That's not a source. This is how the media just makes things up.
After admitting that 8% of the BBC media action budget came from US taxpayers which has now been cencelled, I wonder if they might have an ax to grid.
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.
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.
Homer jay simpson
742 Evergreen terrace, Springfield.
The only problem is I don’t know the state.
That would be rich in irony.
But who knows?
Why would they cite anonymous "media outlets" and not at least find some modicum of an official source to reference?
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 ;)
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.
[0] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/mass-layoffs-at-bonneville... (more detailed info at oregonlive.com but paywalled)
Oh well. Enjoy your extra neutrons.
“US government struggles to rehire nuclear safety staff it laid off days ago”
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).
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."
(FYI, your != you are. use you're for this)
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.
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
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.
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.
>...concerns that the U.S. will abandon Europe and align with President Vladimir Putin of Russia.
Nothing to worry about with Musk doing nazi salutes and Trump looking at hanging with the nearest we have to a modern reich.
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).
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.
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.
If even half of NPR's report is true, the way in which it was conducted was grossly cruel and with complete ignorance.
DOGE and it's supporters are quiet literally playing like a child with the levers that decide if you wake up tomorrow.
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
This just gave me a chuckle and I had to share.
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.
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.
> “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.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/15/us/politics/trump-saves-c...
Be careful, America, what you wished for.
* 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.
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.
https://bsky.app/profile/noahshachtman.bsky.social/post/3li5...
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.
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
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.
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 worst part: the people who voted for him will never connect the dots with their own actions.
https://natural-resources.canada.ca/climate-change/medical-i...
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.
200 of the world's most experienced nuclear personnel are now unemployed. Yes, these people are the kind that get actively recruited by nation states.
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."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Nuclear_Security_Admi...
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.
Here's a list of conferences that can get you going on where to find more: https://nssc.berkeley.edu/events-and-programs/nssc-conferenc...
Youtube also has a lot of them online too: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=nnsa+conference
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.
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.
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.
He knows what he's doing and has a plan. He's a very smart person.
So now, the question is which country will benefit from this the most. Russia or Saudi Arabia? Maybe Iran?
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
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".
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/11/20/business/elon-musk-wealth...
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?
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.
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.
"There are no institutions, only people." — https://twitter.com/davidfrum/status/1231219728619835395 (possibly quoting Papandreou)
In the US context:
> 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.
* https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-11-02-010...
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.
2014 https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchfor...
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.
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.
All the while pointificating about morals and values.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Interview: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/18/magazine/curtis-yarvin-in...
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.
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.
It's hard to take these apocalyptic premonitions about federal government reduction seriously.
See for instance: https://www.investopedia.com/gilded-age-7692919
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).
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!
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.
Please let’s not popularize the label “progressive right,” our political labels are already a mess in the US but that is just too much.
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.
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.
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?
> I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.
Trump or Musk are very much American right as it always was, except without pretension of respectability.
It's all a matter of who gets to define the "over" in "overreach".
Laws which enforce racial segregation are overreach, for those in the American left who support equality.
Federal laws which override state segregation are overreach, for those in the American right who support structural racism.
Marijuana prohibition laws - overreach, or not?
Anti-mask laws - overreach, or not?
Required prayer in school - overreach, or not?
Anti-pollution laws - overreach, or not?
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.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/inside...
> 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.
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.
What is he thinking how this will turn out?
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.
A strategy that seems to be hot in the US, but is an utter ethical abomination and shameful.
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.
Sounds like the kind of thing that could end up increasing costs rather than reducing them.
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.
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.
Degrade the service of a website, and maybe it loads a little funny; degrade the services of a government and people die.
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.
Because good governance is not the goal.
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.
more guidelines at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I agree. Federal credential management and safekeeping is not particularly well crafted.
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.
> [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.
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.
Twitter lost 84% of its revenue.
Do you want the USA GDP to shrink that much over the next few years?
And then we can stop and check - if he is still fine after it, then maybe we didn't trim enough.
It's easy to trim other people when you are completely insulated from the consequences.
Didn't facebook end up changing that?
There's some things you can't undo once they break.
their failure to see wider context, their failures to understand that massive chaotic fractal tier contexts interplay will forever be these people’s downfalls.
sisyphean masochists.
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.
Doesn’t work in with people though. You will be deemed as unreliable.
Alliances will form without you as no one needs a partner that can leave you standing at any moment.
Running the company is the very opposite of running a country.
