ahead and do X. No FBI involvement needed. Same if the issue ends up being something the state execute on.
I have no idea what this means. The courts can certainly decide whether or not the executive branch has broken the law. But again, there is no enforcement mechanism in the judiciary branch.
> That's because he was never charged. Why was he never charged? It's kind of hard to claim insurrection when nobody was armed and didn't actually have the ability to commit insurrection.
He was impeached, for a second time, in the House for "incitement of an insurrection" and acquitted in the Senate. Are you conveniently forgetting this?
Ultimately the system of checks and balances was designed to slow down change. The variety of term limits and actors meant that it would take a significant concentration of resources for a protracted period of time to consolidate power.
The fact that the richest man in the world, acting with at least a visual approval of the next 10-100 richest people in the world has only managed some minor chaos is a testament to how insulated from economic power the US government was (in the grand scheme of things).
Real issues will emerge if such concentration of power is made perpetual.
>>Ultimately the system of checks and balances was designed to slow down change.
I think a good part of the world still doesn't get it. Progress is mostly a outcome of stability, not change, even less rapid change.
This whole concept might sound counter intuitive. But think about it seriously. Exponential growth, when you factor in small losses in between comes when you stick to one process(that generates small gains) for long. Not by making rapid changes to a process(in hopes of making one big gain) for a long time.
Sadly true, the wonder is that the idiot has been showing his hand since at least 2015 and he still was been given another term!?! My guess, the first two years will be a type of cringe humor/horror. Mid-terms will be a political slaughter. Never, ever underestimate the ignorance and naivety of the American voter, especially my generation, the boomers.
Predicting politics is similar to gambling, it's not a science and their are too many variables. However, in this case there are some indicators worth looking at. IF congress severely cuts or makes limiting changes to Medicaid, voters from both parties who live near or at the poverty level will shout loud and clear. They will threaten their representatives with their votes. (they've already started, BTW.) Hospitals will be in a bind also, after all, Medicaid money is better then no money.
If you're not horrified by the access musk has had so far to the Treasury Department, remember how info is sold on the internet.
And last, but not least, Project 2025. Personal morality cannot be legislated. We want the government out of our backyard, bedroom and bank account, P 2025 wants a part of all, the question is will the American voter willingly be led down the path of limited autonomy. (my generation, boomer, used to be all about personal freedom, now we seem to believe in freedom only for ourselves, that is, if we are white and male.)
I believe this to be true. Making waves now is risky because current administration will take revenge on your state, whether blue or red. Sad, isn't it?
It's exposing the intellectual bankruptcy of the Silicon Valley elite. Between the stupidity and kowtowing it has revealed a startling amount of groupthink and cowardice, even among people I once held as independent thinkers.
Isn't that more or less the behavior that's normally associated with the professional managerial class? That is to say: They throw in with whatever side will give them prestige and privilege.
I highly recommend everyone read the Curtis Yarvin NYTimes interview [linked below] to see the full extent of the intellectual bankruptcy. This guy is apparently seen as some meaningful thinker by the Silicon Valley elite (Vance and Andreesen have quoted him), but in literally his 3rd sentence just straight up lies.
Yarvin's claim: "[In] F.D.R.’s first inaugural address,... he essentially says, Hey, Congress, give me absolute power, or I’ll take it anyway"
From FDR's speech: "I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis--broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency..."
Operative phrase: "I shall ask the Congress"
These people are, at best, dishonest and cowardly. Even more disappointing, it's increasingly clear the only indicator of actual intelligence is net worth. This is rather lossy signal, unfortunately.
To further drive home what actually happened with FDR, his policy proposals were repeatedly taken to the Supreme Court and a lot were struck down. It took the SCOTUS to realize that they would soon face a legitimacy crisis if they continued to enact the policy perspective that they wanted.
Oh, and before someone comes and brings up the court packing proposal, it didn’t have to happen, and FDR’s main claim to making the proposal was that he had a mandate based on his, iirc, at the time 3rd supermajority sweep of the electoral college, unlike, say our current President who claims a mandate while not even winning 50% of the popular vote and fell way short of even 400 electoral college votes.
> FDR’s main claim to making the proposal was that he had a mandate based on his, iirc, at the time 3rd supermajority sweep of the electoral college
Court packing would have required the coördination of the Congress and the President to essentially remake the Supreme Court. It's distinctly different from Musk turning off funding to legally-mandated programmes.
>Congress:"no"
>FDR:"well I tried."
You are very clearly being intellectually dishonest here. The only way anybody could think otherwise is if they where on your political team.
Congress said yes to FDR and they are saying yes to Trump. Who cares if you don't like it, it's literally none of your business. Obsessing over other people's actions like this isn't healthy behavior at all.
You are talking about the guy who sent American citizens of Japanese descent to interment/forced labor camps and got hundreds of thousands of Americans killed in WW2, a war we should have never joined. He committed much more evil than anything Trump has done and will ever do.
1) Not sure where you think I’m defending FDR, I’m saying Yarvin lies about what FDR said
2) I truly don’t understand the “none of your business?” Whose behavior am I obsessing over? Only candidates I can think of are POTUS and his inner circle which… is absolutely my business…?
Why would any rational person read the rantings of a radical far left socialist on a site and newspaper known for spreading democrat propaganda? That’s like telling people to watch CNN and MSDNC to get their news.
Are you referring to Yarvin as a far left socialist? He's about as far from a socialist as you can get.
Also: It's a literal interview lol. You get to read his own answers to (very light) skeptical questioning.
You can see him completely elide (or forget, or not know?) that CEOs are accountable to boards and, ultimately, to shareholders. You get to see him dismiss his own child's fears about Trump's wall by first forgetting (or deceiving, again) that Trump did indeed start building a physical, literal wall, then assure his child that his life won't change as he attends a fancy private Mandarin immersion school in San Francisco.
The hypocrisy and intellectual dishonesty just cannot help but seep out of this supposedly serious thinker!
Of course the real value of his philosophy is its conclusion that the ultrawealthy should rule the world. So the ahistoricism, dishonesty, and internal incoherence hardly matter to the Silicon Valley elite.
I think a lot of this “DOGE scenario” couldn’t happen in most of Europe, or Canada, or Australia/New Zealand - due to the US having a presidential instead of parliamentary system of government.
In a parliamentary system, if the Prime Minister wants to merge/abolish/restructure government agencies, it normally just happens - because, most of the time, the Prime Minister can be confident the legislature will vote for any necessary legislation, since the PM’s party/coalition will control the legislature. So, the whole argument that Trump is illegally shutting down government agencies, why would a PM shut something down illegally when they can do it legally? The only exception might be in a minority government scenario, when the PM might not have the votes to get the necessary legislation passed - but, in such a scenario, if they decide to bypass the legislature and shut it down anyway, the legislature likely wouldn’t let them
Similarly, this whole “impoundment” thing - in most parliamentary systems, the executive is under no obligation to spend appropriated funds, and if they decide not to, the legislative majority will not have any problem with it - because, the executive and the legislative majority are basically the same thing. It is only because in the US (and maybe other countries with presidential systems, such as much of Latin America), the legislature gets upset by the executive deciding not to spend appropriated funds, and tries to make it illegal for them to do so. (Although we’ll see what the Supreme Court has to say-don’t be surprised if the current conservative SCOTUS majority decides that the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 is at least partially unconstitutional, or else renders it judicially unenforceable, e.g. using the political question doctrine.)
Many political scientists argue that the presidential system is inferior to the parliamentary, and produces political instability, gridlock, strongman (caudillo) rule. For a long time, while much of Latin America suffered from many of those problems, the US escaped them - whether due to wealth, cultural protective factors, or just plain good luck. However, with the return of caudillo Trump (arguably in his second term acting even more like a caudillo than in his first) and now the “DOGE scenario”, maybe the US’s luck has finally run out, and its politics are at last turning Latin American.
To be fair, the regime running this playbook simply wants different rules and the people who should stand in their way have spent a decade claiming the existing status quo will stop them.
So, it's really hard to point out that we want to revert to the status quo because the winner of the last election was apathy in first place.
A more convincing argument for me would detail the regulatory frameworks that lead to economic stagnation, not bucketing a whole continent in an attempt to correlate a glut of regulation with economic stagnation.
So the UK with 14 years of right wing rule should be humming, but it isn't. Now you're going to claim that "oh, the Tories weren't right wing enough". Nonsense.
Then I'll point out that 12 of the last 16 years in America have been under left wing governments. All filled with policies that a right winger like yourself would no doubt abhor. TARP, Obamacare, CHIPS Act, Inflation Reduction Act - massively left wing. State subsidies handed out left and right, and the American economy grew massively during that time. "Oh, Obama and Biden are actually right wing by European standards". Sure buddy.
Your simplistic world view leads to wrong conclusions, which you'll try to No-True-Scotsman your way out of. None of us are buying it though.
Your worship of right wing ideology saddles you with a crackpot who fires nuclear safety personnel and then attempts to hire them back 2 days later. Spare us the lecture.
Feds consumed <5% GDP during most non-war time between civil war and WW1. During which time standard of living and economy rose about as much during the post WW2 period of massively growing government and regulation.
It's hard to take these apocalyptic premonitions about federal government reduction seriously.
For better or for worse, that GDP boom was enabled by the massive spending and outcome of the Civil War, much like WW2. To point to these moments and ignore the immediate massive historical events that preceded it seems like a serious oversight in the analysis.
You chastise the comparison but then admit they're much alike, did you think that a complete accident. Obviously two different times are two different times but it's hilarious the hypocrisy you often see of regulatory proponents talking up post WW2 gains as the regulatory apparatus spun up -- but when you point out other post war periods with lower federal burdens suddenly the narrative changes to 'not like that!'
So you're telling me that government spending was continually going up, and while this happened our quality of life massively and suddenly improved? I feel like reversing this process is very bad.
Unless nirvana is at 100% it has to stop somewhere. What im saying is it didn't continually go up during periods of like growth, and it's not clear such high federal spending is necessary or helpful in improving the human condition.
The US government has very low spending (it just appears high due to the military budget) and correspondingly many people in the US have very poor human condition. It's abundantly clear that government spending is a necessity to combat inequality. When the functions of government are privatised, the poor will lose access to these amenities, and the rich will begin to profit from them. The result is a system more unequal in both wealth and allocation. Likewise the destruction of regulations serves mainly to increase the ability for corporations to exploit individuals. These are all clear negative effects, and I have yet to see a positive case for this action. What benefits might there be to decimating the government? The only suggestion I've heard is that the private sector will magically do the government's job better than it can, which is absurd because they could already attempt this and have decided it isn't possible.
There may be a serious discussion to be had about government spending. But it seems that you believe Musk and the rest of the GOP are interested in it. If they were, the House GOP wouldn’t have released a budget that asks for 4 trillion debt limit increase while proposing 4.5 trillion tax cuts. Or SpaceX wouldn't be awarded another $40m contract. While it’s a drop in the bucket, serious people would at least raise questions about the massive conflict of interest.
Musk and his ilk are interested in looting the treasury. It has nothing to do with government efficiency.
Dude, maybe just admit that your edgelord libertarian fantasy of everything being a corporation is a bad idea. It's fine, you're allowed to change your mind.
Reverting to the world of 110 years ago in what way resembles today?
This sound like you are deeply misplacing your confidence in your personal understanding of the world.
Not only he is overconfident about his "history knowledge" but is extremely wrong. Comparing that GDP from 110 years ago with today is liking comparing the economics of indigenous tribes with their colonization people.
It's not like comparing apples with oranges, it's literally comparing a bacteria with country.
Maybe best not to invoke the period with the worst economic inequality in US history as some sort of example?
You're also forgetting the tremendous amount of social unrest during that time because of that inequality (and as a result, the workers rights we enjoy today which largely arose from that period, and the Great Depression, though there have been great efforts to erode them).
…youre saying that life was good from 1870-1910? Reconstruction and the gilded age??
I mean, there was technological and medical improvements, sure, and continued urbanization.
But that’s… those are some of our nations most shameful, inequal, racist years in its entire history. The federal government as it exists now was just getting started after we realized we needed it thanks to the civil war, and many local democratic systems were completely broken. More relevantly, we didn’t have cancer researchers, epidemiologists, the NSF, or, most relevantly, nuclear weapons.
Finally, a HUGE majority of the costs of the federal government are social security, Medicare, Medicaid, and defense spending. I doubt even the biggest libertarian on here could advocate cutting any those with a straight face, unless they’re young and don’t know anyone older than them, and/or advocates isolationism.
Regardless, this exact story makes it clear that the goal isn’t cutting the size of the government at all — it’s politicizing the civil service, and bringing it under the exclusive control of a supreme executive. They’re not exactly ashamed of it!
I am so confident that that is untrue, I don't even feel the need to link studies; questioning whether the American voting public supports SS and Medicare is like questioning if they oppose slavery or endorse family values & apple pie. An extraordinary claim in need of extraordinary evidence, for sure.
And, sadly, I won't take "Trump won the election and then put Elon in charge of cutting stuff, so clearly Americans support that decision" as evidence instead of direct, scientific surveys. For one thing, much less than half of the voting public voted affirmatively for Trump; for another, I hope we can all agree that people on all sides very often vote for reasons very loosely related to the candidate's actual positions on policy.
Apologies if I'm rude, really grateful that such convos are happening on HN in the first place! Separate from "would we be better off with or without the New Deal welfare state and/or the entire federal government", I think this is an appropriate place to agree on empirical facts about the current situation. And "that idea is extremely unpopular" is such a fact, IMHO.
Many, many people figure “fuck it, im not getting social security, so why should the others.” It’s enough to tip elections for particularly odious candidates.
They’ve been fed a lie that the system is failed and believe it.
This isn’t my opinion. I’m a widow and survivors benefits for my children has significantly eased the burden of taking care of them. I’m strongly in favor of expanding these programs and soaking the rich to pay for them. Instead they’re getting their money, and someday find themselves on the wall.
> Finally, a HUGE majority of the costs of the federal government are social security, Medicare, Medicaid, and defense spending. I doubt even the biggest libertarian on here could advocate cutting any those with a straight face
I think plenty of people would like to cut Medicare and Medicaid spending, not by reducing service, but by cleaning up the unbelievably broken medical system in the US.
The issue is not with Medicaid: it's with the Big Pharma, their lobbies, and the corruption they generate. For-profit companies can't be in control as something as critical and universal like human health.
>social security, Medicare, Medicaid, and defense spending. I doubt even the biggest libertarian on here could advocate cutting any those with a straight face
Who says I don't advocate cutting those too, if you're asking? And I am grey haired, not sure about the ageism.
I think defense _spending_ could be cut dramatically without changing our defense _posture nor preparedness_, simply by modernizing inefficient systems, reducing waste, renegotiating contracts, etc. Our defense spending is relatively insane. We should look at Medicare and Medicaid in the same way. I wouldn’t want to see benefits reduced, but we certainly should be optimizing costs. I really hope the idea of reducing government waste hasn’t become a partisan thing just because the folks doing it right now are doing it very badly.
Yet the public voted for someone openly stating they'd carry out DOGE.
Majority is just a collection of tiny minorities, in this case my minority opinion partially aligns. As it turns out minority isn't aways what you think.
Less than 19% knew what the nuclear safety team was, so be careful with the point you're making. There was probably more informed consent for DOGE than many eliminated positions.
I was attempting to find evidence for your claim, and I found that survey. If you can find other surveys, please share, as I am seeing this being repeated a lot.
I don't follow. Are we moving the goal posts yet again from the above of what % knew what something was? Because the constituency generally did not know of the nuclear safety team. I don't even know their was a constituency calling for their creation, although there is an argument as to why reps might make them exist anyway.
Are you suggesting their creation was improper? Or suggesting constituency advocation would make it proper?
Either way you might draw uncomfortable conclusions.
I said 'the public voted for someone openly stating they'd carry out DOGE.'
