What I don't quite understand is why we haven't merely come to the conclusion that, like everything else, the internet costs money. Running servers and services costs money, and by giving it away for "free" from the get-go encases certain types of problems in the platform itself. I'm not talking about paying your ISP, I'm talking about accessing websites.
I guess what I'm getting at is that there is no cost to making a request over the internet. Why not? Why doesn't every http request have a corresponding price associated with it? You can access the resource if you pay. I imagine this would be a minuscule amount ($0.00001 or less per request). Then, instead of trying to solve for monetizing eyeballs or personal data, these problems are solved with economics.
> If a spammer needs to spend 0.0001 € in power to access the site only to gain a marginal profit of 0.00005 €, they are losing money with every site access. However, if a ticket scalper needs to spend 0.0001 € in power to buy a ticket that they will later sell at a 200 € profit, this will not stop them.
And, long before the proof-of-work thing was popularized, people were already farming out high-margin captcha solves to cube farms full of people in Asia.
This fixes indians in boilerrooms and nigerian spam emailers but specifically not ticket scalpers. The profit is too large.
Also because users don't actually control the number of HTTP requests they make. Think of sites that load individual icons rather than sprite sheets. Think of sites that fire off 1,000 tracking calls per minute. So respectfully screw that.
Maybe if we do this then those sites will be disincentivized from doing all the tracking. Because consumer's will get their bill, say "what the fuck", and go to a competitor.
Consumers should learn tech-savviness and I don't think I'm attributing too much.
Phone bills used to be really complicated with minutes and long distance and cross country. And consumers learned and adjusted their behaviors to reduce their bills.
That didn’t work at all for cookie banners. People just accept enshittification when it’s just a minor inconvenience. $0.00001 http requests would solidly fall into that category, and then it would just be marginally worse across the board.
Nobody is paying for a cookie banner. Also the cookie banners aren't even required on almost all the sites you see them on - they chose to put those there because they're lazy.
I'm reminded of the story of the Air Force designing cockpits for the "average" pilot, only to find that
> out of 4,063 pilots, not a single airman fit within the average range on all 10 dimensions [0]
Surely, there are so many employees in general that probationary employees aren't needed. And surely, most government employees don't need to purchase things on a daily basis, so we can inhibit their credit card use. And most contracts about XYZ aren't crucial, so we can cancel them.
But, my goodness, there is so much nuance and breadth to the things a government does, let alone the government that is responsible for the largest military and that props up a big part of the world economy, that compounding these rash decisions will have far-reaching and serious blowback. I'm all about efficiency, but why be stupid about it?
The plane that we're all on is being dismantled midair, the engines have been turned off, and we're just gliding now. Gliding or falling, anyway
The people radicalized to these actions are trying to destroy the government. They haven't been especially subtle about it in their writing. The ideal outcome is not the same government outcomes but at 70% of the cost. The ideal outcome is the collapse of the federal bureaucracy so that the lords of capital can scoop things up and create their little kingdoms.
Last weekend the Washington Post published some internal DOGE memos showing this is absolutely true. What's happening has nothing to do with efficiency. It's all about ideology.
But DEI is what made JD Vance who he is today. To quote an article:
"The truth is, if it was not for the Yellow Ribbon Program I would not be going to law school."
It absolutely is. I’m a disabled (technically, but not in any meaningful way) veteran, and you’d best believe that the first time I decided to mark those two boxes on job applications, my callback rate skyrocketed.
> Veterans are included in DEI hiring practices. As are disabilities.
My message was specifically about the Yellow Ribbon Program, not if DEI includes people with disabilities.
> If you've applied for a job in the past 10 years surely you've had to declare your gender, ethnic background, veteran status, and disability status.
I did not. I believe that here, in Switzerland, it'd be illegal to ask for your gender or ethnicity. Age is legal, although not often practiced in IT. Veteran status - not a thing.
Phase 2 consists of placing on leave employees in non-DEI roles — who DOGE determines are somehow tied to DEI — as well as other employees working at offices whose existence is mandated by law.
The ideal outcome is that government fails, then they can point at the failing government and ask, why do we want to pay for something that is failing.
If you want people to get onboard with spending cuts, you should raise taxes high enough to actually pay for all the spending so taxpayers feel the consequences of it.
Reducing revenues and letting people run up the credit card for decades instead, as an intentional strategy, was beyond irresponsible.
They've known for a long time that they can't cut spending. It will be terribly unpopular. So they cut taxes (especially on the rich) which keeps tax pressure on everyone else, but gets them wealthy donors.
Then the opposition has three choices: play chicken with the national debt, cut spending, or raise taxes. Usually raising the national debt is the easiest option.
Yeah, their vision is us living in burbclaves of New South Africa, Mr Lee's Hong Kong and Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates and the bankrupt US Government with trillion dollar notes not to be used as toilet paper because it is illegal and clogs the plumbing.
When you are Elon, or Trump, or even a moderately succesful business… all the government does (or at least what you perceive) is tell you no. You can't dump that here, you can't build that there, you can't fire that person for that reason, you can't do that without a permit, etc.. They just want to clear all the roadblocks out of the way for their PERSONAL gains.
Get rid of the government and you can do whatever you want. That is what they want. These are people who feel they have "won" the game of capitalism, and were still told, "No." That greatly upset them. How can a winner be told they can't do something?
There's thousands of homeless and underhoused people all over the US for the same exact reasons so you don't have to be rich to feel the effects of government telling you no. Didn't used to be that way at all. My grandfather built his own house ~70 years ago with his brother from trees they cut down on the property and set it on blocks. He lived in for 60+ years and it's still standing. It's a house I could buy and live in right now. But I can't just build a much better house with modern materials and live in it without an egregious amount of site work.
It's so dumb it's gotten to the point that there is intense competition for the most rundown house that's already utility connected so you can tear it down and replace it piece by piece to avoid all the ridiculous new rules. It's only feasible to build either million dollar+ homes or jank-station multi-families where you hear your neighbors toilets flush.
There's thousands of homeless and underhoused people all over the US for the same exact reasons so you don't have to be rich to feel the effects of government telling you no.
There was a new EO recently that required all new hires to be approved by DOGE. So the goal would be to bring back something like the CSC had (which was essentially IQ filters for a job). Then the per employee productivity would increase in the government.