The feedback loop is weeks vs years/decades.
However this is people's livelihoods, mortgages, kids etc. being on the receiving end of it through no fault of your own must be awful.
Or maybe not.
When it comes to government, yes.
"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?)
I'm also not a fan of the fire and rehire method, either.
It does feel like more time should have been spent, from an outside agency, watching and deciding.
What they're doing now is an old trick, and I'm surprised more people don't tell them to screw off.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Or when a large enough percentage is easy to fool and manipulate, too many dumb and uneducated. Lots of failure modes
…And here we are
It's not like comparing apples with oranges, it's literally comparing a bacteria with country.
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.
Why would he make concessions for nothing in return? I thought he was meant to be a great negotiator and businessman.
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.
This is partly a self-fulfilling prophecy. Low-trust societies are filled with weak, corrupted, lazy and stupid leaders.
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 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_.
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.
Could you elaborate why is that? They seem to be unrelated areas.
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.
1) Delete a system
2) 404 error
3) add the system back with a simple git command
Nuclear world
1) Delete a system
2) Nuclear meltdown causes the abandonment of the Atlantic coast
3) Add the system back over the next 20 years
> 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.
Again, pardon my French, this is a big fuck up.
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.
You are free to not participate if you prefer. Let those of us who wish to, continue.
Free speech absolutism, right?
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.
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.
Musk and his ilk are interested in looting the treasury. It has nothing to do with government efficiency.
By definition, "overreach" must be beyond the point of acceptable action, so if you're going to use that term you need to say why it's overreach.
I think michaelscott, as an outsider, has bought the propaganda the right has pushing for decades, without realizing it's a falsehood.
By recasting it I mean to provide context about why it's a falsehood.
Some nudists think it's overreach for the government to require clothing in public? That's not really a left/right thing.
Is it government overreach to have Daylight Saving Time? That's another one that seems equally pro/anti.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(Though recently, even in tech changing jobs is much more precarious than it ever was.)
>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.
https://x.com/Dreamshockcom/status/1881383073495048599
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).
That said, it's also an empathogen that promotes prosocial behavior, which isn't the word I'd use to describe the behavior happening.
You can barely tell a poor person to change their life, imagine the discussion with a multi billionaire. There's no discussion.
Say if you're China and Russia...
> then putting a foolish unelected billionaire
With ties to both...
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.
(Not sure if any help was needed this time though.)
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.
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.
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'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].
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/banks-sell-down-mor...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/markets/currencies/trumps-meme-coin-...
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2024/08/02/tru...
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.
[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.
But yeah, it's worse this time around.
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.
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
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.
The poor can gain something at least temporarily by taking it from the rich. Another less violent option is mutually beneficial voluntary interactions.
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.
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.
It also had nothing to do with Marxism. There was no redistribution of land as in social revolutions in other countries (France, Russia, China).
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.
edit: OK, so parent edited to match what I wrote and now I'm being downvoted because I look like I copied parent?
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.
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.
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.
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…?
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.
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.
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.
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?
Impeachment by the house isn’t a high bar since Clinton; the senate is much harder.
> [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 just absolutely silly. What other reasonable ways are there to create requirements?
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).
That takes a level of willful ignorance I can't comprehend.
The 'left' isn't a rigorously defined term, so it is pretty hard to make a tautological argument like you are implying.
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.)
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.
What is significantly worse, is the governing clases continuing the same pre-Brexit policies and deals post-Brexit, to nullify it.
- UK - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYGDPPCAPKDGBR
- FR - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYGDPPCAPKDFRA
- IT - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYGDPPCAPKDITA
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.
- all the major corporations would leave and there would be no jobs - collapse of the pound - start of wars within the UK and potentially with EU
Nice walks help, even so. Absolutely doesn't solve everything, but does help nonetheless.
Are the citations sufficient? Dunno. Just saying this isn't what you call it.
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.
Pretty messed up way for that to work out, though.
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.
As President Musk said, “that necessarily involves some temporary hardship, but it will ensure long-term prosperity”
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.
See: https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v81n4/v81n4p1.html
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.
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.
Who says I don't advocate cutting those too, if you're asking? And I am grey haired, not sure about the ageism.
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.
I believe this as well, but it still baffles me. Don't people have a sense that things can always get worse?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 however coincides with the much older ideas of the technocracy movement, which was championed by Musk's grandfather Haldeman:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy_movement#The_Techn...