They moved the goalposts to what fraction of voters were questionably polled to know about DOGE, because my claim is pretty much irrefutable. Then when I use their own criteria suddenly we cry foul that I used their own goal posts that they shifted to.
The mythos often presented is mass wealth inequality is incompatible with raising of living standards of the poor.
The poor can gain something at least temporarily by taking it from the rich. Another less violent option is mutually beneficial voluntary interactions.
I'm talking about Emancipation. So no, this isn't temporarily taking something from the rich, or something that could have been solved through "mutually beneficial voluntary action".
The government told a bunch of rich people that the incredibly valuable people they owned were no longer their property, and gave money and land to the people who previously had nothing because they hadn't been considered people. That's what kicked off your Gilded Age
Emancipation isn't Marxist, historically or conceptually.
> That's what kicked off your Gilded Age
Absolutely not. "Railroads were the major growth industry," with industrialisation and immigration being the era's economic drivers [1]. "The South remained economically devastated after the American Civil War" and remained a drag on the American economy throughout most of the Gilded Age.
You’re out of your mind and blathering out of ignorance.
Nothing about that era resembles Marxism, and I’d guess you’d struggle to tell the difference between Karl Marx and the Marx Brothers.
Reconstruction was shut down. Slaves went from assets to contract services. Jim Crow ensured that there was no movement upward. For the aristocracy, they were hurt by the depredation of war but recovered stronger than before under the new system.
The gilded age was about railroads. The south with their feudalist system was a backwater producing mostly raw material. They moved out of irrelevance because social control allowed them to control the Senate for decades.
You're literally talking about moving violence enforced slavery to something closer to voluntary trade of labor. That's far from exclusively Marxian, even most brands of ancapism advocate such philosophy.
Yes, it's also a wealth transfer, and slaveholders (other than in DC) were not compensated.
If you're ignoring that huge economic event in your analysis of the economics of the latter half of the 19th century, trying to replicate it today is going to be very rough.
Given your other replies in this thread, you're not interested in arguing honestly and I'm not going to continue engaging.
The involuntary wealth transfer of slavery was from slaves to the rich, not the other way around. Framing it as the slaves taking from the rich when they stopped being slaves by no longer providing free labor is monumentally disingenuous, and I don't think you really believe that.
Not shocked at all. The US Gov right now is crazy, and I wouldn't go back with a crazy ex without a huge overhaul first.
And yup, it's about as disrespectful a dismissal as you'd expect from a Musk "plan". I'm not surprised they are having trouble
>"Please work with your supervisors to send this information (once you get it) to people's personal contact emails," the memo added.
Wait, they don't keep personal emails on record? I have to fill that out for every single job I apply to. Pretty sure USAJobs and my State job board required it to.
I guess they either aren't answering or these were more senior personell than I thought.
>Despite having the words "National" and "Security" in its title, it was not getting an exemption for national security
Yeah, they're firing all the probation employees and NNSA got caught in the net.
Probation employees btw include some recently promoted senior employees.
And probation is just the first status.
This is a plan designed to progressively cull employees by status - there'll be another round after this.
Even if they could rehire everyone instantly, these people are now ripe for being turned by a foreign adversary like Russia or China. And I bet the Russian and Chinese intelligence agencies have increased their espionage efforts exponentially over the past few weeks.
And that’s even before we consider that the current administration has shown a tremendous affinity for enemies and dictators while putting the hammer down on allies and friends.
And I nearly forgot the appointment of individuals to the highest positions in charge of state secrets and intelligence, who are either already compromised or highly sympathetic to those enemy regimes.
To those of you who have pushed back on the arguments that the US is heading towards authoritarianism, I hereby present Exhibit A:[0]
> “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” Mr. Trump wrote, first on his social media platform Truth Social, and then on the website X.
> By late afternoon, Mr. Trump had pinned the statement to the top of his Truth Social feed, making it clear it was not a passing thought but one he wanted people to absorb. The official White House account on X posted his message in the evening.
> The quote is a variation of one sometimes attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, although its origin is unclear.
The hallmark of authoritarianism is to be above the law. (Which is why the SCOTUS ruling was so damaging and directly contributing to this.). If you’re not familiar with China, the way things work there is “rule by law” rather than “rule of law”. The difference being that “rule by law” means that those in power can do whatever they want since they make up the laws as they go (like a monarch ruling by decree). Trump’s statement is exactly that. And make no mistake this is not a one-off quip like buying Greenland. His actions so far have made it clear he believes that there should be no restraints on the power of the executive branch. In other words , authoritarianism.
It's a variation on every despotic announcement ever.
* I am the country. I am the law.
* When the president does it, that means it's not illegal.
* Anyone who opposes me is an enemy of the state.
* People loyal to me, prepare for violence.
Trump could pardon Eric Adams. But he won't do it, clearly, to dangle a future criminal charge against him. It's coercion.
Instead, via Bondi and Bove, they have ordered career prosecutors to dismiss the case, and nearly a dozen of those attorney's have resigned instead of following orders. Many of these people clerked with Republican federal judges.
One is Noah Schactman, 38-years old, US attorney, SDNY, three combat tours in Iraq, two bronze stars, Harvard graduate, clerked with Roberts and Kavanaugh. This is his letter resigning and explaining why the order from DOJ superiors was inappropriate and not considered.
Hundreds of thousands of people in civil service and armed forces have taken an oath to the Constitution of the United States. 5 USC 3331. This isn't an oath to a country, political party, president, or a superior. It's an oath to a contract.
What's the biggest difference between a startup and a country?
Aside from the obvious distinction, Musk has no experience running existing corporations with lots on the line to lose, he comes from move fast break things, great for a social media app, who gives a shit, great for literal moonshots, go big or go home.
However when you manage something big, any upside from improving is weighed against its risk of degradation.
What I find confusing is that this is not typical of conservatism, it's like a progressive right of political outsiders whose express goal is to destroy the government, I don't think that's a controversial statement. And I truly believe that's what (at least half of) the people voted.
My best estimation is that they are conservatives in that they want to conserve power that they hold, and they see the government not as a foundation for their corps, but as an enemy, not state as a literal creator of money, but as its dilluter or robber (through taxes), not the state as the basis for the fiction that is a corporation, but as a taxer of them. And their emnity is mostly due to the redistributive role of their state.
And I believe that people vote out of aspirational belonging to a rich class, they think they are rich, or they want to aspire to become rich, or they buy into the establishes morals that entitles the rich to power.
So that's how I wrap my heads around the conservative right overthrowing and destroying the government, they see it as a threat to their established power, or their chances to rise to power.
But I'm just some idiot on hn who hopefully will come back to delete this later
The president is a con man who larps as the richest person on the planet and his biggest accomplishment last term was a giant tax cut for the rich. The "actual" president is the richest man on earth and has a vested interest in destroying anything that can tax him or hold him / his businessess accountable in any way.
Awfully convenient that the richest people in the world think that the proper way to balance the budget isn't by raising taxes, but by burning the whole government to the ground. They have the resources to live in a walled garden for the rest of their lives and they don't care who else gets hurt.
> The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.
Worse, the very rich have a stake in the country degrading. Institutional collapse and chaos represent opportunities. The Yarvin-ites believe that they will be the god-kings of the new state while the poor are turned into biofuel.
Because it's contradictory. By definition, the Left is progressive -- they want society to progress and see a future where the problems of the past and present are solved by moving forward. The Right is regressive by definition -- they believe that modern society is inferior to some past "Golden Age" that needs to be returned to to make things great again -- the 1950s, the 19th century, or even the 18th century.
So the crypto currency people who support Trump aren't progressive or does it only count as the progress is in a direction you like? If this is an unprecedented constitutional crisis as so many keep claiming, how is that 'conservative'?
The 'left' isn't a rigorously defined term, so it is pretty hard to make a tautological argument like you are implying.
Libertarian capitalists like crypto currency fans idolize capitalism without any government regulations. That isn't anything new -- that was what we had in the late 19th/early 20th century when "robber barons" like John D Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie had free reign and workers had few rights. It's regression to return to that "Gilded Age".
Because these things aren’t rigorously defined it is helpful to follow the convention rather than to go to the dictionary definition of a similar word. I mean surely you wouldn’t say something along the lines of “I often see socialists who aren’t invited to many parties, so are they really social?”
While "Socialist" has a relatively specific meaning, "progressive" has a much wider variety of similar meanings, which definitely include the usage I indicated, without any need for recourse to the related word "progress".
Attempting to now restrict the word "progressive" to just one of its meanings in a politically biased way reeks of newspeak style attempts to control what people can express.
Well, I’m fine with definitions-as-description, but it doesn’t really leave me any room to call you wrong. All I can say is that I’ve never encountered anybody else who uses your definition.
I'm not sure I agree, but I appreciate your response. I think the question is whether "left" always means progressive, and whether "right" always means conservative. For instance, I would not claim that the American right is very conservative these days, but they also don't feel "leftist" whatsoever. I don't want to really delve into political topics, however I feel strongly that what is currently going on with executive orders and gutting the executive branch workforce is not conservative whatsoever. It's more closely matches an unfamiliar kind of progressivism than it does conservatism in my mind. I could definitely understand how and why someone wouldn't agree with this, of course. I also think it could potentially be argued that leftist programs, such as entitlements, social programs, etc, are not necessarily "progressive." There could be ways these programs were strictly regressive. (and by that I mean "past-looking" rather than "bad.")
Now, I would also agree that terms like left, right, conservative, and progressive are not really strictly defined a lot of the time. With such loose definitions it might be hard to claim that I've got the definitions correct. In other words, they may just be no strict definition, and I think you could also argue that _I'm_ the one taking a minority definition.
Progressivism itself is an interesting topic in general. I think there is a lot of progressive thought which is strictly apolitical, but is definitionally progressive. An easy example would be video games. Is Doom 2 better than Doom 1 because it added more gameplay elements? Is Doom 2016 even better because it added so many more systems, and has more advanced graphics? In my opinion "apolitically progressive" gamers would almost always claim yes; things _advanced_ and having advanced the older media is inherently inferior. They would claim that the older Doom games are "janky" which is shorthand for "the older games have not adopted or anticipated modern conventions." Other folks take a different tact; they tend to dislike any newer advances in gaming, and get "stuck" preferring older games. Others take a more balanced approach; they appreciate both new and old games, but don't necessarily prefer something merely because it's newer.
I think movies are another interesting example. I think it could be argued that there are potentially objective improvements when it comes to movie making; cinematography would be one example. The movie Citizen Kane and the Director Alfred Hitchcock created totally novel approaches to cinematography which been widely and thoroughly adopted by filmmakers of all skill levels. (in other words, nearly everyone agrees that these are objective advancements) Even some of the worst movies nowadays may have more competent cinematography than some of the best movies from the 50s and 60s. On the other hand, there are clearly a lot of stylistic aspects to film-making which cannot really be said have to improved, but merely changed with the fashions of the times. I would argue that strongly-progressive-minded folks would not be able to see this; they'd see any older movie as inherently inferior, and see movies through a lens of progress. In other words, movies were always going to "advance" to where they are now, and anything older is inherently inferior. (and this is true even if they can still appreciate the movie.) Now, this is what I might call "hard apolitical progressivism," and is not necessarily the most common view out there. It's a useful example because of its explanatory nature.
It's easy to see how this mentality _could_ map to politics, but I guess my point is that it doesn't necessarily do so. And, even when it does map to politics it doesn't necessarily follow that people on the left are always progressive and people on the right are always conservative. (although I'll obviously admit that this trend is _usually_ true; the left tends to be more progressive on average, and the right tends to be more conservative on average.)
>I think the question is whether "left" always means progressive, and whether "right" always means conservative
They don't. It's widely established that sometimes in the late 19th century or 20th century that party priorities basically shifted around. But for modern times, those are generally how Left and Right assossiate.
> I would not claim that the American right is very conservative these days
I would. In my best faith interetation, they want to preseve their right to bear arms, restrict and downsize immigration, remove many federal departments made in the past 5-6 decades (like the DoED)\, and overall serve, foster small business, and reduce taxes. These are all policies to try and go back to "the good times", without understanding the history and why we can't go back. What are these progressive ideals that the Right hold?
>I don't want to really delve into political topics, however I feel strongly that what is currently going on with executive orders and gutting the executive branch workforce is not conservative whatsoever.
It is not. But they decided to trust in their elected official that this is done to protect small business. They are being hoodwinked, but they do believe it aligns with their goals. In very basic logic: ICE is deporting illegals so there's more business opportunities, and a smaller government means less money to run it, which means lower taxes. That's how they rationalize it.
It definitely is not traditional conservatism, but these days it seems the party has accepted that the ends justify the means at best.
>I also think it could potentially be argued that leftist programs, such as entitlements, social programs, etc, are not necessarily "progressive."
When we have the worst coverage in a first world country, "catching up" is still "progressive". It shouldn't be progressive, but here we are with proposals to cut Medicaid and Elon Musk calling Social Security inefficient and insecure (and sadly, he's right here. But once again, he's attacking something without understanding the history).
>In other words, they may just be no strict definition, and I think you could also argue that _I'm_ the one taking a minority definition.
At the end of the day, communication is used to (hopefully) quickly convey ideas, even complex ideas, to others. It's not perfect without being a lawyer, so there will always be a lot of wiggle room when defining abstract concepts. We've spent millenia in hundreds of different languages trying to define "love", for instance. We won't ever fully agree, but we all have this abstract, univeral, generality on what "love" is nonetheless.
Politics are similar, so I wouldn't delve too deep into definitions unless the context requires it. No one fits in a jar but most people will have a rough idea on what "Left" and "Right" in the modern US political concept is if you've conversed enough about it. Good enough for this context.
Progressivism is a particular set of political beliefs. Progressives is a noun. Adding a new meaning that is sort an adjective, even if it is similar to the dictionary definition of the word progressive, will be confusing. Can we have progressive Progressives? (People who want to hit the Progressives’ goals, but faster).
"What I find confusing is that this is not typical of conservatism, it's like a progressive right of political outsiders whose express goal is to destroy the government, I don't think that's a controversial statement"
I think it'd be fair to call them populist right? I think they couldn't be further from classical conservatism. Chesterton's Fence is a concept that seems foreign to them.
Destroying government and rule of law and replacing it with a violent movement, giving people implicit permission to be brown shirts ("he who saves the country cannot violate the law") isn't just "populist right" in the same way "cancer" isn't an "inconvenience" -- yeah sure technically you could say that, but you probably wouldn't.
But Trumpism is literally a right-wing populist movement. It's directly influenced by the alt-right/Tea Party and right-libertarianism, accelerationist white supremacy and the Christian right.
It would be incorrect to call it a "progressive" right movement, because it stands in direct opposition to what progressivism is commonly understood to be. Doing so would be the same kind of category error as calling the Nazis socialists because the word "socialist" is in their name, ignoring the fact that they hated socialists. The Nazis weren't socialist, and Trumpists aren't progressive.
Oh, I didn't disagree that they're populist right, and not progressive. I just think it's so much worse than that. Or maybe I don't associate enough "weight" with "right-wing populist"?
For me it's the difference between someone who has a different opinion on the same facts, as wrong as I may find that opinion (and they mine) -- and a movement that just destroys and creates facts ad-hoc, believes what it wants, and smears and attacks anyone not aligned. It's the difference between someone who disagrees with or even fights me -- and someone who attacks me while they're basically wrestling with the voices in their head, without seeing or hearing me, at all.
> What I find confusing is that this is not typical of conservatism, it's like a progressive right of political outsiders whose express goal is to destroy the government
Right, these people aren't classical conservatives in any sense of the word. I would think of most of these people more as libertarians: small government, little regulation or oversight, let the market sort it out.
The striking thing is that the actual conservatives in Congress are sitting on their thumbs, letting this all happen. But I think that's because actual conservativism in US politics is mostly dead, and has been so for a while. Republicans would rather play at culture wars, and cry about spending (that they themselves never rein in, even when they have the power to do so) and taxes (for the rich and corporations of course, that need to be cut).