Government employees are unbelievably unimpressive, and it started in 1978 with the abolition of the CSC.
> The people radicalized to these actions are trying to destroy the government.
It's worse than that. They're also incompetent.
Look, I'm a radical anarcho-capitalist / libertarian / voluntaryist myself. I'm fine with the idea of "destroying the government" in general. BUT, even I would say that there's a right way to go about it, and that that involves dismantling things slowly and incrementally, identifying replacements (where available) for government services that are being wound down BEFORE winding them down, minimizing the harm done, taking "collateral damage" into consideration etc. These people are doing the equivalent of "destroying the government" by just randomly lobbing hand grenades all over the place, with no knowledge, consideration, or concern, for the outcomes.
Well, then get to resisting. Like it or not, people with your ideology aren't going to be distinguished from the people that burned the government to the ground, destroyed people's lives, and sold the ashes to the richest men on the planet.
It is a fascinating comment. Surely, you recognize things are hardly black and white. Like it or not, the guy has an actual popular mandate to do just that. If you accept that premise, the undistinguishing is already happening on both sides of the US' political spectrum.
Less than 50% of voters voted for him and what was total voter turn out? 60%? So maybe a 1/3 of eligible voters voted for him. A plurality does not equate to a mandate.
But if the outcome is that the existing federal system collapses and we have a collection of fiefdoms run by CEO-kings, endless nuance won't be the appropriate response.
If Trump has a popular mandate to illegally dismantle the government, then what was Biden's popular mandate? Why were such comparatively small things like student loan forgiveness seen as tyrannical? Where was the endless supply of pundits saying "well that's the mandate" then?
You have to understand that arguing from "mandate" is a nice way of saying, "Please stop talking." Its purpose is to end the conversation, not to engage in further discussion.
Except that when democrats are in power, we don't hear "they have mandate" for them. We see obstruction at every level and a lot of vitriol. It is only when conservatives are destroying it becomes mandate for anything.
So, no. This is just another asymetric rule designed to enable.
Also, on cultural level, we are supposed to not consider all Republicans assholes, but if they mandated this, they are. Or when Canadiens boo American anthem, it is all "American people are not responsible for their leadership".
<< Except that when democrats are in power, we don't hear "they have mandate"
We don't hear it from democrats now either. What is your point? That each side uses the best argument that supports their position and they decide on the argument after they decide what their expected result is? We all know this and it has been unfortunate part of the discourse for decades at the very least.
<< We see obstruction at every level and a lot of vitriol. It is only when conservatives are destroying it becomes mandate for anything.
Could you elaborate on this point a little? I had a longer initial reaction to it, but I realized that the phrasing can be interpreted in several ways.
I will say this just to give you an idea of my initial read: the vitriol( from republican electorate ) was the cause of the mandate ( to clamp down on bureaucracy ). Now, said clamping generates its own vitriol ( and seemingly some vitriol as well ). Which vitriol you want to focus on?
<< Also, on cultural level, we are supposed to not consider all Republicans assholes, but if they mandated this, they are.
Why.. do I care about it at all?
Asshole designation is largely meaningless to me. I will push that point further, because I worry that I might be misunderstood on this point.
You may find that almost the entirety of the situation we find ourselves is a result of people 'just being nice' and trying not ruffle feathers. There was rather ample time to do some of the incremental changes some recommended here, but no one wanted to be an asshole. We are way past the point, where that label would even register ( not even have and impact; register ). Edit: I will separately note that on this forum, I noted years ago that if those issues are not addressed, we will find ourselves having to make rather unhappy choices.
I am pointing it out for one reason some may be misunderstanding some very basic reality. I will offer one more example of this weird blindness to zeitgeist.
Did you notice how Trump was able to simply shrug off the felon label? Have you considered the why behind it?
<< Or when Canadiens boo American anthem, it is all "American people are not responsible for their leadership".
Again.. why does it matter to me? They can boo all they want.
Being okay or ignoring such a label indicates a certain level of understanding it and accepting it. Trump is totally fine with being against the law because he is in a position of privilege - he can afford it. He doesn't care about those laws either, so basically is totally fine with being an antisocial - because a society codifies its principles in the laws it created. Now if another person is okay with being called an asshole, again it's because they are okay with being mean to others, to disrespect norms and generally other persons, out of a feeling of personal or group superiority and expected impunity - an impunity they see again and again in their role models. So while you cannot make the asshole care about it, the way you truthfully explained, it's important for the less-assholes to point this out to each other. Because the "others" are a group as well, even though nowadays it looks chaotic and actually just less visible in general. Just to be clear, I don't think anybody expects assholes fixing stuff for the rest, it's for the moment nothing more than flag waving. And also I agree that the system is seemingly built to be abused by assholes, something not even the founding fathers have considered. But what happened, happened, and the question is, what now?
<< Being okay or ignoring such a label indicates a certain level of understanding it and accepting it.
I am ok if people choose to believe that.
<< because a society codifies its principles in the laws it created.
In broad strokes, sure; no real disagreement here.
<< Now if another person is okay with being called an asshole, again it's because they are okay with being mean to others, to disrespect norms and generally other persons, out of a feeling of personal or group superiority and expected impunity - an impunity they see again and again in their role models.
No. Laws are laws. Norms are norms. Both are subject to change, but I worry that people confuse the two for whatever reason. Even the issue with Trump getting felon tag is resolved within the existing system since he is the president. You may disagree and despair that the norm "president shouldn't be a felon" is not upheld, but them is the breaks ( I was gonna write "that's democracy for you", but I don't think you would have found it as funny as I did ).
<< So while you cannot make the asshole care about it, the way you truthfully explained, it's important for the less-assholes to point this out to each other.
No. I am done with tacit acceptance of social coercion. It only allows current system to get more unstable as it basically rewards people who yell the loudest. If I really need to point out an example you may get behind, look at former Twitter. Musk bought recognizing that simple fact and used it to his advantage.
No. Pass on branding assholes with a giant A to point out to others.
<< it's for the moment nothing more than flag waving
Yes, thankfully thus far only minor incidents have taken place, but they are there and social media is not exactly helping.
<< But what happened, happened, and the question is, what now?
Honestly, I don't know, but my personal rule of thumb is to not make things worse.