So it is not necessarily Russia driven, but surely RT has recently published an article that defends the Technate (RT is blocked, so here is a copy):
https://thepressunited.com/updates/heres-why-trump-really-wa...
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.
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.
I think it is safe to say that the west is experiencing Duginism.
Yes, Russia has nuclear weapons but no one would commit suicide by using them.
Russia is dying, so are Italy, Japan and China etc.
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.
It's driven by Trump and Musk egos. It's Nero watching Rome burn, to bring about his new greatness.
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.
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.
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.
Don't spread fake news.
Your argument is super goofy.
David Foster Wallace is my favorite author, and I've never even met the guy!
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.
Why didn't they?
I think key personnel came back because they wanted to. It's the simplest explanation.
On top of that, mass media controls the narratives way too hard - just look how fast Luigi Mangione got out of the news.
What news would there be? He was arrested and locked up, his court case hasn’t started. Should we have “Luigi still in jail” headlines?
"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.
Republicans might make big changes but this has been the situation since Obama.
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.
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.
Middle manager from Minnesota scraping in at the very bottom of the 0.1% wealth line, in a system with power-law dynamics, is a high-profile mugging.
"for are we not generous gods?" --Most Billionaires
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).
[1] - https://www.afge.org/article/afge-continues-to-debunk-miscon...
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.
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?
https://www.investopedia.com/democrats-vs-republicans-who-ha...
- 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.
---
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.
Don't worry, they want to cut that too:
https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/finance/gop-targets-88...
March is going to be a bloodbath. For who, I can only wait and see.
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.
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.
The effects are going to be felt for a good couple of decades to follow.
that’s what I would conclude from “it exists but wasn’t taken seriously”
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”
https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/brexit-potential-financial-ca...
So I agree, the more extreme must have been amplified voices from the fringe, on places like Reddit.
They're not just trying to get rid of the US middleman, but the middleman altogether.
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.
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.
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.
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.
US nuclear arsenal is not in this situation.
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?
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.
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.
The US government is a lot more affected by politics than twitter will ever be.
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.
1. Buy Twitter.
2. Fire most of the staff.
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...)
We truly live in the darkest timeline.
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.
"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.
https://www.business-standard.com/world-news/morgan-stanley-...
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.
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.
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 cruelty is the point.
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.
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 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?
They will be able to collect unemployment, do we know if they are getting severance?
Firing is not an issue. The issue is fire to rehire.
It is not only indicative of poor leadership, but also does it break down institutions - one of the key values government provides.
to contextualize: Do you think you can get people to go to war for the US if you can not make up your mind on whether or not to keep them on payroll?
But we will see how the US will fare with broken down institutions.
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
https://napolitannews.org/posts/19-percent-of-voters-know-wh...
(PDF) https://napolitannews.org/assets/pdfs/67633dc0cced7-gcm24-12...
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.
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.
When Putin realised that, his body language changed: https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-ukraine-war-putin-neumann-int...
(Oh how hyperbolic headlines are…)
Nah, we'll cut those too: https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/finance/gop-targets-88...
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.
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.
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).
Or it might be a propaganda effort to make Team Trump look busy. Hard to say without more visibility into what they're doing.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/house-gop-panel-ap...
> 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).
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.
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.
this. the optics are important for the Trump base
>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.
Are you suggesting their creation was improper? Or suggesting constituency advocation would make it proper?
Either way you might draw uncomfortable conclusions.
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.
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.
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.
In this particular case, the government positions were maintaining the US's nuclear arsenal. Not sure how "wasteful" having a nuclear deterrent is.
This is some serious 1984 war is peace shit.
Seems like a stretch to compare executions and layoffs, no one else is immune to layoffs
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.
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.
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.
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.
Reason being, look at Tesla stock price: Musk's gaffes have a short term impact, but overall the price is way up since buying Twitter.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I'm very curious how anyone could think this is a good idea (for consumers, obviously it's a good idea for Musk)
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.
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.
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:
https://www.yalejreg.com/nc/the-overlooked-conundrums-of-imp...
Tesla is absolutely in the advertisement business.
Their marketing and image is the only thing holding the company up (for now).
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.
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.
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.
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.
All anyone can do is guess and imagine, because of this.
Everyone has to be a theory. Reason is extinct.
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.
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.
"Remove the people between you and your doctor."
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.
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)
Patients need to be more involved.
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.
[@]https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/trumps-doj-volun...
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 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.
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.