It is pathetic that it seems like the only prominent Republican that has a problem with all this now is Mitch McConnell, when he's the one who enabled Trump in the first place during his first term, and failed to shut him down when he actually had the power to do so. Be careful what you wish for, Mitch.
59% of Republicans in Congress are newly elected since Trump began his first term (which saw the highest attrition among members of the president's part in modern history). Those who remain are the most aligned with Trump, or at least willing to appear so in order to retain their office.
The American right has (always?) been anti-government overreach traditionally. I don't actually think Trump or Musk are particularly conservative or right wing (they'll say and do what gets them the support) but on this topic they are actually very much in line with political tradition.
I think they're overshooting here and will need to correct, but I get the impression as an outsider that the American people who voted Trump in are sick and tired of a social structure that isn't benefiting them and seems to give them no "out" or way forward. They will take the wild and crazy antics/experiments because hey, it wasn't exactly working before anyway, was it?
> Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
Frankly I don't see how you read Norquist's statement any other way: he doesn't want to abolish the government, he just wants to be sure it holds no dominion over him personally.
American right was always pro government overreach when it comes to cops, military and so on. The are anti government when the government is helping someone they dont like. They are against public schools, public health care, consumer protection, safety rules.
Trump or Musk are very much American right as it always was, except without pretension of respectability.
It’s not a false equivalency. The right frequently claims the government over reaches, and then enact their own Christian policies which have a tendency to overreach. Heard of those book bans? That’s conservative Christian overreach into state policy, which takes away freedom.
What’s bad faith is claiming that more social restriction is not a form of overreach.
Edit: pollution is actually a very good example. In my view, polluting my property via air or water pollution is a violation of my property rights, and is therefore unconstitutional. Companies doing so are overreaching. I would like the government to reach out and stop that. Certain Conservatives somehow don’t share this view, and think businesses should have the freedom to pollute, and wish to abolish the EPA. The government would be overstepping, to them.
This is LITERALLY the twitter layoffs playing out again. They fired people who had credentials and other things they needed so had to hire them back. Everything else aside why repeat the same mistakes? Just go a little slower and give agencies time to compile accurate lists of necessary employees
Very similar to the story about the Supercharger network.
Apparently the boss of the team was told to make layoffs, she did some but not enough to please Musk, so Musk in a face to face meeting demanded she make more. She said they couldn't without affecting delivery.
Musk fired her. Then fired the team. Then hired the team back because she was correct.
But not before lots of ongoing projects got stalled because contacts just disappeared and stopped answering phones.
> The meeting could not have gone worse. Musk, the employees said, was not pleased with Tinucci’s presentation and wanted more layoffs. When she balked, saying deeper cuts would undermine charging-business fundamentals, he responded by firing her and her entire 500-member team.
and
> The contractor said he had expected Supercharger projects to provide about 20% of his 2024 revenue but now plans to diversify to avoid relying on Tesla.
Such a fragile ego. A mature manger should be able to handle a subordinate disobeying without throwing a temper tantrum and firing the whole team and damaging the whole company out of spite.
I haven't had th misfortune of having such managers myself. But I've been right next door to other managers like this and it's the absolute worse.
Even then, a power trip that actually fired hundreds of people on the spot is just ficticious levels of stupidity. It's the exaggerated evil businessman that everyone would laugh at. And musk fits it to a T.
lol, there are “managers” making 40k a year (with 3 people reporting to them) that have huge egos. It isn’t surprising that world’s richest man child has the ego to match his wealth.
Something wrong with society as a whole. People being cruel to each other for no reason, people can’t think/plan beyond the current quarter etc. Everywhere I look, people seem stressed, and they lash out in whatever way they can. Seems like a much bigger problem than Trump/Musk, though they are a big contributor to society’s stress for sure
>>lol, there are “managers” making 40k a year (with 3 people reporting to them) that have huge egos.
Power trip has its pitfalls. It convinces nobodies that they are special. Its one of the big reasons many times the middle managers end behind their reportees.
Once you taste power its easy to convince yourself that you are coasting along the path of a guaranteed victory, and winning is a given.
There was once this interview of a man I watched who would be around the head of a army, his staff pretty much treated him like a god. And he even got used to that sort of stuff over time. You can't expect good things to happen from there.
Why people think it’s a good idea to put this wealthy dickwad in charge of one of the most (allegedly) important projects in the current admin is beyond me. Move fast and break things is a stupid policy to apply to public policy.
Whether or not it's a good idea depends on what outcome you desire. If the aim is to weaken the U.S. then putting a foolish unelected billionaire in charge of things that he has no idea about is a great idea.
I don't think Trump's aim is to weaken the US. I don't think here's some big secret Russia conspiracy.
I think the situation is much simpler. Trump wants to be king. What happens to America in the future is immaterial. And a king needs a kingmaker, who in this case also wants to be MOTU.
>I don't think Trump's aim is to weaken the US. I don't think here's some big secret Russia conspiracy.
That's not really the claim these days. The Stelle Dossier accusations haven't really been substantiated.
He's more likely to be just a useful idiot. Far more easy to manipulate than politically educated stable people, and with less connection to the institutions of State.
There are plenty of ways for getting rid of underperformers in a goverment organisation. I've seen entire teams being sacked, and also some of the hardest working people I know work for goverment organisations.
Also, you cannot run the goverment like an startup that is always running on the edge. A majority of startups fail and that's fine, but one goverment organisation failing could cause problems for the entire country.
>I fully acknowledge that it will result in mistakes,
The people arguing the other side are not talking about reversible mistakes with minor fallout. They are claiming that taken as a whole the damage will be very difficult to undo. Countering this simply by accepting that there will be mistakes doesn't quite suffice. As pg tried to remind Musk on twitter (I'm paraphrasing): Countless startups come into being and die within the system. But this is the system we're talking about. There is only one.
I take it you want the others to believe this administration geniunely cares about providing the public efficient services without fraud and corruption by establishing highly-efficient meritocratic institutions. There's overwhelming evidence in the events of the past few weeks that this not the case. Just looking at the Eric Adams fiasco and, say, the cabinet picks of Hegseth, Gaetz, Bondi (straight of the movie Idiocracy) show this administration does not care about fighting corruption or hiring people that are most qualified for the job.
I've never witnessed pg screaming about anything ever frankly, maybe people close to him have. He would be the last person I use the verb for.
A lot of people and Democrats in STEM fields who voted for Kamala in the elections, including pg who publicly stated he was voting for Kamala, thought the corporate DEIA initiatives were counterproductive to their stated goals. It's not a extreme minority position in the tech crowd, nor is there a complete lack of criticism of corporate DEIA in the progressive media either.
I also give pg credit for being one of the rare VCs who posts "pro-Palestinian" viewpoints on occasion. So he does buck the trend from time to time. Calling David Sacks, Musk's unwavering eternal sychophant, possibly "the most evil person in Silicon Valley" was also a great line in the sand for him. But the basis for this opinion was more from his knowledge of how terrible Sacks treated founders as an investor rather than from Sacks being a Musk acolyte.
> Yep, but as opposed to a startup those "mistakes" will be deadly.
Well, these mistakes are also deadly if it’s a move fast and break things startup in medtech. And these mistakes are deadly in healthcare.
I am calling this out because I see this complete myopia of abstracting people’s lives as OK to ever lose on purpose.
Statements like “no one thinks that!!!” “Most people are XYZ!!!” are thrown around because computer scientists start being computer scientists - we try to solve problems the way we do at work. Big O notation is not an acceptable way to manage other people’s lives.
In computer science, 100,000 people in the global population converge to zero. If you are counting DAU… OK.
If you are estimating the number of people you might accidentally kill… not OK.
If you are trying to reduce corruption and you don’t actually know if you will kill people or not, and you do it anyway… I don’t see how anyone can consider that ethical.
> While you might not like his methods, you can't blame him for not wanting to wait 2 years for these issues to be addressed, data to be collected, and then action to be taken.
Yes, I definitely can blame him and anyone who wants to 180 the government in that time - that's stupid, childish, short sighted, and suicidal for keeping the lights on.
> you can't blame him for not wanting to wait 2 years
I do blame him. What harm of 2 years of status quo could be greater than the risks of completely breaking safety organizations?
> Elon who has to get rid of underperformers without credible data
No, this is not a valid solution to the problem, if there even are significant performance problems. “We don’t know exactly who the problematic people are, so let’s just fire every probationary employee, you know the ones who haven’t even been around long enough to be chronic underperformers?”
It’s either a very foolish attempt to solve the problem, and/or he actually just wants to destroy government.
> the real blame for this is with the previous administrators who neglected this problem for years
Trump was in charge 5-9 years ago, does he get some blame too?
>The lack of effective performance management in the federal workforce.
>Resulting in poor service provision and wasteful allocation of taxpayer funds.
Alleged. Not proven, alleged.
>No large private sector workforce would have gotten away with such broken processes.
What broken processes? You havent shown them to exist.
Large companies are built to maximixe profit. Governments are not, so why should their organizational choices be similar?
You have clearly never worked in any sizeable workforce, and I can assure you your basic presumption that large private sector workforces does not have broken processes is childishly naive. The "problem" is you, making assumptions of waste where there is none to speak off, unless you can provide some actual data to back that up. The average federal employee earns about $60k/y, they are not there for the money. Firing all federal employees will same about 7h of borrowing.
I'm sorry but the narrative you have invested in so deeply is not founded in reality, not that I expect anyone explaining facts to you will make any appreciable difference.
Enjoy the pain you elected to bring upon yourself, you deserve the government you got.
You can’t generalize about the entire public sector from a couple anecdotes. Of course there are going to be badly run groups inside an organization of that size. I can tell you there exists management inside the federal government that runs performance management and fires underperformers.
Since you fall victim to such an obvious fallacy, it makes sense that you would wind up hired into low-performing groups.
You're right it's not a startup. It's an organization in a town that voted 90%+ in favor of keeping their jobs, not being prosecuted, or some kind of "threat to democracy".
You can't run an organization if the ground troops are resistant to executing the vision of leadership
Management is as much about convincing people you’re right as it is about getting your way always. Sometimes your subordinates are right and a good manager can still work with that situation. Even in a professional army like the US military there is disagreement and negotiation. This idea that we are all troops in some kind of militia who should blindly follow one person’s will is the bottom half of fascist ideology.
The term "ground troops" was just used as a metaphor for people at the bottom who do a big chunk of the actual work. Every organization would rather have people at least be pro "big picture" vision, and, yes, there should be dissonance and compromise on the "how" we get there part
You can say that but you could also have called them “workers.” Calling them ground troops is intended to evoke the image of people being shelled in foxholes and then running away. It is a bad euphemism that is meant to suggest we are fighting a war. You have to ask yourself—-when someone evokes the imagery of war, do you not think they are spoiling for a fight?
I can’t say if you’re serious or just trolling. It is beyond stupid to compare government institutions with private sector.
Let’s say (just for discussion purposes) that some government agency (USAID, for example) is wasting 100% of their budget on parties (again, just for discussion purposes). What is the right way to fix it? Step one - you hire an auditor and collect proof of any misconduct or wrongdoing. Step 2 - find out the people who did wrong. Ask for an explanation. Show the public your proof. And so on.
You don’t shut down departments without a shred of evidence, overnight. It is just cruel and stupid. But then, cruelty seems to be the point here.
You don’t set fire to your entire face because you got a pimple on your nose. You just treat the pimple
Also, all employees are just cogs in the machine. You can totally lay off that grizzled senior dev and hire a kid fresh out of college, what’s the difference? It’s not like there was any institutional logic locked up in the senior’s head right?
Not to mention the externality of having extra people floating around who know intimate details of the nations nuclear weapons secrets, who you have now pissed off.
I'm sure anyone who has been entrusted with such a position is fairly responsible, but it still seems like a bad idea.
Plus our adversaries would know we're hiring, and this bunch doesn't seem to care so much about proper vetting.
I would never go back under a boss who thinks even for a second that I’m easily replaceable. It would immediately indicate to me, that I can’t trust in my boss at all. Nobody really can work effectively without trust. That’s the base of our whole society.
If you're not easily replaceable then the company has failed on some level.
This is why I think current org structures, and incentives, don't map properly to SWE and fuels this employment theater of "trust me I'm not a cog" => "trust me you are".
Don't know what an ideal arrangement would be, maybe SaaS is closer. Even then, still have to convince some 'cogs' to build your SaaS corp while you recoup 90% margins off their labor which is a fast path to class consciousness and we're back at square one!
Yes good, and now because their value is appreciated they can be paid what they will be paid in the private sector, perhaps ~180k/y instead of 60k/y. So if you fire 2/3 of the workforce and pay those that remain what they are "worth", you have saved exactly what ?
Maybe they ought not have been fired, but their feelings are 2nd place when their salary is funded predicated on men with guns forcing people to pay up. Maybe my feelings are hurt and I hold a grudge for being forced to pay their paycheck rather than spend that money on my family, but I'm nearly certain most of them don't care nor does much of HN.
They are humans first, public servants second. We are in the business of governing and employing humans. A wise government would acknowledge this truth.
Emotions are the motivator for everything, the question is, which emotion is getting the better of the human today? The better angel of their nature, or the other, darker one, that ineptitude stoked into relevance?
Everyone has a breaking point, for them, it’s losing a livelihood, for you, sadly, it’s the garnishing of your wage for the collective good.
I take it you’d also be fine paying 100% of the cost of the roads you use to buy food for your family? Men with guns take money from my family to pay for your roads after all.
Absolutely privatize them all. The roads for miles around my house are private easement (no tax) that are publicly accessible and it works beautifully. I built my own roads to access my land and it's great, my property taxes are near 0.
These firings will have no impact on your taxes. Instead of people having a job, the money will just get given to oligarchs and you’ll pay largely the same taxes but have moderately less government services. Socialism is needed to some degree for society to function. Capitalism alone is an awful system.
In reality, whether taxes fall or not likely depends on whether the savings are returned in the form of income tax cuts, or whether the savings are used to repay the massive debt that has accumulated from decades of deficits. Both outcomes are good in the long run.
False dichotomy. They will likely be used to continue tax cuts for the wealthiest (and corporations? I don't remember), which are set to expire. That is neither scenario that you envisioned.
Whom does income tax cuts help? Median US salary is 62k. That person pays ~12k in income taxes. Conservatives are going to ‘save’ that person 1k on their taxes or some other paltry sum and then cancel a bunch of services, fire a few hundred thousand workers, and raise tariffs to make the actual cost go up on everything that person buys.
What do you mean when you say "it's an effective strategy"? It's hard to say for certain since Twitter is now private, but it certainly seems to have lost value since Musk took over. What would "work in the public sector" entail for you?
I would actually agree with you on that in the case of Twitter, but in what sense is that comparable to the current situation? Unless you mean that Musk is succeeding by destroying a bunch of American assets (i.e. the agencies) and then being lauded for this destruction. I could see that value once again going to Musk (and Trump), but in what sense would that value not be lost by your average US citizen? It's not like Musk bought these agencies before destroying them, he's just destroying them. He's no longer burning his own house down for life insurance, he's burning your house down for life insurance.
Neither of us really know Twitter's financial position, given it's now private.
The rumours I'm hearing are that EBITDA is now above pre-acquistion. The fact that debt is trading hands without a haircut suggests that's probably accurate.
There was a lot of waste at Twitter. Given that headcount was cut by 80%, and advertisers are returning, I'd suggest it's doing fine.
Literally every valuation shows its worth <10b, at best a 25% of its paid for value what, two years ago? a little more?
After reading through your posts its like you live in an alternate reality where Musk's integrity is bulletproof, his decisions are awesome, and he's basically doing it for the rest of us.
I don't know how you can sustain this with everyone throwing reality in your face that he's a short sighted rich kid who lies through his teeth and throws money around until he gets what he wants.