We are explicitly talking about a mandate - the will of the median voter. Someone who did not receive even half of the popular vote is not representative of the median voter.
I just had to check since I am admittedly sick. Even wikipedia has mandate[1] as
"mandate is a perceived legitimacy to rule through popular support. Mandates are conveyed through elections, in which voters choose political parties and candidates based on their own policy preferences."
Even if we play around with concepts here, in a very, very practical sense, if the mandate is conveyed through elections, at least at the very beginning of the administration, that administration has a mandate to govern. Now.. this perception may change, but you can't honestly tell me this administration has no mandate for one simple reason:
If it does not have a mandate, neither of the previous administrations did.
>I'm fine with the idea of "destroying the government" in general. BUT, even I would say that there's a right way to go about it...
Earnest question: Does the second sentence here cause you to reflect on the first, because:
>minimizing the harm done, taking "collateral damage" into consideration...
acknowledges that the government is performing important functions on which people rely.
I know there's an argument that the private sector could instead provide some of these, but that causes me to consider whether such critical services should be in the hands of for-profit companies?
> but that causes me to consider whether such critical services should be in the hands of for-profit companies?
I believe the idea is that you can have multiple companies for a given purpose and switch between them (or form your own) depending on what you think works best for you and your community. You cannot have multiple governments - if the one elected on an piece of land you happen to live on does not act in your interests, you're pretty much SOL at least until the next election cycle (if it's a democracy) or the next coup (if it's not).
The obligatory caveat is that - of course - this does not work in practice. At the very least, it requires a perfect free and fair market which means it needs us all to be well-informed rational actors. And there are probably more requirements than just this.
The problem with this line of thinking is in people frequently ignore their own interests or just shrug their shoulders and "I got mine" in some way: The absolute easiest example that comes to mind is roads. I can't tell you how many times I've heard people complain about tax on gasoline and how they don't even use the majors roads and highways that much. Mention that nearly every single thing that keeps them alive will in some way require roads to exist and they'll move the goal posts to "I ready pay other taxes" or "I've already paid plenty" or less reasonably "fine let all this go away then because we got along fine 200 years ago without it".
With other things, it's just about impossible to convey to someone with this sort of mindset anything much less direct like the costs of having beauracracies creating and enforcing regulating building codes or workplace standards, and even those are easier to grasp than many other services
Exactly - no disagreement here. But if you understand it and I understand it, can we dream of a day everyone will? :-)
In the meanwhile, I support bureaucracies. Even if the long-term goal is to get rid of them, I currently believe that we desperately need those training wheels for the time being, and trying to dismantle them until we know how to do well without is irresponsible and dangerous.
Companies tend to deceive customers, as the incentives are frequently aren't aligned, so "voting with a wallet" is not functioning as well as it should. And profit-seeking leads to market consolidation, which, at least past some threshold is a net negative on society and turns into oligopoly.
A vision of a society without a government is utopic. It requires drastically different mindset and understanding of the side effects and unintended outcomes from every living person. Yet, I cannot help but naively like the idea of such society (which is entirely subjective thing), and so I wish we all could be smarter and knowledgeable, stop fighting for resources, and that some distant day whatever becomes of us may live in a world where cartels won't form because everyone understands how that's not really in anyone's interest (paradoxically, I believe that's not even good for the cartel itself in the long term - power and wealth are also a deadly curse).
I did not expect that conclusion in the last paragraph.
It occurred to me that making a point of the type, "here's what I believe is best or here's what I prefer, but I understand that the current reality doesn't accommodate it" represents a level of non-binary nuance and maturity that is exceedingly rare these days. We'd all do well to emulate it.
You can think that someone doesn't deserve the benefit they get from the government but also think it's unfair to impose additional hardship by cutting it off suddenly.
For most states, there's only two governments--the city and county governments of most states are organs of the state governments and only have such authority as the state unilaterally deigns to let them have.
As for the distinction between state and federal, that's essentially the exception that proves the rule. The reason you cannot have multiple governments is because you end up with a situation of contested authority, and a brief look at US history (and I suspect every other federal system in the world, though I don't have particular knowledge for others) shows a litany of debates over whether state or federal government has primacy in a given jurisdiction. It's only barely tolerable by the fact that, even if the grant of authority to the different governments is unclear, at least the authority to decide who has authority is unquestioned.
>acknowledges that the government is performing important functions on which people rely.
>I know there's an argument that the private sector could instead provide some of these, but that causes me to consider whether such critical services should be in the hands of for-profit companies?
I think decentralizing and delegating some of those services to be closer to the people (to state governments) has merit. I agree with the OP that to shift to in that direction there's a right way and a wrong way to do that transition. In today's immediate self gratification culture though you'll get what we're getting. Patience is a virtue we were all born without. It takes displince and strong values to stick with it.
Oh but they can be just fine, you only need to look outside the States to see it working. They're not perfect either, don't start me on it, but I can see exactly that idea working in Switzerland: the state making the rules for the private providers _and_enforcing_ them. It might be against "muh freedom to rip everybody off" but I personally refuse to call that "freedom".
OTOH, some important things in Switzerland are still state-owned, like the railways or the post.
Some people treat Switzerland like some libertarian paradise, but in reality, while Switzerland does tend to be more economically liberal than many of its neighbours, it's usually pretty pragmatic and not committed to some ideology.
The problem is that it wouldn't get done. To do it that way you would need the cooperation of the bureaucracy and they are just not going to cooperate here. And who can blame them? I wouldn't do a good job if my bosses asked me to do an analysis of how to cut my job. The conclusion would be "the collateral damage would be catastrophic." I think that's why large corporate layoffs are always a shitshow too.
What about early retirement for unnecessary bureaucrats? You give them their most recent salary and benefits until they're 65 or would've been eligible for retirement, then handle their retirement plans as though they'd been working all that time. So that's fewer bureaucrats, less resistance to the change, more people moving to the "more productive" private sector, and the money still flows to communities via federal wages.
This kind of plan would be crazy for a private company that needs to fight to survive each quarter, but it works for governments who should be planning decades ahead.
> that involves dismantling things slowly and incrementally
Yeah? been waiting, consciously, for over 35 years and all we managed to do is give billions to industries for no return for citizens, tenfold our debt, potentially bankrupt Medicare, and so on.