It was, but advertisers are now returning which has driven it's earnings back up while it's operational costs remain significantly below pre-acquisition.
Advertisers are returning because Elon Musk is the long arm of the president and literally threatening tech companies with reprisal. On Twitter. It's open corruption! They're not even bothering to hide it.
paywalled article so this link isn't really worth much. And given your credibility I don't trust your analysis. Especially when you also seem to be ignoring any reasonable responses and focusing on arguing instead.
It's wild — people that look at employment of the citizens of this country as just data to feed into some kind of profit/waste equation that needs to maximize profit, discard any hint of waste.
It's not waste when those employed have paychecks to spend in the economy. What would Corporate think if half the population of the U.S. were unemployed and/or homeless?
I guess that's fine as long as profits have been maximized.
Right? I am astounded by these takes. If every corp and every job was this way, our country would be a high-stress, unemployed wasteland. Any org will drop thousands in a heartbeat. Your family would never be safe.
We work so hard already. We already have such high stress. I do not believe we need to eke out the last %s of profit to pass to shareholders and create crushing stress and work on those remaining.
> Neither of us really know Twitter's financial position, given it's now private.
Then why are you making any argument that it was a success?
> There was a lot of waste at Twitter. Given that headcount was cut by 80%, and advertisers are returning, I'd suggest it's doing fine.
Why would you suggest it's fine? Without knowing their exact costs, debts, revenues, etc. you know _nothing_. Why would you suggest it's doing fine when knowing nothing about it's financial position?
Whether or not it's a good strategy for either companies or the government, this particular case involved randomly firing a bunch of folks who build and maintain nuclear weapons and then almost immediately trying to un-fire them. There wasn't enough time to see if anything broke (not that you'd see that with nuclear weapons until it was way, way too late) but now you've managed to piss off a bunch of people who are likely only going to come back long enough to find a new job, if they come back at all, and you've probably also damaged your ability to retain even the people you didn't fire or attract new prospective employees. It's basically all damage with zero value and it certainly isn't going to fix any performance management problems.
I think it's a questionable strategy anyways, especially when applied to government, but carrying out the strategy in such a ham-fisted way seems unlikely to be the secret to making it successful.
perhaps effective, but not efficient. shouldn't there be some due diligence on selecting people and departments from dismissal? some kind of measurement and analysis.
>The US government is trying to rehire nuclear safety employees it had fired on Thursday, after concerns grew that their dismissal could jeopardise national security, US media reported.
It hasn't even been one business day. We don't know how much this will break. The titanic took 4 hours to sink; these things don't instantly show its aftereffects. Clearly, the administration thinks something will break if they are reversing course.
> usually easily undone.
article:
>A memo sent to NNSA employees on Friday and obtained by NBC News read: "The termination letters for some NNSA probationary employees are being rescinded, but we do not have a good way to get in touch with those personnel."
We are definitely in unusual times.
You also responded 2 coments downstream to another story where this strategy cost a company an entire division and utterly missed its goals.
One goal is to get rid of any critical voices. Only yes-men (or women) will be left standing. It is a test of allegiance, and those that care more about the mission of the organization, or team, customers, users, general public than the boss - are considered to fail. It is core to authoritarianism. Kneel before the king :/
In that case I'd say it seems to have proven effective for Musk multiple times now, so why stop now? In his experience, he can just keep shit-canning feds until something immediately bad happens - say he is sorry and give them a job back.
As others have already pointed out, the real damage is silent, has already been done, and will be suffered by generations to come while being able to blame others.
I don't know him, but as a programmer I hope I'm at least half decent at identifying a pattern. Musk's business acument is horrfying consistent, if nothing else.
Problem is, it’s not backfired - the example you cited “worked”, because it rapidly identified key personnel without weeks or months of subjective analysis and political posturing by workers and their supervisors.
I think in federal government the risks are much higher, and Musk is being an idiot by exposing the America public to those risks, but the feedback loop for him on these previous experiments has been positive, not negative.
Before the election, Vivek or Elon or one of the galaxy-brains floated the idea of firing every other employee in the federal government based on the last digit of their social security number.
It was Vivek and his plan was to randomly (lottery) fire half of all federal employees the first year and then randomly fire half of those who remain the second year get to an overall 75% reduction.
There is a difference between cruelty and arbitrariness. It isn't cruelty.
They're going up against a world-class bureaucracy; a human powered machine that is excellent at dragging out changes beyond the term of any politician. Something like "Yes, Minister" is a comedy show except a lot of it is fairly true - they aren't going to get anything done without doing something drastic like cutting a lot of functions and seeing what happens. Otherwise it'll keep growing.
It’s not arbitrary, though. He’s attacking CFPB because he wants to launch financial features on Twitter without oversight. He’s attacking USAID because they helped end apartheid in his native South Africa. It’s really all just a bunch of petty vendettas and looting.
> It’s really all just a bunch of petty vendettas and looting.
Yeah. The technical term for that is "arbitrary". It isn't ideologically motivated; it is based on some dude's opinions based on who-knows-what internal dialogue. Although this financial features on Twitter sounds like a pretty good idea and I'd like to see it in the wild.
No it’s not? “Arbitrary” would be if he were, like, picking names out of a hat, or the first one that he sees on Twitter in the morning. He’s attacking agencies for extremely personal and ideological reasons. Literally the opposite of arbitrary.
> Although this financial features on Twitter sounds like a pretty good idea and I'd like to see it in the wild.
Kind of a jaw-dropping reaction to the fact that he’s dismantling the very agency that would be in charge of regulating those features. Honestly, I really struggle to understand the mindset that’s not merely okay with but excited by this sort of egregious corruption.
> Honestly, I really struggle to understand the mindset that’s not merely okay with but excited by this sort of egregious corruption.
Seems like it should be easy to do. We're looking at this big corrupt blob thing of questionable competence that is the US political class, and then one polyp of the mass does something that probably makes the world a little better. Yay. Well done blob thing.
It'd be better if people committed to a high-integrity political class but it is a monumental task (probably multi-generational) and the people trying to progress it haven't made much progress. Suggestions welcome.
Is the "one polyp of mass that does something that probably makes the world a little better"… supposed to be DOGE? The single most nakedly corrupt government body in probably the past century?
Like, are we not commenting on an article about how we recklessly fired dozens to hundreds of people who were overseeing our nuclear weapons stockpile? And it turned out they're actually really important, but we're having trouble contacting them to hire them back? And the group that's responsible for all this… is somehow not the questionably competent one?
I don't really know what to say, man. It's pretty clear this isn't going to go anywhere productive. Have a nice night.
> The single most nakedly corrupt government body in probably the past century?
The last president was forced to issue multiple preemptive pardons for his own family after being dogged for years by serious corruption allegations. That probably counts as worse and it isn't even particularly outrageous by the standards of the US Congress, it seemed to be pretty routine stuff. I'd expect most members of the US congress to struggle if real scrutiny was bought to bear since their financial circumstances often don't appear to make sense.
Then beyond the personal corruption there is the lobbying network that constantly tries and succeeds in writing law for various unsavoury interest groups. Realistically if Musk is doing something corrupt - TBD in my opinion - his major mistake is being directly associated with the changes, he should have learned from the experts and done it discretely like everyone else does.
> And the group that's responsible for all this… is somehow not the questionably competent one?
You seem to have tapped into the mindset with this one. Say it again seriously and you've made it there.
A financial institution created by the very person responsible for dismantling our most effective consumer protections against malicious financial institutions sounds like an extremely bad idea.
I'm very curious how anyone could think this is a good idea (for consumers, obviously it's a good idea for Musk)
As you mention "Yes, Minister", as a potential metaphor for truth...
That series was based on conversations between the writers and senior civil servants in UK Government. It was Margaret Thatcher's favourite show (she even wrote a scene to perform with the actors at some event or other), because in 1970s and 1980s Britain, it was incredibly on the money.
However, the more apt political comedy to reflect what modern politics looks like isn't "Yes, Minister" or "Yes, Prime Minister" (the sequel), but "The Thick of It", which shows well-meaning but put-upon civil servants dealing with the tyranny and abuse of special advisors and external consultants bullying and demeaning them at every turn. It, too, is based on conversations with real insiders in UK government.
I'll leave it to you to decide which is most apt for modern Washington, but there was a film of the latter mostly set in Washington, which tries to capture the tensions on that side of the Atlantic quite well, with the main joke being the UK's necessary subservience to a larger World power. It's worth a watch.
For my money, Musk looks a lot more like Malcolm Tucker than he does Jim Hacker.
I thought that a reasonably free, vital, innovative, and prosperous society was compatible with a fundamental respect for human dignity. That's why I moved to Europe. Now it seems I was overoptimistic, but that doesn't mean we should wholly embrace backsliding right into the 19th century version of "progress".
> I don't think I was overoptimistic. It was literally the best decision I ever made, in every aspect I can think of.
A lot of folks mention the lower salaries in Europe (generally, and especially for tech): has mattered much in your (personal) experience for quality of life and happiness?
For me, the lower salary has not affected my daily life too much. I saved a lot of money in the US, but now making about 100k between myself and my partner in the Netherlands, we are still living a comfortable life. We own a car, bought a house in 2024, and we are saving about 1k per month into various sinking funds with a net savings closer to 500/pm. No kids yet, but hopefully with raises and generous family leave policies, I think we will be okay.
My quality of life is insanely better. I live in a walkable small city in the south. I walk to the grocery store a few times a week. I bike to the library or to the train station. My job turns off at 5pm and I don’t work on the weekends unless I want to. Even then, that weekend work time can be substituted for work during the week.
The biggest downside for us has been the cost of traveling back to the US to see family. It’s very expensive for us to fly home since we also need to rent a car usually. Even saving 1k per month, that’s a significant part of the yearly savings just going to buy plane tickets for one big trip per year. After we have kids, I suspect grandma and grandpa will be coming here to visit more often because we can’t afford to fly with a family of 4 or 5 more than once every other year. Not to mention the tax implications of spending too much time abroad.
If you can afford to try it out, take a 90 day visa and just chill and see if the lifestyle works for you (including remote work). Worst case scenario, you go back to the US after a year if you hate it.
What imho matters more is culture. There is less of a salary, but a culture of safety and stability.
However, this is not for everyone: While you can be more sure of keeping your job in rough times, you can also be sure that the lazy idiot 2 desks over will keep his job. And you can be sure that any change will be resisted because change is seen as inherently bad and threatening, and reasons will be found to shoot down your new-fangled fancy ideas. YMMV, to each his own, etc.
No. But it depends on they type of life you choose to lead.
I just wanted enough to buy a house and raise a family, and I could earn enough for this. A comfortable middle class life in a nice neighborhood.
I also appreciate the safety nets and worker protections here in Europe. I recently went through a serious medical condition that in the US would have me bankrupt. Here I had no issues.
Had I moved to the US I would by now be either dead or broke.
I took the "overoptimisim" to mean that the parent thought Europe could defend and maintain this outlook well into the forseeable future, an assumption that is being tested by Europe's own rightward slide. The way things are right now in Europe, to say that it might have been overoptimistic to think that Europe will continue as it has makes sense to me. At the moment, it is unclear to most people who live there how much of their way of life (if any) is subsidized by the US.
Government employees shouldn't be immune to layoffs. If the government goes bankrupt, everyone is much worse off. The longer these systems stay down the worse things can go, this is the most humane way to do what needs to be done. Which is take away the power (money) that the parasitic relationship between business and DC is built on and make sure we don't go bankrupt.
They will be able to collect unemployment, do we know if they are getting severance?
I am aware that it is about the fire and rehire. If no one can say why something should exist, then yes, the quickest solution is turn it all off and see what breaks. You might not agree with it but it is a valid strategy given all the dynamics at play. Your definition of leadership isn't my definition.
I don't think we should go to war at all.
I don't think you understand why Trump was elected or middle America culture. The popular vote was a vote against deterring and corrupt institutions that already exist
Makes sense. And isn't this the ol' military trick, that in software dev / project management parlance is now called a "scream test"? I.e. if your unit feels like it's doing nothing but endlessly filling out all kinds of reports, and no one knows which ones are important, the solution is to stop submitting any reports at all - and wait until calls and angry letters from higher-ups begin. That will quickly reveal which reports you need to keep filing, and which you can ignore.
The Scream test is very valuable for time efficiency, in general. In this application though, I think they’re realizing sometimes it’s difficult to reverse, such as firing the new blood who just moved to DC and have been there only a year… like I would feel so abused, why go back?
If they tell you it was a scream test, and it turns out your team was actually pretty important and also gives you a raise, you might. Especially if you have nothing else lined up.
Yeah that's the thing, the government can't unilaterally give raises like that. reason #20 this was a horrible move.
>Especially if you have nothing else lined up.
Sadly, yes. I do find the irony here that the FEDS said the economy was recovering and Trump promised to fix inflation and make jobs. Then he's taking advantsge of the bad market to force people he abused back.
>Rapidly identified key personnel without weeks or months of subjective analysis and political posturing by workers and their supervisors.
This doesn't make sense to me. The federal government isn't a company making Widget X, where you can gut, tweak, and repair it until you minimize the cost per widget and maximize the number of widgets sold. The government does a lot of things, often in the hopes of results in one or more decades, and there's rarely an easy and immediate way to measure success.
For example, the Surgeon General announced tobacco's link with cancer in 1964. It wasn't until the 1990s that smoking rates really started to fall in any significant way. The federal and state governments have spent decades and billions of dollars to reduce smoking rates, and they've been wildly successful. The tax revenue generated by any person-years alive which were won through that effort will never make up for the billions spent. But those people will contribute more to the economic and social life of the US, and the tobacco settlement deterred other companies from causing so much harm.
Did the twitter employees come back at the same pay or did they ask for much more expensive packages since they'd been identified as crucial to operations?
Sounds like the kind of thing that could end up increasing costs rather than reducing them.
If it ends up being something like 80% non-crucial and stays fired, the other 20% return with double-pay, you’re probably still running a net-positive with better resource allocation
Except in reality the 20% coming back are probably not the best. Some will be but at least some of your best employees are going to be smart enough (or have enough self-respect) to go elsewhere. And/or those are the people skilled enough to find a new job quickly (or know they can find one quickly) and aren’t willing to come back.
It only "worked" because the key personnel decided to come back. Had they decided to move on to greener pastures, the end result would've been very different.
That isn't much of a point because federal employees are much more likely to return than Twitter technical staff. Interesting approach, specially because it's not my country.
>> federal employees are much more likely to return
Not necessarily. It's generally understood that federal employees accept a lower salary in exchange for career stability. If a career as a federal employee now has higher risk then at least some people will be expecting a higher salary.
I think that incentive is part of the problem. Federal employees should get paid more with a reasonable expectation of being fired. The amount of people I know in government positions who give 0 consideration to the quality of their work because they know they won’t be fired astounds me.
How is firing large amounts of people on a whim going to solve the problem of people not caring about their work?
From what it sounds like (w.r.t. Agenda 47 / Project 2025) DOGE is fund seeking for massive planned programs, not returning money to the citizenry or restructuring for efficiency.
It sounds like they are illegally looting agencies and programs that congress already funded, so they can fund the admin's proposed plans (virtual social cleansing, mass deportations, homeless relocation, freedom cities, etc).
It doesn't look like DOGE is trying to fund anything; at this stage my guess is they're trying to hack off the propaganda arm of the CIA/NSA and the web of NGOs on the theory that it is funding anti-Trump messaging. Otherwise targeting USAID for savings early is a bit pointless; what is $50 billion a year to the US government? They're $36 trillion in debt with no plausible path out of the hole. Annual deficit is around $2 trillion.
Or it might be a propaganda effort to make Team Trump look busy. Hard to say without more visibility into what they're doing.
> Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, R-N.Y., said she has expressed “concerns” to leaders about the prospect of steep spending cuts and told reporters that, before she agrees to vote for the budget resolution, she wants “better clarity” about the next stage — especially when it comes to cuts. “$4.5 trillion doesn’t leave a lot of room for the president’s priorities,” Malliotakis said
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Also, why else would you directly reclaim funds as the executive? As a party, if you wanted to correct spending, you would do it in a budget. As the executive, if you wanted to get money without congressional approval, you would reclaim money that has already been appropriated. There are other ways (emergency orders), but they might not be popular with the party or a target voting base (in this case, more net spending).
It is the US Government. Nobody has minded funding their schemes since 1970. They're going to keep borrowing until something so terrible happens that they literally cannot borrow any more. It is a bipartisan consensus position that spans multiple powerful governing ideologies.
Rep. Nicole Malliotakis is much more likely to be using rhetoric than predicting how the situation will develop. If the Republicans as a party actually cared about the debt or intended to make meaningful improvements to the situation we'd have seen evidence of it in the 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s or 10s.
I'd love to be wrong, but there is pretty strong evidence here that they're going to tut-tut; maybe wag a finger or even in extreme situations someone will write a strongly worded letter. Then the government will borrow whatever they need to to pay for whatever hare-brained scheme is flavour of the month.
The problem here is that gilt rates have been on the rise for a year (most likely as a reaction to Trump's manifesto), meaning borrowing is getting more and more expensive. You can print more money, but that devalues the currency, which the USD has managed to shirk off by being the main reserve currency of the planet. Except, that might change soon - because of the seeming chaos of the Trump administration (based on experiences of the previous administration), people are eyeing up EUR as a safer place, and gold prices are moving in a direction that suggests people want out of dollars (even if gold is normally denominated in USD for most people).
Trump has therefore caused gilt rates to rise, borrowing costs to rise, and a potential currency devaluation.
If you want to see how that works out when people finally lose their confidence, see what happened to the Truss government in the UK: it's not pretty. The UK is still paying for that on multiple fronts, but we were able to end the experiment in 49 days - that's not possible in the US.
I don't think what has worked for the last 50 years - waving budget appropriations through, shrugging at the national debt - is going to hold up for too much longer, for multiple reasons. And when it falls, it's going to fall fast, and very hard.
I made this comment before digging deeper into appropriations impoundment.
However, it still seems plausible (in my limited understanding) that this strategy could still be the goal, if the goal is to first push appropriations impoundment to SCOTUS.
Here is the best cited and approachable article I found on the subject within the context of these events:
>Hard to say without more visibility into what they're doing.
They want to fund corporate tax cuts. the cut from 22 to 15 percent is estsimated to be worth 100-200b dollars of income for the government per year. That's about the yearly funding of the DoED.
So we aren't saving money nor paying off debt. we are just funding corporate profits.
Most likely the whole point is to destabilise and eliminate government structures with the goal of filling the resulting power vacuum with privately owned services. That's what Thiel and his ilk are all about.
The first part of this plan - destruction - is easier than the second half - creation. If they're successful with the second half, people will be worse off because it's a big step towards neofeudalism /strengthening oligarchy. If they fail, people will be a lot worse off because the structures they're destroying are actually doing important work.
They don't get paid more because the government is not a profit center. It gets money from the citizens and then appropriates those funds. raises and promotions need to be a strict process because all government workers have public salaries. They can probably pay a little more, but not anything close to competitive.
>The amount of people I know in government positions who give 0 consideration to the quality of their work because they know they won’t be fired astounds me.
blame the incentive structure, not the players. Government being efficient and saving money results in less budget next time. They are punished for their improvement. If Musk wanted governent efficiency, that's the angle to approach. Protecting against lower budgets after a high performance review would do wonders.
None of these people were let go because of the quality of their work. What incentive would they have to do their job well if their continued employment is not based on merit?
The advocates of Musk's firings will say that if these people could command a higher salary, they should be in the private industry producing goods and services for the population rather than the inherently wasteful government positions.
The profit-making part is when we pull back from being world policeman and instead sell nuclear weapons and weapon systems. Sorry, we won't go to war for you, but how about some H-bombs, Taiwan?
The problem with ongoing US "experiments" is how much the rest of the planet is dependent on American companies, related economics and politics, regardless of it not being our country, the schockwaves will be felt.
And this is the thing, the rest of the world has agreed to be dependent on American companies, because they believed in the legitimacy of the US and free international trade. If belief in that legitimacy goes away, we will see that dependence shift quickly. Let us begin with Mastercard and Visa where the US taxes every payment transaction in much of the world. Do we really believe that Europe couldn't run its own card schemes?
Starting with this year, Germany has legally mandated free and instant (few seconds) direct account to account transfers. For some shops, you can now either pay by SEPA (for free) or agree to pay a 3% fee for using VISA. They already started cutting out the US middleman.
The European Payment Initiative, the EPI, abandoned its plans for a card scheme and decided to focus on an account-to-account instant payment solution (A2A) for all kinds of use cases, all through a wallet. There is an interesting synergy here with the European moves to develop a common digital identity service and euro-wallet infrastructure.
They're not just trying to get rid of the US middleman, but the middleman altogether.
IMO, to me as layman non-American, it's not an if. The USA is done-for-except-not, just like Twitter has been for a while. This might be able to be undone, hypothetically, but is not being undone. Online armchair generals are already starting to discuss things like escalation strategy for European nuclear forces and so on.
I guess we'll be seeing Mastodon/Bluesky/Threads phenomenon across worlds, both horizontally and vertically in the coming decades, this time in real life with (more)real consequences.
There's going to be major efforts especially in Europe, to de-couple from the US. We saw this to some extent in Trump 1.0 but he didn't actually do much due to the ineptness of those around him and a Senate that was still dominated by the anti-MAGA GOP "old guard". This time it is much, much worse.
Right, but that's all Musk sees: they came back, and so it worked. He seems like the kind of person whose ego would make him believe that any other time he tries this, it would work too.
All key personnel were immigrants? Why did the others come back? Also, since the H1B were key to operations and therefore smart, couldn't at least some of them have found a new employer? 61% of the H1B population switched jobs that year, so why did all key H1B come back?
I think key personnel came back because they wanted to. It's the simplest explanation.
With h1b i think you have 60 days to find someone else to sponsor you or you have to leave the country. 60 days is no time at all to find and start a new job. Even if you’re smart.
Even in the best markets, I still had a 6 week interview to offer stage (5 stages). 45 days and if they decided someone else is better I may be out of luck restarting the process.
With a Visa, I would not take such a risk. Given the job market, they either need to extend the period, or somehow mandate companies decide on a full time candidate within 30 days of first conact. It's gotten beyond out of hand.
Maybe? They went private so that's not a good sign usually.
There's more of a surge on wall street, but similar to tesla a lot of this is upheld by an undeserved hype. If Elon Musk died, I suspect these valuations would plummet harder than '29. TSLA is informally called a meme stock for a reason.
I'm still waiting for file upload API v2. V1 was only made EOL like what, 9 months ago.. Its totally fine to gut your company when all you need is maintenance mode.
Yes, and the personnel rapidly identified that their new boss is a jerk that has no respect to their work and their life, so why should they work for him, when any boss in random fastfood is probably more capable to their job better that this one idiot, plus private sector pays more...
This is horribly naive. It’s not twitter. There are safety outcomes which need to be considered in safety critical agencies.
I mean can you even claim to make the assumption that the actual key staff were rehired? Can you make the assumption that they are working safely with the resources they need? Can you make an assumption that they have covered the entire scope of the organisation?
Probably not.
Chess is played one piece at a time, not smashing all the pieces off the board.
Valid point, but Twitter's development post acquisition stalled and the company was massively devalued, so I'm not sure that can be considered a positive case.
The point was never to turn it into a profitable venture, but to acquire a widely adopted and established communication channel, turn it into an echo chamber and make it run with the least cost possible. It became what was expected of it.
Yes, using this tactic in the govt is much riskier than a private company. And we won't know in this case if it "works" until after many months. And then deciding whether it "works" is very subjective depending on whether the collateral damage on human lives is acceptable or not.
"works" implies that they are able to a) find those personnel and b) win them back over. It seems like they shokingly cannot do either.
It's also still weird because a lot of the firings focused on probationary workers.Very few would prove themselves in a year, so they did have to defer to key personell in he end to figure out "hey, he needed those people". Except he may not get those worers back.
> but the feedback loop for him on these previous experiments has been positive, not negative.
Sure, positve for his ego. He didn't care about recovering the supercharger conractors, he didn't care about repairing his adverts' relationships on Twitter and even threatened to sue as if they are obligated to advertise on his plaform. Call me treachorous but I don't think he really cares about making an efficient government. He's just funding his tax cuts.
They are not supporting the decision in this comment, they are just pointing out that Elon had a positive experience with the twitter layoffs which led him to want to run that playbook again. I would even venture the guess that they DONT support Elon's decision here.
Another perspective on that is if some highly-ranked agent may do so, maybe the system itself is wrong. This is basically allowed and works. Why someone who remains in practically legal limits to blame if clearly your ideas are based on morals and not these limits?
I’m not justifying him here, it just seems naive to make the rules which produce (and most of the times promote) ones like that and then blame them for doing what’s effing effective within it. I mean, as a hi-tech american(?) you’re eating a cake baked in the same oven. Maybe it wouldn’t be as tasty if the oven had different settings, and you’d have different life experiences and opinion then.
A difference with government is that you and I pay the salaries of these people. With Twitter a lot of it was just schadenfreude. Many of the employees were acting in a way perceived to be partisan and vindictive, which left a rather sizable number of people somewhat less than upset when the tide turned.
It's one reason we should all endeavor to treat each other, perhaps especially those we disagree with, with some degree of respect - even if your sole and only motivation is your own interests.
If a company gets too big, its not the employees fault, why should they be the first on the chopping block?
If a government is too big, is it again the employees fault? Or is it someone elses?
The concept that some dude with more money than another can make screwups, then happily go off and impact thousands of lives thinking this is the way forward with no impact on them is utterly mind boggling. Similarly, we, the people who pay the salaries of government employees, are the ones who are at fault for voting in people who keep making mistakes. So why should the employees be suffering for this?
Do people not realise all of this is a smoke screen to push attention away from the conversation that existed to tax billionaires? To make them pay their fair share? This has all been nothing but an act to divert attention away. And its working. We are arguing about nothing when the solution is so obvious.
The people that should suffer are the ones in control. Not the ones who just want to live day to day.
Employees with zero to negative productivity should be on the chopping block because we want the employer to survive.
The United States has an highly progressive tax system where the rich pay the vast majority of the taxes. Why isn't that already their "fair share" (a propaganda term)?
Were it trivial to attribute the performance of complex systems to individuals, they would have no need to seek employment at firms and would be able to get the fair value for their labor in an efficient market.
And what if it turns out that let's say 70% of individuals have a zero to even slightly negative 'value', as seems increasingly possible as organizations shed mass numbers of employees but continue to function just fine? Or we can look at evidence in the other direction where you have companies taking on dramatically more employees yet not showing anywhere near proportional increases in 'productivity' (which I'm using as as a catch-all rather than as the precise term).
I really think this is the future many people behind evangelization of e.g. "AGI" futures are aiming for, with the assumption that well then we'd just have to create some sort of a basic income and everybody would live happily ever after. Of course that rather voluntarily chooses to ignore centuries of evidence to the fact that that's probably not quite what would happen. And even if it did, instead of everybody living happily every you'd instead create a dramatic stratification in society that would, over time, come to make Feudalism look like Communism. People that live only to consume will, over time, come to be marginalized with 100% certainty.
Do you really believe that your second sentence is true? wow. So what you are saying is that billionaires, while they do pay taxes, pay their fair share with no attempt to avoid taxes? No overseas accounts or shady businesses? Its all above board?
But anyway, lets focus on the low productive people, because that really what is going to bring America out of the rut that it is in. Not the overly powerful rich that are totally screwing the regular joe. You're on another planet bro if you think the problem is the low productivity person and thats what America needs to focus on right now.
The main way taxes are avoided is by a lot of their wealth being paper wealth. For Bezos that's Amazon stock, for Musk it's Tesla. So when the stock doubles in price, so does (nearly) their net worth. But they're not taxed on this until they convert it to cash. So they can see their wealth double or triple with 0 increase in paid taxes, unless they try to access that money.
Taxing unrealized capital gains is possible, but it's not clear how you'd do this without destroying the entire financial (as opposed to goods/services) economy, since taxing 'wins' without crediting 'losses' makes any margins-game like investing impossible, but billionaires receiving billions of dollars in refunds when the market crashes is probably not visually great. It also seems fairly certain you'd introduce investment hedge possibilities with this, which is also probably undesirable. Not an easy problem.
And of course on top of all of this there's the Norway Problem. [1] Norway decided to introduce a hugely unpopular increase to their wealth tax system. It was expected to increase government revenue by about $146 million per year. Instead it resulted in a loss of about $448 million per year. Make taxation sufficiently onerous and people will simply leave your country. We're not talking about a captive audience, especially in modern times.
Certainly I do. I'd like the United States to change to a simpler and more regressive tax policy so that everyone has skin in the game. For example, eliminating all taxes in favor of a VAT or the like.
Getting bureaucrats to fire each other is met with every delay tactic
possible. Might be able to put it off for two years which is all they
need.
Going in crazy like they are doing now, may serve the administration
if they start having department do their own layoffs in a hurry,
because they know otherwise it will be done for then.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
It worked with twitter though. The site did not implode like all the naysayers predicted, it's at least as good, if not better than it was, just going off of usage statistics.
This is basically 0 based budgeting, where you get rid of everything and then only add back what you deem to be absolutely necessary. I expect good results.
> Just go a little slower and give agencies time to compile accurate lists of necessary employees
It's not about achieving results primarily, it's a public perception game. Trump and Musk are going for the perception of "they do what they say from day 1" - it doesn't matter if what they plan succeeds at all (and if it's struck down by judges, it's just additional fodder for "un-American judges!!!" propaganda), or if what they do actually has the outcome they promised.
The GQP voter base no longer cares about anything but the appearance of "winning", and it's aided by completely off-the-rockers media and influencers.
People should read Elon Musk by Walter Issacson. Here's an excerpt from the chapter on his "algorithm":
> [Step 2] Delete any part or process you can. You may have to add them back later. In fact, if you do not end up adding back at least 10% of them, then you didn't delete enough.
He thinks this is a feature, not a bug. Is he wrong? I don't think so.
If we fired 25% of the federal govt workforce, it would save 1% from the federal budget.
This has nothing to do with trimming waste and everything to do with replacing the government with loyalists from top to bottom. What comes after that isn't going to be pretty.
The "federal budget" is something people often mention, but it's quite misleading. At least in terms of what we think of.
The reason is that the overwhelming majority of the budget is spent automatically - pensions, medicare, social security, and all of these expenses are unavoidable and in a mandatory expenses category. The remainder of the budget, including military, is considered discretionary. That discretionary spending is the thousands of pages that Congress creates (and fails to read) each year. And it's in that budget that most of the things we associate with government came from - everything from education, to roads, to infrastructure, and also the military.
So by the numbers in 2024 the discretionary budget was "only" $1.7 trillion and after military spending "only" $900 billion was left. "Only" obviously needs to be in quotes but that's indeed only about 13% of the e.g. $6.7 trillion total budget in 2024. And so each time you cut something the amount of money left for the things we generally associate with government skyrockets. So for instance USAID was "only" $50 billion, but that was more than 5% of the entire discretionary budget!
US Federal Workers cost $293 billion [1], and contractors amounted to $760 billion. This is excluding secondary costs/benefits, which are extremely high for government workers, and only direct payments. It also excludes budgeted expenditures that would have been performed by those employees. So that's already $1.05 trillion and we're clearly substantially lowballing the figure. Yet that's already more than the entire discretionary budget excluding military, and certainly far more than 4% of the entire budget (as would be required for cutting 25% to only result in a 1% cost saving, as proposed).