Democrats have been in power about equally (20 vs 14 years but just president isn't enough to be "in power"); so neither side is interested in fixing this country for the people instead of themselves.
This. In fact, since the system is built for gridlock, both parties happily pretend to care about given's electorate red meat, while blaming the other party for failing to do X. It is a perfect scenario for an elected official: do nothing -- the hardest thing to do in politics.
Hmm. Is it though? You are making rather broad statement here. Would you be willing to offer an example supporting that statement?
<< Democrats were willing to work across the aisle and even adopted republican ideas.
'Were'? It is a real question, but the spirit is the same as above. Can you offer an example you have in your mind. I suspect I know where you are going with this, but I don't want to assume too much.
<< The moment they do, Republicans reject their own ides. Republicans refused to cooperate.
Same as above.
<< It is assymetric and the knee jerk tendency to both side everything just enable it.
No. This is pure silliness and I am frankly tired of hearing this point so I will just call it out.
I like to see things as they are. If things happen to work in a way that I happen to not like, then I do not like those things, but it does not mean said those things are invalid, simply because it was a 'kneejerk' reaction to it.
And even trying to cast it as kneejerk is amazingly inaccurate. This resentment has been building for a long time now ( does anyone even remember Vance's CNN commentary that basically said 'can you hear us now?' ), which kinda sucks for the political class as they will need to figure out a different model ( and it seems they may have already ) to bamboozle the population.
I am happy to discuss further, but you need to give me a little more.
Obama was literally that. And republicans refused to do any cooperation at all and punished own republicans for any compromises. Obama eventually understood it well into his period.
Trying to both sides here is just lie. And yes, knee jerk complain is about people saying 'both sides' because they feel like they have to, not because both sides would be the same.
I will admit it is a good response, because McConnell is effectively on the record[2] for actively torpedoing any opposing party moves. Still, affordable ACA passed with -- I might add -- 'bipartisan' support ( quotation, because phrase is thrown out the moment even one opposing party joins the vote ).
On the other hand, we may need to go over some definitions, because it is possible we are somehow not talking about the same thing, but use the same words further confusing this conversation.
<< and punished own republicans for any compromises.
<< ( previous comment ) The moment they do, Republicans reject their own ides.
Practical question. Sides or ideas in the above as it will affect my interpretation.
>> In fact, since the system is built for gridlock, both parties happily pretend to care about given's electorate red meat, while blaming the other party for failing to do X. It is a perfect scenario for an elected official: do nothing
<< The lock is VERY one sided.
Let us assume for a moment that I buy into your premise.
The current system is built around gridlock. I am not joking. The whole separation of powers is basically saying 'if you can't work something out, each side has opportunities to grind the system to a halt'. Which side uses the feature more is irrelevant to equation given that the system effectively incentivizes its use. We can talk all day about how things should be, but you don't exactly win golf tournaments by performing synchronized swimming routine.
Anyway, my very subtle point that both sides are the same stands. Do you know why? Because the 'sides' that do not understand the system and the rules it operates under do not last in congress very long ( and are ousted as you pointed out in your example ).
Then it's worth asking: surely no matter what your perspective is, it's possible to come up with intelligent and capable malefactors who'll further your power and that of your side?
No matter who you consider to be malefactors. Let's say we call ancaps malefactors, and we're talking about the reformation of society. Surely it's possible to find capable people who will set that in motion and lock it in so it can't be avoided? There must be so many people able to plan this out. You might be one of those people!
And yet, how come we're looking at a pile of nonsense people, hurling grenades and being catastrophically useless in their own rights, across the board?
Do you consider them incompetent, when the claim is they'll make everything great and you hope they'll serve your interests?
Or do you consider that they're doing exactly what they are meant to do, but they're meant to be saboteurs and the damage IS not only the point but the only real plan?
In that case, they might not even be in control of what they think they're intending, but they've been selected to do exactly what they're doing. Some of the bigger ones seem to be carrying on like Bond villains, presumably because they enjoy that, but even they are poised to do catastrophic damage to what they're supposed to 'rule'.
So do they even expect to rule anything, or are they simply trying to break everything before fleeing the ruins? They're not acting like they're trying to build power, it's something else. Even Trump's bluster is not really building power in any way, it's only undermining American hegemony at a staggering rate.
<< They're not acting like they're trying to build power, it's something else. Even Trump's bluster is not really building power in any way, it's only undermining American hegemony at a staggering rate.
That is arguable, but let us assume it is true for the sake of the argument. If that is true, would you agree that US hegemony seriously waned over the course of at least 4 administrations before Trump?
I can assure you that a great number of the people who disagree with you don't just "hate Musk" or have Trump derangement syndrome or something. This assumption that people only disagree with you for bad faith reasons or aren't "remaining curious" is weird, and you should reflect on it.
"Just hire them back" is not actually a cost efficient option.
Take TB medication delivery, one of the many programs halted by the USAID cuts. If you stop a TB treatment midway through you make the development of drug-resistant TB more likely and you make it more likely that this strain spreads to others. Even if Musk decides that actually it really is unconscionable to not tackle the deadliest disease on the planet (which happens to be treatable), the delays cause deaths. This isn't like turning some web server back on.
Rehiring people is also a fucking joke when they've been fired in this manner. People have been forced to rapidly leave the countries that they are deployed in with minimal support from leadership. Those relationships are burned.
That's the bigger point. This is the destruction of the United States as a viable partner, today and for the future. It's the most anti-American thing you could do, which makes you think how much of this is incompetence and ideology and how much of it is compromise.
Also, everyone knows that they're more likely to get messed around as a government employee now, so the market rate has gone up. It is now more expensive to hire people for the same roles.
Government jobs don't work like that, do they? There's a pay schedule for the job title and that's what you get paid. The codes start with G and go from 1-16 and beyond. Idk look it up. You don't really get to negotiate wages as a federal employee. The only thing you can get paid more on hire is if the schedule for the title is like GS4-GS5 DOE
The flip is they get paid time off, a lot, retirement, health coverage, and maybe early retirement.
> You don't really get to negotiate wages as a federal employee.
Not on an individual basis, no. But the rates get set according to the market just like everything else, to the lowest that results in sufficient supply. The market is always moving. Recent changes will result in positive price pressure. Rates will inevitably lag, but they do not exist in a vacuum relative to the market.
Benefits of government employment exist, but other changing factors still move the market.