If I spend 90% of my budget on mandatory items, and I cut 10% of my discretionary spending, I've shaved 1% of my total budget. Have I really accomplished that much?
Is that going to keep me out of the poor house if something goes wrong? Is it worth a massive sacrifice to obtain?
Probationary employees means not just the new hires, but any federal employee who changed jobs internally in the last year. Who's going to want to work for the Federal government after this bloodbath? No one with any talent, which I'm sure is either the goal or a happy by-product.
This is about Trump and Co. destroying govt institutions they don't like, and weaponizing other institutions with loyalists. Just look at what's happening in the DoJ.
Most mandatory spending is on healthcare, social security, interest payments on debt. For anyone who values anything other than those things, every penny should be accounted for. The percentage of the total budget now becomes irrelevant.
As mentioned elsewhere, this is literally impossible. Directly cutting mandatory spending would require new laws which, in turn, would require a supermajority in the Senate due to the filibuster, meaning the DNC would also need to be all-in on it. On the note, keep this in mind the next time some party, which can't see past tomorrow, tries to eliminate the filibuster.
Checks and balances are very important and I'm very happy to see the GOP making 0 effort to end the filibuster in spite of it currently being rather liberally used by the DNC.
It's important to note though that the goal is not to reduce debt. The goal is to cut taxes (largely for the rich).
I mean if debt was an issue why vote for the guy who has increased the national debt by the most in history and whose spending plans were going to increase the debt by almost twice of his opponent?
The person who wrote that article is remarkably ignorant of essentially all topics that she covered to the point I'd consider that lower quality than an average internet shitpost. I don't know where to start so I'll just bullet point things in no particular order:
- The US parties almost entirely ideologically swapped sometime in the 19th century. Some claim it happened with FDR in the 30s, others claim it didn't "really" happen until LBJ in the 60s. Everybody acknowledges it happened. What a "Democrat" did in 1913 is irrelevant.
- Congress dictates budgets, not the President. The President has veto power (which can be overruled by Congress), but nothing more.
- The modern US economic system enabling us to go arbitrarily far into debt only began in 1971, when we defaulted on our obligations under Bretton Woods.
- The total deficit under Trump was $5.6 trillion, under Biden it was ~7.6 trillion [1]. I assume the author was looking at delta debt and then 'inflation adjusting' it... ugh.
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That's just the basic historic/factual backing. The "stats" are even worse, but enough is enough. In any case, the issue is not what happened in 1913 or even Trump's first term, but what is happening now. Trump's first term he promised to do what he's doing now but instead just mostly carried on the military machine (at least without starting any news wars, which was nice - though he was trying his hardest with Iran) and filled his entire cabinet with political establishment types who did their thing.
Trump 2.0 seems to have genuinely gained some sort of messianic delusions, probably from the attempted assassinations, and is actually doing what he said he would do before. And those current actions are what is really changing the game like nothing that's happened in decades.
>Congress dictates budgets, not the President. The President has veto power (which can be overruled by Congress), but nothing more.
congress makes budget, but the president has always been a means to apply pressure and influence the budget. After all, if a president declares an emergency or crisis, and congress doesn't fund for that, then they may risk re-election. That's always been the "legal" means of the president settting the budget.
The deficit also doesn’t paint the whole picture. The debt significantly increased near the end of the Trump administration which added to mandatory spending via interest payments.
Those expenses are only unavoidable if you don't consider cutting fraudulent claims, which may have been enabled by people who are incompetent and/or working inefficiently. If you're able to cut a small but significant portion of fraudulent "pensions, medicare, social security, and all of these expenses are unavoidable and in a mandatory expenses category" by proxy from cutting the people, that represents a larger proportion of the total budget.
>The reason is that the overwhelming majority of the budget is spent automatically - pensions, medicare, social security, and all of these expenses are unavoidable and in a mandatory expenses category.
As is typical for media on this issue, that article is highly misleading. That's the House, not DOGE, asking a committee to cut an average of $88 billion per year over the next decade. That committee in particular also has oversight over a stupidly large number of things from commerce to energy (as per their name) and everything inside which somehow even includes healthcare as well.
But it's impossible to cut mandatory programs' spending directly without a law passed which would require a super-majority in the Senate due to filibusters. On that note, consider now how critical the filibuster is. It wasn't long ago that Democrats wanted to end the filibuster to try to roughshod some voting law changes. Had that succeeded then now the Republican party on a super-narrow majority in the Senate would similarly be able to pass literally any law they want. Checks and balances are important because tomorrow will not be like today - a truth that will remain forever.
So in any case, they're going to need to carry out cuts not related to mandatory spending, or indirectly cut mandatory spending which can be done by things like reducing administrative costs, not spending millions of dollars on Politico subscriptions, and so on. But healthcare (or any other mandatory spending) cuts themselves will be impossible unless the DNC is also on board with it.
That's great. Congress should be the ones making budget decisions, not Musk. Trump has control of both houses, why not cut spending and give Musk his tax breaks legally?
But despite being a minority, such a budget will be highly unpopular and democratic congress can still use that to push back against it. It's faster for Trump to just force it through, if he's going undeterred.
Overhead for staff isn't that much more. And even one person can spend money like it's going out of style if they have a budget that says they can and the implicit threat it'll be cut if they don't. They'll just spend it in dumber ways.
If we take Twitter/X as an example of this process, my personal experience has been that it has been degraded to a spams and bot hell shortly after Musk took over.
But my personal experience isn't quantifiable, what is quantifiable is X valuation which, according to Fidelity, has been depreciating and back in Oct. 2024 was estimated at nearly 20% of the original acquisition price.
While it shows investors aren't concerned about X ability to pay back its loan term, it isn't a proxy for valuation. Banks usually sell issued debt to investors soon after the debt is issued. In this case it took 2 years.
Ah yes, sold Feb 15 2025[1]...right as the CEO took over running the US government and raided the US treasury department.
I'm sure this is a completely above board sale that definitely does not represent a legal-if-you-don't-look-at-it way to bribe the de facto head of the US government / the expectation of massive corruption (ala: Tesla's stock price rising on the news Elon Musk was running DOGE - weird right? The CEO is apparently going to be too busy to run the company because he's now running the government so the stock price goes up...to be fair, technically that's not a bad bet)
Because we know the new administration definitely wouldn't take bribes in the form of financial instruments[2]. Definitely no history of it[3].
> a legal-if-you-don't-look-at-it way to bribe the de facto head of the US government / the expectation of massive corruption
How does the sale of the debt help Elon Musk or Trump? They don't own that debt, they don't make money off that debt. Do you expect the fund managers to forgive the debt as a bribe? That would clearly be a bribe, but until that happens, it isn't and I don't think it is terribly likely.
There are plenty of real things to be upset over, you don't need to make up imaginary ones. All that does is dilute the real concerns and make your opposition less effective.
I'm saying when you see a lot of smoke coming from a house, the neighbours probably didn't just buy an industrial sized BBQ and suddenly decide to have a huge cook off after some kids threw a bottle through the window.
[3] is an unnecessarily verbose story with practically no substance. In 2017 a $10m cash withdrawal was made to a Research and Studies Center said to have a “relationship with the Egyptian General Intelligence Agency.”
Using those facts, and the fact Trump was friendly with Sisi at a UN event, an entire investigation was launched to see if Trump was the final recipient.
If you look at it with the counter assumption of Trump being innocent, there still seems to be a reasonable motive for all this.
The FBI wanted information about an Egyptian cash withdrawal from one of Egypt’s own banks, subpoenaed them by bringing up presidential relevancy, and punished them $50k a day until the bank sent the documents.
There's a gap between "no you can't see the dragon in my garage, he's invisible, intangible, emits no body heat, and has no gravitational field" and "here's some citations to back up my belief".
Are the citations sufficient? Dunno. Just saying this isn't what you call it.
How much of that is because of politics? Already at the point of takeover, Musk was so hated by half the US for various reasons that it became profitable for major publishing platforms to abandon Twitter/X "on principle". When you're in that situation, nothing on the object-level can help you - neither good management nor technical competence. Revenue depends indirectly on the public opinion, and half of it wants nothing to do with you.
Is it politics that people don't want to do business with shitty people? I'd call that being human.
If I owned a bill board space, and set everything around it on fire, wouldn't you think it was my fault that advertisers didn't want to pay to use it any more?
No, but then burning everything around the billboard doesn't necessarily make you a shitty person, and also opinions of people siding with advertisers aren't somehow the definitive ones.
I mean, why do people who hate what Twitter is now care about it's lost revenue? Especially given what it was, and where the revenue came from, this isn't exactly an argument that generalizes well.
The real question is why people think Twitter's lost revenue is linked to Musk's management. There doesn't seem to be a theory about a causal link. If anything the argument is "Musk is a bad person -> Twitter lost revenue" which suggests his management practices had no effect on the company's operation.
Tesla is not in advertising business, though. They are affected by the whims of public opinion, but not as much, as they're established company selling a quality product worldwide.
Musk used to dabble much more in Tesla directly than he's now, I wonder whether the ups and downs of the company correlate with his involvement, especially before he started going off the rails so badly? That would be informative and help separate object-level impact from political hysteria.
What I meant is: they buy ads and care about their opinion. They're not a platform selling ads, and they're not an ad delivery vector (like e.g. publishers) either. The latter two kinds of businesses have particular dynamics that are highly sensitive to public opinion, much more so than for any other kind of business.
Did people already forget he allowed Anti-semitism? And then brands left Twitter? And then he threatened to sue the brands for leaving?
We can argue the first part all day. The point was Coca Cola and co. did not want to assossiate anymore and that had an objective dollar amount.
I know less about this situation, but Twitter in 2024 apparently made some controversial blocking changes and that started the bluesky migration. I don't know the dollar amount there, but they apparently lost some big influencers.
> Already at the point of takeover, Musk was so hated by half the US for various reasons that it became profitable for major publishing platforms to abandon Twitter/X "on principle"
No, Musk became hated by half the US __because__ of the way he took over Twitter. That lost him a great deal of good will.
Pretty sure it's the same type of politics. If you think private, profit driven corporations are reluctant to deal with individuals viewed as problematic by their customers, wait until you see how elected, popularity driven officials deal with people viewed as problematic by their constituents.
If Musk was so politically toxic as to drive an 84% revenue decline, the Republican politicians wouldn't have allowed him to support them or their party.
Why? That entirely depends on political alignment of revenue sources, and I bet that (before the takeover) the balance was heavily on the US left-wing side, as that's also the overall bias in tech industry and social media and news publishing. And all that is amplified by advertisers in general, regardless of political leaning, being very touchy about controversy.
I can easily imagine this to alone be responsible for wiping 84% revenue.
Real world has a different political distribution than the Internet. "Politically toxic" on-line in particular is a knee-jerk reaction that is great at generating consistent revenue streams for publishers and social media on-line, but doesn't translate well to how the entire population of a country actually thinks or votes in the real world.
> Real world has a different political distribution than the Internet.
5% different, almost everyone is online.
But, thinking about your oft-quoted blog post about advertising bring a cancer, I guess if the top ad spenders cut themselves out entirely, then the bidding system could result in the runner-up bidder finding their ads are now almost arbitrarily cheaper.
We at best get 70% participation in voter representation. Online wise, I'd wager we get at best 20% "public" participation in terms of who bothers to participate online as opposed to lurking. And that 20% is spread amongst hundreds of subjects.
And we know these aren't created equal. The internet is disproportionately on the younger side, is very slightly biased by "middle class", educated workers, and the gender demographics vary site to site, despite being overall even (e.g. disproportionately male on Reddit, female on Pintrest). There will definitely be a different resuts online compared to making physical surveys.
The US's GDP isn't based on the amount of bloat in its government. Sure spending finds its way into the economy, but tax dollars saved also will. As for Twitter/X - the goal isn't revenue but profit, and Twitter was not in a good shape before Elon. Musk recently noted they are barely breaking even now, and the recent sale of X debt was just above original pricing. Considering big advertisers are coming back to X, that's probably only going to look better.
3. Piss everyone off so all the advertisers shun you.
4. Barely get the company breaking even, mainly due to all the cuts, even though the platform itself is barely limping along.
5. Cozy up to a wannabe dictator that dupes (slightly less than) half the country to elect him as president again.
6. Make the advertisers realize that their continued prosperity depends on bending the knee to you, due to your political connections. Not to mention your platform is now a way for people to buy favors from the government.
7. Profit.
(No need for a "???" step before "Profit", well done...)
>Sure spending finds its way into the economy, but tax dollars saved also will.
Tax savings too a $40k a year person immediately find their way into the economy. Tax savings to multi-millionaires and billionaires tend to result in ever higher asset prices. They have too much spend effectively, so they hoard it.
The twitter deal kind of worked out for Musk because Trump won the presidency. It's a way to buy favors from the US government now. Basically a corruption vehicle. From a end user stand point, twitter is terrible now. Lots of bots, full of life hack and crypto scams and a lot of scientists and other interesting people completely abandoned the platform.
> The US's GDP isn't based on the amount of bloat in its government. Sure spending finds its way into the economy, but tax dollars saved also will.
"Bloat" presumes. "Tax dollars saved" would only be relevant — still incorrect, but relevant — if you were matching tax cuts with spending cuts, rather than trying to balance budgets.
If the USA balances its budget in a way that *somehow* has no side-effects, the GDP shrinks 7% just from that cut alone — but these cuts do have side effects so it is worse than that.
And doing using layoffs as a discovery mechanism is going to have Chesterton-fence type mistakes, where you only find what's wrong when the stuff you stop paying for is maintenance whose absence takes a while to become visible to non-domain experts. Dams will fail and flood valleys, bridges will fall into rivers, that kind of thing has gotten into the news in other countries when maintenance was forgotten.
The infrastructure that your government is responsible for is the backbone upon which the wealth of the rest of your country is built. You can eliminate the entire Federal Highway Administration and Joe Average won't notice anything for nearly a year… but if and when you do hire them back, you may have to hire back a lot more than you fired just to catch up with the damage done.
And so it goes for many other aspects of your country. CDC's also in the news now. OK, until you get your next pandemic… oh, wait, you're already having one. Nukes? You won't notice the problem until other governments no longer fear your nuclear deterrent. Armed forces in general? British didn't see any problem with shrinking their forces until the Russian invasion of Ukraine and realising how close they were to not being able to defend themselves if invaded. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration? Getting rid of that means a lot of companies can get away with skipping safety processes, so it might even seem like the economy goes up… until you get some equivalent of the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal.
> As for Twitter/X - the goal isn't revenue but profit, and Twitter was not in a good shape before Elon.
They made a profit in two of the years before he took over; an 84% revenue decline means that the company cannot even service the debt he saddled the company with during the purchase, even if he fired all remaining staff and reduced server, utility, real estate, and insurance, and all other costs to zero.
> Musk recently noted they are barely breaking even now, and the recent sale of X debt was just above original pricing.
Do you trust him?
According to this link, they sold more of their debt than they were expecting to, for more than expected to, but it was still less than they paid for it.
Going from $1b to $5.5b and from 90¢/$ to 97¢/$ is less bad rather than good.
The good news is that GDP is positively correlated with greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels. Lower GDP, lower temp. I mean the famines will certainly "help"... I don't think the Senate will let it get that far, though. Only takes a few Rs in the House to impeach. 67 senators is a hard climb but 0% YoY GDP decline could do it... Or it could give Trump the stimulus he so badly craves.
They need it to seem like that. Russia mistook the illusion for a reality, and is now stuck in a war of attrition with an economy that, on paper, is only a tenth of their own, and which is being supported by the international equivalent of loose change.
> [Step 1] Question every requirement. Each should come with the name of the person who made it. You should never accept that a requirement came from a department, such as from "the legal department" or "the safety department." You need to know the name of the real person who made that requirement. Then you should question it, no matter how smart that person is. Requirements from smart people are the most dangerous, because people are less likely to question them. Always do so, even if the requirement came from me. Then make the requirements less dumb.
This is not quite as innovative as you might think, I guess you are advocating for the Chernobyl approach: "Let's turn all safety features off and see if it breaks!"
They weren't testing a safety procedure, they were testing whether they could get rid of a safety feature. Specifically they were checking whether the plant's turbine could provide enough power to keep coolant flowing without the help of a counterweight system.
I REALLY doubt the recent high school graduates "yes boys" he brought in are even capable of providing the "name of the real person who made that requirement."
come on bro, you must know somewhere deep inside that this is more complex and consequential than fucking twitter of all things.
I know that the US government is more complex than twitter lol. I just think it's stupid to automatically invalidate an idea because it was tried in a less complex system.
The only reason you think he isnt wrong is because you think it wont impact you. I hope one day you find yourself in the same situation, even worse, then I hope you remember this comment.
Sometimes people like you need to go through what others do to realise how wrong you were. Some people have empathy to know. You seem like the former. Its not too late to see that Elon is nothing but a fraud though if you wish to.
I don't want to live in a world where it's right. Treating people like this, toying with their livelihoods, is wrong, full stop. It might "work" for certain definitions of "work", but it's morally repugnant.
I was going to mention this as well. This is pretty standard musk, delete large swaiths of stuff, see what breaks, and put the essential pieces back. It's supposed to be much faster than meticulous planning.
Yes all with no regard for the impact on people, families and their needs. Lets just make sure to focus on the need of a billionaire to create more wealth. The only reason you think like this is because you think it wont happen to you. Oh boy, I hope it does, then I hope you remember this comment. I so hope the people in here defending this bs end up on the street and impacted like the many innocent people are today. I love hearing the stories of regret from MAGA people, only more to come.
This sounds like a software developers take. I think it is an algorithm that can work well in non critical systems. I think it is naive in the extreme to apply it to critical systems.
i run into this problem often when building teams, people who fail to understand that the real world is not an algorithm. the very first people i release are those incapable of seeing beyond math.
their failure to see wider context, their failures to understand that massive chaotic fractal tier contexts interplay will forever be these people’s downfalls.
He's assuming everyone will grovel back to him and that this can be undone. That's the wrong part.
Layoffs will often cost you your best employees. Either because you laid them off, because they saw the signs and jumped before the layoffs, or because you end up overworking the post layoffs and they leave over the bad balance. You're never paying 10xer 10x the salary, so the attritiion is usually a matter of when, not if.
people aren't machines. They have their own interests and very few want to feel like they are one step away from being let go.
i don't see how this is (technically) related to the twitter layoffs - and even less how it could be "literally" given that the twitter layoffs where about LAYOFFS and this news item is about reHIRING ... or are you maybe a little challenged with language and what you actually want to say is that in both cases Elon Musk is involved?
> Everything else aside why repeat the same mistakes?
"Move fast and break things." /s
Then try to move fast to fix the things you just broke.
(Perhaps government tend to moves slowly for a reason: when a company breaks things customers can go to a competitor, when government breaks where can you go?)
Which is why Congress employs an army of auditors, who audit and report their findings to them.
The difference is, they are largely non-partisan appointments, who are expected to actually do their job, instead of rubber-stamping propaganda pieces. Their work can be verified, and there are consequences to them engaging in fraud, and there's a chain of custody for the evidence they find.
Which is more than can be said for giving a bunch of politically-appointed teenagers read/write access to every single system in the government... Paired with a blanket immunity from prosecution.
the accusations of fraud are probably mirror politics.
Given the lack of respect for process its plausible that in 10 or 20 years or whenever we'll find out this government was the most corrupt out of any in the past century.
And the lack of respect for process breaks trust. Some people might not care about this, but you can’t magically summon trust. It takes years for trust to rebuild. I don’t care which party you are from, you have take into account the other side, if only for that trust reason. Inform them of what you are doing, and your process. This is a public institution build upon the foundation of the Constitution.
In the first Trump admin, Rick Perry was picked to head the Department of Energy with the goal of shutting it down. These cockwombles thought the DoE was about pushing green energy and recycling and stuff like that. Once on the job, Perry discovered that he was in charge of the nation’s nuclear arsenal. To his credit, he course corrected and seems to have done a decent job once he found out what it was.
It’s the same story again, except with even less competence and knowledge.
It’s incredible that half the voters in this country thought this guy was a good choice for our leader.
Ask a resident of Texas, we knew Rick Perry. He was not known for his high IQ.
However, he bucled down and did an acceptable job running the DOE.
One could hope that at least some of the current cabinet will rise to the occasion.
With our supreme leader, many in 2016 thought he would rise to the occasion; perhaps behave like a statesman in foreign affairs, and to respect the office of the presidency. It did not happen then and will not happen now.
The current cabinet were chosen precisely because they will not stand up to the dear leader and will pull whatever levers they are asked. It’s an absolute shit show and we will all suffer.
The worst part: the people who voted for him will never connect the dots with their own actions.
Can you explain? I must have the wrong impression, but isn't nuclear-related work specifically in the USA a declining or dying industry? Are there really plenty of jobs when Americans keep posturing away from nuclear? I knew no one from university interested in doing nuclear-related engineering for industry.
Data centers will pretty much absorb any person with military nuclear power experience, even cases of people who completely washed out of the program.
As for nuclear missile programs in this case, I'm pretty positive that field will still have similar desirable high points. Reliability, understanding procedures, actually understanding procedures to know when/how/why scripts are broken in some cases, and having such socially toxic work environment that even an Amazon job feels like fresh air.
At least one the Navy Nuke side, they need to survive what colleges count as 50 to 92 credits in a year and a half. So considerable levels of training.
Anything govt. Nuclear is also going to have "interesting" relationships with procedures. Essentially planning them out, proving them as functional, and being pretrained think about current conditions compared what the procedure thinks is correct. Also trained to analyze when to step into a casualty or recovery procedure properly.
Those still seem to be projects years away from completion (and they also have projects for fusion powered data centers - which are 30 years away, I guess?), yet I've interpreted the chain of comments as "Nuclear workers which were laid off _now_ can easily be absorbed by data centers almost immediately".
What other jobs? I guess that they could pull a fall-of-the-Soviet-Union scenario and sell their skills to foreign countries? Surely there must be a lot of countries interested in starting their own nuclear weapons programs in the aftermath of the Russia-Ukraine war.
The last few weeks of government action has shown me one thing. When the democrats take over next there will be no reason they can’t make the health care insurance sector government controlled. I think the vast majority of people would support them.
I find it sad that the US is confused about what a work contract is. If you can tell someone to take unpaid leave whenever you feel like it then they don't really need to call you back or explain why they won't be in next week.
So, my SO had a fellowship with the NNSA here. As in, the NNSA paid for their grad school.
I'll speak to my own experiences here though as the spouse.
The NNSA is, like, bonkers important. I'll just copy-paste wikipedia here:
"The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is ... responsible for safeguarding national security through the military application of nuclear science. NNSA maintains and enhances the safety, security, and effectiveness of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile; works to reduce the global danger from weapons of mass destruction; provides the United States Navy with safe and effective nuclear propulsion; and responds to nuclear and radiological emergencies in the United States and abroad."
The reason it took until 2000 to make them is tied up with the silver tsunami and congress. But suffice to say, we really really need them. A lot of their stuff is very classified, but the presentation that I was allowed to attend were quite eye opening. Most of the presentations are on things like blast resistance in microsceonds of a door or some z-pinch magnetic experiment. But there were are lot on the national security picture at the time too. The main concern is that the nukes are aging. Stuffing 1950's breadboards next to that much radiation for 50 years wasn't the plan, we were thinking of using them a bit more quickly than that. But now we have them and can't be sure if they'll work. There are a lot of other issues too, big ones, but I'll let the interested people here discover more on their own.
The general side I saw was in my spouse trying to be recruited by the NNSA to work for them after graduation. The silver tsunami is a big deal in DoD government. And the issue for us at the time was the very much lowered pay. One of the main sites was the square mile that is Livermore National Labs. But with a PhD in the right fields and the NNSA fellowship, my spouse could easily just go across the Dumbarton bridge for about 4x the pay and mostly just as good benefits (the retirement plans aren't quite as stellar, but only a little). So, this is where HN/tech and the NNSA merge: employee competition.
Now, I'm not surprised that they're reporting that a lot of the fired employees are not coming back. The big thing that they had going for them, personally, was 'the mission' and the quiet respect and admiration that the government and therefore the people of the US had for them and their sacrifices (classified work has a lot of sacrifice that is not seen, especially in nuclear work, much more so than beyond just pay).
That they were fired, likely by some random 20 something from DOGE (read: not a flag rank military officer (Admiral+) or an elected official of national office (Senator+)), without notice, last Thursday. Man, that hurt the ego a lot, and fundamentally altered the bargain that they had with the government and the US people in general (from what very little I knew of those people).
It is going to be very hard to get them all back to begin with, let alone for that same payscale and benefits schedule. That gap for 'fired with cause' is going to mess up the retirement in a way that is currently hard to fix (AFAIK). Many of the NNSA are just going to go get a better job, really.
And the US is going to be left behind in the nuclear arms race that is still very much going on.
Summary: Pardon my french, but, this is a big fuck up.
What if they offer 2x the salary to come back? Some are suggesting that is the strategy. I know of one example where this was done but in a private company with lower stakes, so i know the concept at least exists.
It's not about money for government jobs. It's about the mission and, for many, the previously perceived stability + pension. The good ones, the capable civil servants who made the commitment to the government, do not need to work there but do out of a sense of duty, the interesting work, and commitment to the country.
Offering 2x is like going to Thanksgiving dinner lovingly prepared by a relative and asking at the end how much they want paid. You know, to just square up. It couldn't have been more than $20 a head. The social contract has already been altered, and there will be a non-zero number of government employees looking to the private sector. The capable ones will likely leave on their own in the coming years.
2x is also likely less than the private sector is willing to pay. Try like 4x. It is this way for cyber jobs where we will see massive brain drain. The only way cyber compensation starts to get even is through contracting work, but even then it's less than private sector. Which shows the level of stupid this policy was.
People in these roles are not fungible. That is a big logical error. People who can pass a background check with a PhD in Nuclear engineering aren't being pumped out every few months. They can't go to a web developer boot camp. There is a multi-year lead time and scholarships designed to attract them to the public sector. Same for capable cybersecurity talent (my field).
This is also a warning shot to all those in the government that their jobs, no matter what they are covering, are not safe from the stupidity. And if the BS factor gets too high they will leave.
I'll respond to both comments in just this daughter comment:
> What if they offer 2x the salary to come back? Some are suggesting that is the strategy. I know of one example where this was done but in a private company with lower stakes, so i know the concept at least exists.
With the feds, it's not easy to do this. You can, of course, but it'll take some very large wringing to do so. Think: this will need to be stuck as a rider into some bill that congress passes, and not before that happens. DoE/D pay is very rigid.
Still, it's not like a 2x salary bump will make a difference at all. As I said, these folks can make a lot more than just 2x going into tech or a lot of other private sector jobs.
Now, for the comment I'm responding to:
> It's not about money for government jobs. It's about the mission and, for many, the previously perceived stability + pension.
This X1000. These folks have dedicated their lives to nuclear science and non proliferation.
It's a delicate point, but one that I think needs stating: You know in a Bond/Bourne/Spy movie where a scientist gets recruited by the BBEG and then the hero needs to go save them or take them out? These are those scientists.
I am saying, without any doubt here, that these people would never do such a thing as betray their life's mission and engage in nuclear proliferation. But, if you ever wanted a nuke, these are the people that you'd get to make you one in ~5 years. You'd only need one of them, and they just tried to fire 3000 of them. Again, not a single one of them would ever do so. Clear?
And I don't mean 'theoretically' build a nuke. I mean that these are the people that have the hands on experience with fissile material. They know the weight and smell of these bombs because they are the ones that have held them in their hands and have custody over them. They know the torque specs of the exact grade of steel bolts you have to use. That level of knowledge.
This agency is why RU's nukes are falling apart. They don't have an agency that does what the NNSA does, and it shows.
> People in these roles are not fungible. That is a big logical error. People who can pass a background check with a PhD in Nuclear engineering aren't being pumped out every few months.
Precisely. It takes a long time to educate these people, and then it takes a longer time to have the older greybeards begin to trust them enough to actually get them working on these devices. It takes then even more time to get them to know the little things that aren't written down about how the nukes work. These people, again, are invaluable. And, to be clear, it's not just any background check that they go through. A simple SF86 is just the start. We're talking $250k+ in gov time and resources per person just to get started on the checks.
Look, some of the folks that got fired are going to leave. They're mostly going to Europe and then working and doing the exact same job, just for the EU countries. Mostly in non-proliferation work, and some basic nuclear science. But they are going to be paid a lot more and they're all going to live in Nice or Florence too.
The US is going to have to sweeten the deal a lot more to just get them back. This little move likely sent our nuke programs back at least a decade, if not 30+ years.
Since we are now being governed by the enthusiastic ignorant raised in the wake of Reaganism (or for the unfortunate Brits, Thatcherism), it would be a really good idea for us to rename the Department of Energy to the Department of Scary Nukes We Must Keep Secure. Then maybe GOP presidents would stop nominating oilmen to be Secretary of Energy.
He cuts, removes and simplifies until it starts to hurt, and then slightly dials it back. He does this with rocket engines and staff.
Now he's doing it with government services and the US as a whole is doing it with its allies.
The problem with the latter is that you can't dial it back. Countries don't really like it when you threaten to annex them, disrupt their economies on a whim and negotiate about them behinds their backs.
Not only is the US no longer an ally of said countries, it's a hostile nation. 80 years of cooperation and trillions of dollars were wiped out in a single speech.
There’s a segment in one of his many Starship interviews with Tim Dodd the Everyday Astronaut, where he talks about simplifying the machine. He says you’ve got to cut and cut and cut some more until it’s radically simple. His rule of thumb is that if you’re not adding back 10% of the stuff you got rid of, you didn’t get rid of enough in the first place.
This might be fine for greenfield engineering projects, where there are no “Chesterton’s fences”, where there are not yet any other people or things depending on success, but it’s wholly inadequate for people problems or brownfield systems and processes. The fact Musk doesn’t understand this just suggests ignorance, and suggests that it’s not an idea he really understands at its core. To understand an idea truly, means to understand when it applies and when it doesn’t, and why.
>>His rule of thumb is that if you’re not adding back 10% of the stuff you got rid of, you didn’t get rid of enough in the first place.
Mao moved farm labor into factories using this logic, and then a apocalyptic famine followed. He tried to add back the people from factory back to the farms, and then discovered labor wasn't as elastic as he had thought.
Be careful before making big scary changes, especially before taking down carefully erected fences. You don't know why they were put up at the first place.
Exactly. Move fast and break things only works well when it doesn't matter if you break the thing. That's true at the beginning of a startup, or the early stages of a product. It's not true of things like the welfare state or medical care.
To be clear, I think he's ignorant of why this approach doesn't get the same cost/benefit in this use-case. I don't think he's ignorant of the harm being caused (or he's at least wilfully ignorant), but as I said I think he'll see it as working as intended.
Of course they are. Any rational person not blinded by partisanship would be infuriated by this development and immediately demand that DOGE be restrained. Even most partisans would blanch and demand accountability. DOGE advocates know this. Their only recourse is to try to hide it or distract everyone with tangential arguments like they are doing in this thread.
The community is and has discussed this days old news. Lots of comments, upvotes and eyeballs. Over there. Not all of those stories is flagged. This is a dupe.
I think the marketplace of ideas is showing that the HN community has not had enough of the discussion, because when these get reposted after being flagged, there is yet more discussion!
You are free to not participate if you prefer. Let those of us who wish to, continue.
> The nuclear security officials who were laid off on Thursday helped oversee the nation's stockpile of nuclear weapons. That included staff who are stationed at facilities where the weapons are built, according to CNN.