>It’s the same with firing people and hiring them back. Performance metrics are unreliable, but firing and then hiring back who you miss isn’t. It shows you who is really critical.
I might believe this if there was actually any time between the firing and rehiring. This isn't the administration firing people, observing the result, and then restaffing the programs that did actually become less efficient. There have been multiple times in recent weeks in which this administration fired people and then immediately moved to rehire them because they didn't have any idea of who they actually fired in the first place.
I just don't understand how anyone could think all the confusion and uncertainty we have seen over the last month is part of a well constructed and good faith plan for a more efficient government.
Its picking up rocks to see what makes threats or scatters.
A large portion of the effect you seem to be experiencing is trump and elon troll, and the media just mangles the trolls until I do not believe any story, comment, etc about Trump, doge, musk, Zelensky, Putin, whatever unless I literally see their words or hear their words.
Ex: the executive branch policy executive order today or yesterday. MSM and people on the internet "he's bypassing the checks and balances!"
OK no that's not what the EO says; but just for fun check what EO Biden signed about this many days into his presidency.
Hint: Reformation of the US Supreme Court.
It's just what they do. Presidents.
Also for the record Trump has signed 68 and in the same timespan Biden signed 34. Most of both were rescinding the others EO.
The example I gave was people being fired and immediately rehired[1][2] and you're blaming that on the fake news not understanding Trump's "trolling"? That is your defense that this is all "part of a well constructed and good faith plan for a more efficient government"? The President of the United States is trolling federal workers by firing and then immediately rehiring them?
as my wife pointed out earlier today, they weren't fired. she said the best term she could come up with at that exact moment was something like furloughed. They're getting paid for months without having to show up and clock in.
that is not fired.
thank you for proving my point though. Probationary employees won't have their employment renewed, and everyone else you're calling "fired" was furloughed. Since she's a government employee, i tend to listen to her, rather than some other government mouthpiece over in Britain.
Your wife seems to be confused and is probably lumping together the previous round of voluntary deferred resignations with the more recent round of firings and layoffs.
The exact word used by both the USDA spokesperson and NNSA email was "termination" with the latter specifically saying "effective today"[1]. These are the words directly from the people whose job it is to communicate on behalf of this administration.
This matches the pattern of what has been happening to other federal workers who have generally had their termination letters cite "performance", regardless of their past reviews, as the reason for the termination[2], presumably so they can be let go without any notice or severance pay.
the first article you linked uses the phrases "terminated, fired, laid off, mass firings, termination notifications, ending contracts"
Do you see how you're not actually getting any information from that?
the second article isn't any better "fired", "laid off", "sent letters that were lying", “The U.S. Department of Transportation finds, that based on your performance you have not demonstrated that your further employment at the Department of Transportation would be in the public interest,” the letter to fired staffers read. “For this reason, the Department of Transportation is removing you from your position with the Department of Transportation and the federal civil service effective today.”
That letter was to probationary employees. maybe. I've never seen a nat-pop in a news article like that before. It is in reference to something near the top, maybe?
What you're reading and linking to me is fuel. It isn't useful information.
people who get fired for being poor at their jobs - do they usually own up to it? or do they squawk about how unfair everything is. "i'm not poor at my job and my supervisor said so" yeah does your supervisor still work there or? There's poor management; just like employees, C levels, and politicians.
>Do you see how you're not actually getting any information from that?
I don't know what to tell you. There is information in these articles and you don't even need to trust the journalists who are reporting them. All these articles have included quotes directly from the relevant government officials and emails.
Here is another article[1] with a direct quote from the following:
-White House deputy press secretary saying "Any key positions that were eliminated are being identified and reinstated rapidly"
-Trump's Secretary of Energy saying "When we made mistakes on layoffs at NNSA, we reversed them immediately, less than 24 hours."
- Even Elon Musk saying "We are moving fast, so we will make mistakes, but we'll also fix the mistakes very quickly."
And yet you are still refusing to admit what the people directly involved are telling you is true? You still think I'm just being misled by bad journalism?
so the secretary called them "layoffs"? Alright, so they weren't fired? Thanks again. I said they weren't fired. The comment you replied to originally was about the threat of auditing agencies is kicking up a lot of ruckus.
It is fine if you think these layoffs, firings, or whatever are not necessary, even if the only reason you think that is msm reporting and a dislike of elon and donald. I don't really care.
The journalists you assure me are doing just fine used 5 different words that have different meanings to convey that the people were no longer "employed".
If you can get real information from that, great. I'd argue that you don't, since i've spent 3 comments arguing that.
This is the problem with your argument and all others like it.
Like the parent comment states in this thread, there is a truly mind boggling level of nuance and complexity that goes on in almost every single discrete field. The nuances that make you succeed in one field may not (are probably not!) the same as another field.
We can even see this within a field: Being a good engineering manager does not make you a good engineer, or vice versa. So why should we think either of these disciplines can be extended into geopolitics, finance, or anything else?
Some of the people you fire will not come back, even if you try to rehire them immediately. Some of the firings will not result in problems in the near term, but will cause problems later on. Some of the firings will cause problems that only occur under certain conditions, like catastrophic events and natural disasters.
Furthermore, you cause real harm to people who depend on these services in the interim period where you’re figuring things out. In some cases that harm cannot be undone.
The stated policy objectives to reduce waste could be achieved with much less disruption and cruelty simply by doing them more slowly and thoughtfully. There is no need to rush everything through in six weeks.
<< The stated policy objectives to reduce waste could be achieved with much less disruption and cruelty simply by doing them more slowly and thoughtfully. There is no need to rush everything through in six weeks.
If there is one thing that Trump has clearly learned from his first term, it is your window to effect actual change is surprisingly small and for that reason alone, historically speaking, presidents tended to open with their priorities ( whatever they were ).
I am mildly on the fence, but it has been my affliction most of my life. FWIW, I do hear you, but I do see a need for a drastic reduction. I recognize it is a gordian knot and it will be painful across the board. Doing it slowly may be just taking a bandaid off one hair at a time.
"Efficiency" is such a dumb thing to optimize for singlemindedly. Overly efficient systems are brittle and can't adapt to shocks. Look what happened to the efficient global supply chain when that ship blocked the Suez Canal.
Imagine if we demanded "efficiency" from fire departments; they'd only hire as many firefighters as they need to respond to the average number of emergencies per day, then totally flop when there's a mass casualty event.
Having a fast moving and inefficient government is what attracts people to the US! To live and invest there. Fast moving governments can destroy things, make them unpredictable and unstable based on the whims of a few. In this case an unelected billionaire with conflicts of interest and a pardon for all his crimes waiting for him in Dec of 2028.
"move fast and break things" means iterating on a product but that's on a whole different scale when you are talking about space rockets and the USA government
You give a compelling argument. If the same strategy was being executed by someone else, I'd even consider giving it a thought. Heck, if the president was executing this independently, I'd still give him the benefit of doubt. But I don't trust Elon with what you're suggesting. He has nefarious motives.
>It’s the same with firing people and hiring them back.
Except that we're talking about human beings.
>Progressives will hate all of this simply out of a hatred of Musk
Consider that truly believing this instead of considering that some people have well-reasoned concerns, might make you closed to divergent ideas. And that is, of course, what you're accusing progressives of being here.
> a brilliant strategy to quickly and comprehensively remove waste
A better strategy would have been to :
- spend 2016-2020 while Trump was in power auditing the NSAID / federal spending.
- spend 2020-2024 while they were hand-vetting thousands of loyalists and having Musk donate $240,000,000 towards their funds, plus other donations from other mi/billionaires, planning spending cuts.
- spend the pre-election time telling people what cuts they were planning and why.
- move to make those planned cuts quickly and comprehensively.
- release a tidy report of fraud and corruption found after 2, 3, 6 months.
This keeps confidence in the government high for national and international investors and governments, it would win over some Dems and undecided voters, it would reduce worry and stress from Republicans. They didn't do that, and you can't say it isn't a priority or they didn't have money or time or access to do it, so the possible remaining reasons don't look good:
1. they are just winging it. They don't know what the agencies do, what can be cut or what they want to spend.
1. The plans are so objectionable that if they told everyone their plans in advance, people would not have voted for them. (They don't care what the agencies do).
1. the chaos and hurt is part of the plan.
1. They want to be able to make stuff up, and have nobody able to call them on it. (see also: DOGE's actions are sealed by Executive Order, Musk has said some untruths about what they've found, Musk told interviewers that the things he says will be incorrect).
It's been overrun by Nazis and is worth a fraction of it's purchase price. Having a website be technically online is not the measure of if it's "doing well".
>Operationally, Twitter is doing well, even with 80% of the workforce gone.
>It’s pretty clearly a success story on any objective measure.
Your comment actually underscores the problem. That is, even if Twitter really is more efficient operationally, the overall business is greatly diminished.
You point to the advertiser feud as the reason for revenue drop-off, as if it's a tangential thing. But, in fact, part of the reason for that is the chaos, as well as other, let's say..."human dynamics". And, now we're seeing a mass exodus from Twitter, the impact of which remains to be seen. It's all related. Having humans in the mix makes things far messier.
So, business success is not merely about operational efficiency and, when it comes to government, it's orders of magnitude more complex.
The advertisers couldn't care less about operational chaos at Twitter. They care about bad press. If Twitter was a lesser known company or Elon Musk wasn't a political enemy of liberal journalists, there would have been minimal revenue loss. This had nothing to do with the layoffs. Twitter would have the exact same problem even if they kept all the employees.
>The advertisers couldn't care less about operational chaos at Twitter
I wasn't referring to operational chaos or layoffs. I was referring to social chaos—you know, all of the controversial "free speech" stuff.
You could certainly characterize it all as merely political. But many would say (do say) that the kind of speech, disinformation, etc. that now occurs regularly there is much more than that.
Obviously, you're free to disagree, but then that leads to a somewhat tedious and unresolvable discussion wherein we debate what other people actually think or how much hate speech occurs; or we disagree over semantics of the "who decides what's hate speech?" variety.
Overall, I think most would agree that things changed under Musk. Some call it free speech. Some call it hate speech. But, whatever side you choose, it's controversial by definition. Advertisers, especially those serving a "general audience", tend to not like controversy.
Everyone has the right to choose and, among those with that right, are advertisers.
objectively, the ad business used to bring in around $5 billion. It now brings in closer to 1. Sure, costs got cut, and now it's cashflow positive, but if the goal was really to reform the business from a strictly monetary point of view, it's impossible not to bring up the fact that there could have been an extra $4 billion in profit, if someone had just been less polarizing of a character.
so objectively, looking strictly at the numbers, it's not a winner. if I were a PE firm and my hired CEO's personality caused revenue to drop that hard, I'd find another CEO who could just as easily have cut costs without all the insanity. insanity brings risk and has cultural and political costs, and who wants that? Just make me money and don't get me in the newspapers.
so the only reasonable conclusion is that it's not about money or the stated goals but about power. Ever get annoyed with a waitress at a restaurant over something small? A normal person would just brush it off, but if you're a billionaire, you can buy the restaurant, cut her wages (because firing her is less humiliating), and have her boss treat her like shit, because it's fun for a billionaire to flex on the peasants like that.
It stopped being about the money a couple hundred million dollars ago.
Unless they radically edited what they said after you replied, I’d say the approach they favor necessarily includes understanding the fence. It’s a bit rude to just lump them in with “folks like themselves” as an ad hom.
Even as a left lib who thinks the primary purpose of a government should be to pool money into public good, I doubt all the fences that are up are there for good reasons anymore. Questioning them in a careful and rational manner is healthy, and I wish it were done more. Wanton destruction like we’re seeing now isn’t.
I think that’s in line with what your parent comment was saying too. They might be more surprised than I would be as to how many fences are justified, but it sounds like they believe it’s important to check.
I've worked in government and large institutions, and frequently deal with people who think like this.
Let's just say I'm perfectly comfortable with the ad hominem.
Literally 100% of the people I've encountered with this attitude either soften it once they're actually in, or they come in and break things.
Any time someone comes in with a "clean house" attitude," I know I have to get ready because they nearly universally have no clue of what they're talking about.
Pardon my French. - You need to be sharing a fuck ton of examples.
People make sense of things in many ways. One of the most fundamental are stories.
Share every example or story you can, or your friends can. This is one of the things conspicuously absent on HN, which is surprising since there should be many people with personal experience dealing with governments or complex systems.