So now, the question is which country will benefit from this the most. Russia or Saudi Arabia? Maybe Iran?
Look, having nuclear — my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart — you know, if you're a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I'm one of the smartest people anywhere in the world — it's true! — but when you're a conservative Republican they try — oh, do they do a number — that's why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune — you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we're a little disadvantaged — but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me — it would have been so easy, and it's not as important as these lives are — nuclear is so powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what's going to happen and he was right, who would have thought? — but when you look at what's going on with the four prisoners — now it used to be three, now it's four — but when it was three and even now, I would have said it's all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don't, they haven't figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it's gonna take them about another 150 years — but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us, this is horrible."
I saw this comment earlier in another posted article that I think will explain it pretty well. We simply have a lot of these kinds of folks running around. Don’t forget to check out the YouTube comments for more examples! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43065052
Half the people in the country either a) want to watch everything burn, because the system has served them poorly for too long, or b) are stupid enough to believe that Trump actually wants to help them. Or both.
Many (most?) Americans don't seem to have ever learned how to think critically or question what authority figures tell them to believe.
On top of that, COVID was rough for lots and lots of people. Even though it started under Trump, he somehow managed to avoid blame for the government's missteps early on. Biden did what he could, but even an absolute perfect response would have caused a lot of strife for a lot of people, and his administration's response was definitely not perfect. In a way I think it's impressive how well Harris did; even had Biden decided not to run at all for a second term, it would have been an uphill battle for the incumbent party to stay in power after COVID.
No, they don't. Most people don't seem to get beyond 1st order thinking. At best, it's cause and effect - 3rd/4th/5th order effects are just not computable. If X then Y is the best they can manage.
Canada has this problem too. We’ve been coddled for a long time and many Canadians think they’ve got the government’s boot on their neck. The reality is the inverse. The worst things our leadership has done in the last ten years are, all things considered, very bearable.
I’ve been thinking for some time that both our countries need some kind of wake up call. I’m very sad that we seem to be getting one simultaneously, yet it might not be a reversible event. At least not on any short order.
But yeah, the lack of truly bad experiences seems to have made us all very soft. I know some of us experience poverty or immigrated from horrible governments so we know firsthand how much worse things can be, but on average I get the sense that people typically have no idea.
Sure, and not even a quarter of Americans voted for Harris.
But if you really want to be pedantic: there are around 75M non-citizens living in the US, so that means there are only 265M Americans in the US. A quick search suggests that the number of American citizens living outside the US is under 5M. 77M out of 270M is 28%, so Trump did get more than a quarter of Americans to vote for him.
(For the record, I said "of the country", and didn't restrict my comment to only US citizens as you did.)
At any rate, I don't find these sorts of takes all that useful when it comes to electoral math. 77M people voted for Trump. Around 100M people in the US are ineligible to vote (under 18 years old, non-citizens, felons denied voting rights, etc.). That leaves around 90M people left who could have voted, but didn't: to me, that's either "I'm fine with what the people who vote decide" (so a tacit vote for Trump) or "I don't care at all, screw this".
So that's 167M votes either explicitly for Trump, or implicitly for watching things burn. That's about half the country.
But sure, if you must be pedantic, amend my comment to "nearly half the people who voted in the election". It doesn't change the meaning or outcome or implications of the rest of what I said.
So let's stop playing dumb number games. Half of the country either actively wanted this, or was fine with it.
> Sure, and not even a quarter of Americans voted for Harris.
So if Harris and her goons did this shit, the correct response would be the same.
> if you really want to be pedantic
Why would I want to be? Saying "the people are fine with this so it's fine" would be BS even if 99% of Americans voted for it. That's the "dumb numbers game", I didn't start with that and I attribute zero value to it.
This is normal in every election so you can use the same logic to dismiss any president. Do you only respect 100% sampling rates in other statistical situations?
At a certain point this line of thinking is just saying you don’t think elections work, or that there should be some non-democratic supervisor to undo bad ones.
There is also an older idea that getting people out to vote is part of the game. An election is when citizens back leaders from their community. It’s not taking a survey of every 18+ human life form with a pulse.
> This is normal in every election so you can use the same logic to dismiss any president.
A "president" who declared himself and any breaking the law "to save the country" as above the law.
That's the crucial difference here.
> If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.
-- John Stuart Mill
How un-democratic, huh?
Even if Trump had 99% of the votes, that would not justify his brown shirts. Call that un-democratic. If fascism is the same as a healthy society, as long as most people who were eligible at one point in time thought that's what they want (just take how Trump voters have no clue how tariffs work, and how saying "I want tariffs" means nothing as long as they don't), because "democracy", then that's just mob rule by the worst.
Why are you using a quote about censorship and free speech to talk about the outcome of an election? Those aren’t related things.
Nobody thinks majority vote makes truth, but majority of electoral voters does determine the president of the US.
> Even if Trump had 99% of the votes
It sounds like your previous comment expressing concern about the number of voters was in bad faith.
> Trump voters have no clue how tariffs work
I noticed this actually isn’t an argument against tariffs.
I don’t think it’s going to look pretty if we starting quizzing low class democratic voters on economic questions either. This has no bearing on whether the policy is a good idea or not.
> It sounds like your previous comment expressing concern about the number of voters was in bad faith.
Heh. Nope. A minority of Americans voted for a fascist, not half of them. That's a fact. 23%, 28%, doesn't matter in light of "half of Americans".
And in addition even if 99% voted for fascism it wouldn't give them the right to impose fascism on 1%. If you don't see how the quote relates to that, how it's an analogy, well.
> I don’t think it’s going to look pretty if we starting quizzing low class democratic voters on economic questions either. This has no bearing on whether the policy is a good idea or not.
It has a bearing on the legitimacy of saying "people want this". If I send you an email saying "click here to get a million bucks", it means you wanted a million bucks, not catch malware. Now you can say "but cybersecurity has nothing to do with elections" and tell me I'm arguing in bad faith because you're not even trying to follow ^^
Through the repetition of statements like: "illegals commit more crime," "illegals are eating your dogs," "Trump - Low prices, Kamala - High prices | 2024."
Those things are not true, but having no proof does not matter any more. You just need to "flood the zone."
They don't even attempt to hide this technique at all. This philosophy was openly confirmed by multiple people in the current administration, including the Vice President.
The implication here is that people vote for trump because they are stupid. Which is a political non-starter. If you can’t explain what they think in words they would agree with, you just don’t understand them.
But sure I’ll try to take the other side. Is every person in an organization associated with the word “nuclear” essential? Will nations start blowing up if a single one is fired?
So we need to know who got let go and what their responsibility is. Otherwise we are just word associating (“nuclear safety people = good”, “reducing safety = bad”), which is probably what the authors of this piece hoped for.
But come on, this is just a nerd fantasy that appeals to HNers (the smart people doing important science are untouchable and will automatically do what’s right).
I'll give the people deep in the cult a pass. I'm more thinking about the normies who saw Jan 6th, saw Trump repeatedly say Covid was going away with one or two cases, saw Trump lie about the election being stolen, saw 90% of campaign ads be nothing but attacking immigrants and trans people, and saw a million other things--and said, "Yes please, give me more of that."
That takes a level of willful ignorance I can't comprehend.
They certainly can name their new price due to urgency but struggles is a bit of an overstretch. They certainly know where they live. A knock at the door with flowers and a big bonus check will do.
Can you just please read the article? The bbc writes to about a sixth grade standard.
They literally do not have contact information after they deleted the .gov email addresses
Edit: and they cant "name their price" because unlike the private sector there is legally mandated pay scale. Which is just another reason why firing g-men to save money makes no sense
Their contact information will be in the payroll, assuming they know the full names of those they fired.
But yeah, there are pay scales. Anyone who knows they can get a job for more elsewhere (the most talented among them) is likely to say "fuck this shit".
Did you not read my entire comment? The gov will certainly know where they live and breathe. A non-creative approach is easier. Paychecks and bonus checks are separately accounted.
Where will the money he purportedly saves in the bureaucracies go? Will houses be built for the Appalachian voters that were oh so important before the election?
Will it be use to subsidize another telemedicine scam for all-in podcast members, who are also on Megyn Kelly's show now?
"social security" isn't really true. If the government offers subsidies for electric vehicles and you then set up a company making those that isn't really social security.
You voted for this. Yes, you did. Of course they don't headline their campaign with the stuff they're _really_ going to do.
All democracies need to switch to policy based voting and hide political parties behind them until after election results, humans are too tribal for anything else.
Its hilarious. Americans dont realise they are being played. All this BS from the MAGA people and trump are just shift attention away from the conversation to tax billionaires. You guys had been going in the right direction when it came to having the rich pay their fair share. Now look at what you are all talking about?
Your fighting each other. What a shitshow.
I really dont think America will recover from this and while the world will suffer as a result, I think in the long term, things will work out. There will be some major suffering but thats the way the world works. WW2 happened, a lot of suffering then peace. We had peace for too long, people forgot about suffering and now look at the world. Thanks America, you played yourself and are now bringing the rest of the world down with you. Rather than focusing on the right things, you are being played to argue with each other.
Trump got a plurality of the popular vote, not a majority. There are lots of people who didn't vote for this. Many people are now doing whatever they can to limit the damage, but it's an uphill battle and plenty damage will be done in the meantime. It's been very hard to watch this unfold.
I don't really see that re the tax on billionaires. It wasn't tightened up especially during the Biden admin and it would be surprising if the Trump lot went all lefty and cracked down. It seems much more of a culture war thing.
I think the rich are using culture ways to deflect attention away from that conversation. Americans have the richest people in government positions now, the most wealthiest cabinet ever assembled. They literally took over the government to make sure they fixed the debt problem without them having to pay for it and are attacking their own people. They literally elected a billionaire (though only recently) to lead their country. Thats how much they got played.
The fact remains, America needs to fix its debt problem. Its either through the rich or through the people. The rich seems to have their way at the moment.
With regard to nuclear security, this is a sourceless article, and the comment pointing this out got flagged into oblivion so the outrage machine could ignore it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43066633
Now that they've been fired, the gov't has lost the goodwill/loyalty from the staff. In other words, the gov't is competing with private industry rates. Unfortunately for taxpayers, rehiring is always more expensive.
Here we go again, let's watch HN users bend over backwards to tell everyone how this is a good thing, or clever, or a master stroke of finding inefficiencies.
I mean, yeah, this place invented Elon Musk and Sam Altman and every last Silicon Valley grifter. It's not all JavaScript and cute GitHub projects. I really do hope HN is at least a footnote in the history books that talk about the collapse of the United States.
I start thinking that Trump and Elon are Russian assets whose task is to destroy the US from the inside. Both were heavily involved with Russians before, travelled to Russia as private citizens, and they both could be compromised long ago. If Russia and China tried to think about ways to ruin the US, they couldn't come up with a better plan than what Trump and Musk do to the US as to both home and foreign policies.
has anyone noticed the irony of firing a large number of agents at the IRS, whose literal job it is to find fraud (by auding tax returns) while claiming that some DOGE engineers need access to all of our tax data in order to "root out fraud".
(Not) coincidentally, Trump has repeatedly criticized the IRS for being too aggressive with its tax audits and is trying to overturn recent efforts to make the IRS more effective ;)
Here's another example of the type of thoughtlessness that is going into these firings.
600 people were fired at the BPA, which handles power transmission for the Pacific Northwest, and 20% total are expected to lose their jobs.[0]
Keeping a grid running 24/7 is no small feat, there is no way that you're telling me that some DOGE engineers did a deep dive investigation in the past 2 weeks and decided that you can cut 20% of the staff responsible for power transmission / power lines without degrading either the service or safety.
But here's the kicker: the firings __won't reduce Federal spending__. Why? Because it's paid for by PNW users (in their energy bills).
So if no money is saved, why the firings? Are BPA workers siphoning off power or money for their own uses (corruption, fraud)? Maybe they're a bunch of "unqualified DEI hires"? Or taken over by "Marxists" who are doing what--making sure the power that comes to my home has a "leftist" frequency?
Obviously none of the above. So why? stupidity? Maybe. But I don't think it's stupidity. It's a calculated move to make it look like Trump/Elon are "doing something", appealing to their "burn it down" MAGA base, and also their own egos "we cut K employees! Look how great we are!" Elon thinks he's some sort of Alexander the Great cutting the Gordion Knot -- except in this case, the knot is actually holding up important stuff.
Also, I don't really understand how they delivered letters letting people know that they had been fired but were struggling to rescind the letters because "we do not have a good way to get in touch with those personnel"
Did they just hand them a note saying "your fired" and escort them out of the building?
> Did they just hand them a note saying "your fired" and escort them out of the building?
My understanding (from reading this and other articles on the topic) is that they blasted out mass emails to those who were fired and promptly disabled all their access and accounts (thereby preventing many of them from even getting the notice that they were fired).
From what I read elsewhere, resignation letters were sent via corporate email. Once "escorted out" of the building, naturally their corporate accounts were cancelled.
This article says:
Attempting to reach the workers, the email, which was sent to current employees, said: "Please work with your supervisors to send this information (once you get it) to people's personal contact emails."
Well, obviously you can't have them hanging around in an office that manages the nuclear stockpile. It's a far too critical of a role to have a bunch of fired people around it.
Yeah, I am pretty tired of what seems like Musk fanboys flagging everything negative about Musk. A government agency, DOGE, not caring the slightest about security and getting hacked definitely did not deserve to be flagged like it was a few days ago.
When I was posting, `document.title ` said "US goverment seeks to rehire recently fired nuclear workers". I didn't want to introduce my editorialization.
I didn’t get the impression that they were dismissing the entire article. They were just sharing their frustration with how thin on details the article was given the nature of the news grabbing headline. They might have also brought up the fact that the BBC, a news organization, is connected with USAID funding.
That may be true if all non-stream media includes random Facebook accounts.
But it’s kind of an irrelevant point when the mainstream media got important things dead wrong. And not only dead wrong but also so poorly backed up I hesitate to even call them “journalists”. More like “gossip columnists”.
Meh. All those who you call "journalists" and "gossip columnists" in mainstream media have better truth record then alternative media conservatives created for themselves. That is all there is to it. I now believe that all those accusations of mainstream media being liars were just so that you can lie more and more brazenly.
For all the minor flaws they had, they were massively better then the replacement. The replacement just had an ideological goal that required them to destroy truth.
I can only assume your political leanings are clouding your judgement.
The mass media has been caught in massive lies that exposed not only incompetence but a willingness to be the mouthpiece of the government when it’s convenient.
What is worse is unlike the “alternative media” (I still don’t know what you mean exactly) the mass media had the trust of Americans and the means to actually do investigative work to back up their stories. But they failed on both - they parroted lies without checking and in some cases repeated talking points knowing they likely weren’t true.
The Iraq War, Covid origins, Russiagate, Hunter Biden’s laptop just to name a few egregious lies that has big impacts on Americans and the world. Impacts that include the deaths of hundreds of thousands.
If you can name a few doozies like that from the “alternative media” I’d be interested to hear about it.
And the “alternative media” doesn’t have either the means nor the trust to do those sorts of things. What they mostly do is call BS on the mass media, and sure don’t always get it right, but even that track record I’d argue is better than the mass media.
Considering that this criminally deranged nutjob was a high-ranking Biden nuclear safety officer, I think they are doing the right thing by looking into whether the remaining staff are qualified: https://cbsaustin.com/news/nation-world/non-binary-ex-biden-...
They should just pass a law saying these people are essential workers and cannot say no to not coming back, and will be paid and must accept whatever pay they are told to accept. Done!
From a position of world-wide dominance and respect, it is being destroyed at a rate that is too quick for most to even start to comprehend what the outcome of these actions will be. I suspect the consequences of these actions will be carried for the rest of our lives, as they are not so easy to turn back.
Lots of other countries are standing by watching while the USA has seemingly found enough rope to hang itself.