Right, I mean the fundamental problem here is that the sort of person who actually does this sort of real work -- much more than I do -- doesn't have time to screw around on here. :)
This is a weird realization, but everyone has their bit to play. Sometime that bit is because you happen to be the one at the table or the scene, and others are not.
I respect your experience, but your message added literally nothing to the conversation besides “you probably suck because people like you generally do.” It was nothing but a personal attack.
That’s considerably harder to respect, and it put me in the position of feeling like I needed to defend the parent of your comment.
Being more direct, since you seem to value that: consider keeping that sort of thing to yourself unless it has an actual constructive point beyond insulting the person to whom you’re responding. However true it might be per your subjective experience, posting it here only makes you look bad.
If nothing else, choosing a straw man of not understanding Chesterton’s Fence, when that was already directly contradicted by the parent comment, comes off as you being the ignorant one.
You may be comfortable with the ad hom, but maybe you shouldn’t be so comfortable with that.
Nah. This place is a bit of an echo chamber; as I said above -- it is unfortunate but the people who do (much more than I) this good real work of keeping stupid overdoers like this away don't have time to, e.g. post in places like this.
Identifying what the collateral damage would be, planning to minimize harm done, and identifying replacements for the functionality prior to replacement reads to me like an exact application of the principles recommended by Chesterton's fence rather than apparent ignorance of the concepts https://www.chesterton.org/taking-a-fence-down/:
> There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”
If you still see it so differently I'd like to better understand some more of the reasoning why.
I can't take any credit for theory as the above is just what Chesterton's Fence story is advising with nothing added.
I'm not particularly a DOGE fan myself but I've seen many folks like the above able to do great amounts of "cleanup" in organizations of 100k+ employees without much broken glass. Plenty who don't as well and create a mess of course... but those are not usually the ones who introduce themselves by way of being concerned about the effects and rate of change. People absolutely certain they know how something will go without doubt before even getting involved are usually the biggest problems, though they aren't wrong 100% of the time either.
Just as not every person who is hesitant to remove things is just a curmudgeon, freeloader, fake worker, lazy, or whatever else people like to characterize them as it's also true not every person who wants to remove cruft is ignorant, clueless, wreckless, royally screws things up, and so on. In both cases success is more tied with those focusing on the details, review, and planning of the execution rather than feelings on first thought.
Is the US going the way the aftermath of which is described in Neuromancer, or is it going to be Snow Crash, complete with visas to every city state, and the "US" part that's left deluded that they are in control?
It's snow crash, they're calling it network states. Tech billionaires want to be CEO kings of their own mini states, their goal is to destroy the federal government. Project 2025 is based on ideas (in particula, RAGE, retire all government employees) from Curtis Yarvin, good friend of Peter Theil and JD Vance.
Accurately observed, but I think they're foolish and are only being used by a particular nation-state with a grudge against the US. Their alliances are pretty obvious, but an empire trying to reclaim its empire does not keep its promises to tech barons.
The Project 2025 people are probably sincere, but wildly impractical. Their impracticality has been indulged by a global adversary which simply intends to destroy the United States on every possible level. There's no reason the tech barons will be given mini states. Why would that happen?
That's my take too. The tech barons are all remarkably stupid and think that if they destroy the federal government they'll be able to swoop in and take everything, but the end result is 50 individual governments that stop paying dues to the feds, many of which are going to be far more hostile to said tech barons.
They're not even smart enough to properly pay off and maintain the military so they could try and enforce the oligarchy.
The best part is this is trivially obvious to anyone who knows their US history. The articles of confederation were torn up and replaced with a strong federal government that could adapt over time in part because the "federated states" system resulted in a bunch of petty tyrant Governors who completely ignored and neglected their federal obligations, ran their states like fiefdoms, and consistently made things shitty for everyone out of their pettiness.
Lots of people insist that the US should be a loose federation of states that are mostly left to themselves, basically like a less bureaucratic Europe, but that's stupid, because if that model worked, the constitution would not exist
They have money, there might be enough corruption in some states to allow them to accomplish this, or since they're in power they could sell federal land?
Not sure if anything but their own incompetence can stop them now, if not that a military coup might happen when trump cracks down on protests with soldiers, like he wanted last time he was president.
That's actually the problem. These tech shitlords KNOW there's a chance everything is destroyed in a way that doesn't leave them gods. But they place that chance at like 30%. They're degenerate gamblers basically, betting it all on red.
> This wasn't just theoretical—there were actual attempts to implement these ideas, like the Peter Thiel-backed “network state" project called Praxis in Greenland.
I spent a long time trying to figure out who he could have been comparing himself to every time he was in the media for decades, until I was watching the Simpsons and realized Krusty had always been there but was no longer the worlds most beloved clown.
Removing political guardrails and community due-process is what is happening.
A king and his fool is unsustainable, thus... people with brains and money will simply start to vote with their feet and leave while they are able. Have a great day =3
> people with brains and money will simply start to vote with their feet and leave while they are able
That worked in 1935. It doesn't work in 2025, in a world with nuclear-tipped ICBMs. We're all stuck on this planet together now; there's no escaping from a US with a mad king at the helm.
Not unless someone is suicidal, the ultimate glass-cannon is practically only an economic-weapon designed to bankrupt anyone foolish enough to compete in such programs.
Besides, there are rumors of far worse things now like geriatric Fox media. lol =3
Yarvin's writing as Moldbug is very clear on the subject. Both Thiel and Vance are public admirers and have reflected Yarvin's RAGE (Retire All Government Employees) in public. Thiel acolytes and admirers are staffing DOGE, drawn from tech communities and web forums.
They do not believe in functioning democracy but instead in a Randian "utopia" where the lords of capital run regions of the country as kings and the poor are turned into "biofuel."
It's from the admin of r/keep_track. It is far from complete (missing lots) and the summaries they write aren't always accurate.
The Federal Reserve section is one that's clearly incomplete, for instance, including just two goals when the document has several (e.g. curbing last-resort lending is missing).
That said, the site's a good portal if you're aware of those limitations. I really like that each item has a link to the PDF.
There are also various public talks and other published pieces by members of the admin, laying out exactly what they're planning to do (and now are doing) and why.
I dunno when they figured out they can just conduct conspiracies in public and nobody will call them on it, so there's little reason to bother with secrecy, but that's how they work now, and it's been weird to watch. I first noticed it with Bush II when prominent members of his administration published multiple pieces (before he was elected) calling for war with Iraq, and stating that the US should take essentially any half-decent excuse to go to war with Iraq even if that excuse itself is bad, then... did exactly that! And got away with it! Inexplicably, the media would interview them on the topic of going to war with Iraq and didn't make all the questions about that. It was barely a footnote to media coverage of the run-up to the war, which was so damn weird when anyone could just go read the text of these pieces themselves, with familiar names on them, telling us exactly how they were planning to fuck us. Didn't matter, they could just straight-up publish "here's how we're going to screw the public" and then screw the public exactly that way, and laugh all the way to the goddamn bank (literally, in many cases—they made so friggin' much money off the post-9/11 security apparatus and the wars)
It is really frustrating how news organizations don’t remember previous news cycles and connect the threads. That’s why the trump strategy of flooding the system with outrage constantly is so effective. People can’t maintain the narrative over time and so things get buried.
If what happened to USAID isn’t evidence enough for you, I suggest you go and read up on Project 2025. Below is a link to the chapter on the commerce department where they call for the dismantling of NOAA. As the head of the Office of Management and Budget, Russel Vought is one of the most powerful men in the executive branch and was one of the main architects of Project 2025.
The "starve the beast" strategy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast) has been around for a long time and is something that some right wing conservative people want to do. E.g. Norquist's quote that "My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.".
As someone else mentioned, this isn't only about improving efficiency of the government but also about it doing less. So things that currently you would be getting from the government you would no longer be getting. You might agree or disagree with this idea.
Predicting what Trump is going to do is not easy. I don't think he really knows himself each day what he will get up to. Mostly draw a lot of attention to himself, seems the main goal. He's doing fantastic on that front. Regarding policy, he is a lot more purposeful vs his previous term and he is pretty closely following the Project 2025 playbook:
Enacting government policy primarily through executive orders is an "interesting" approach. I would say that's not how you want a government to work. Maybe Trump's extreme use of EOs will prompt some reform or maybe it will become the new norm. The other branches of the US government don't seem very interested in actually performing their job.
The congress in 2021 seemed very interested in doing their job but the minority in the Senate did a really good job of obstructing anything and everything using the pocket filibuster.
meta: it's interesting because this kind of disingenuous "Just asking questions. I'd love to know more!" had been pretty effective at shutting down conversation when the topics were abstract. People were inevitably tired of explaining the same things over and over to a contingent that didn't want to understand.
But now that our country is being imminently destroyed by these treacherous looters, there are enough people ready to immediately jump in with straightforward answers that the FUD is a mere speed bump, making the technique pretty useless for shutting down discussion and consensus.
I'm not from your country and don't follow its politics closely. The GP had said that the intent had been clearly written but provided no breadcrumbs for me to research further.
Your country makes up 5% of the worlds population, the other 95% of us are not all following that closely and certainly not trying to commit some form of sabotage by asking for more information.
You're voluntarily in a thread about US politics. If this is your first such thread, reading it would have gotten you the background.
Also, the "I haven't seen" construction is quite dodgy on its own, as it has become common pattern of the neofascists to feign ignorance rather than acknowledge details.
If it was really an innocent one time question, you're certainly not the only one to have been harmed by this destruction.
There were about 10 comments on the brand new thread at the time. I replied in context to someone saying "these people" are trying to "destroy the country" and have written openly about it. There was not enough context at the time for me to research further, so I asked for more information.
I'm not aware of any HN rule for you to need to be a subject matter expert to participate and ask questions.
I'm not across "neofascist" playbooks, but I assume if you provide evidence backing up a claim you've made then it strengthens the claim to those reading it.
The government was on life support because of the same people killing it now. If you want to shrink the government, you first break it, then say it’s broken and must be reduced as a result.
The alternative was followed from the 30s during FDR until arguably the 80s…make the government effective, and it was immensely successful.
That was dependent upon an interpretation of the 10th amendment achieved via intimidation to pack the courts. Before that most the regulatory apparatus would not be constitutional.
What many of us are welcoming is an end to most regulation of most intrastate commerce except as authorized by the constitution. It is time to undo the damage of Wickard v Filburn.
What damage? You think the American economy was better during the robber baron era before the federal government had the ability to regulate interstate commerce and redistributive taxation, strong unions, and things like the GI bill created a large middle class capable of buying goods and services?
We’re backsliding into serfdom forgetting what Henry ford said when asked why he was raising wages far above competition: “I’ll sell more cars if my employees can afford to buy them”
If it’s austerity why are they raising the debt limit by 4 trillion and awarding massive contracts to their cronies (or themselves)? They are not trying to cut costs, they are trying to reallocate wealth away from the working class and into billionaire pockets.
Oligarchy. Kleptocracy. Morons cheering because they're deluded enough to believe that the definition of "pork" is when the government transfers money directly to lower and middle class via paychecks.
Congress will authorize contractors to do these jobs instead. We get back privatized versions of the old government services at a higher price, and the money goes into the bank accounts of the rich.
I'd like to read the CBO report on what this shit will actually cost over ten years.
> The people radicalized to these actions are trying to destroy the government.
The federal government, right? They are in favor of state and local government, but object to federal, which they assert reduces the ability for states to have different rules and regulations that can drive competition amongst different legal frameworks.
This seems unclear. For example, the Department of Transportation just told NY they have to shut down the new (and apparently relatively successful) congestion pricing [1] in NYC. (As with some other things being torn down by the administration, apparently the rules say the government cannot do this.)
So it appears, at least, that the administration doesn't actually respect states' rights and is looking to take over everything.
I'd be interested in understanding the property rights of the roads they were taxing. Were they taxing highways that had some covenants or contract ensuring toll free passage? I'm unfamiliar with the contract made for federally matched roads but it wouldn't surprise me if there's an agreement you can't just turn it into a toll road by calling it a new tax.
“ In a letter to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said that the federal government has jurisdiction over highways leading to Manhattan and that the additional tolls posed an unfair burden for motorists outside the city.”
However that seems like a dubious claim (Google results report the highways around Manhattan are operated by the state of NY, however New Jersey is adjacent).
I wonder if they could get around that by making the prices balance to zero? Like charge fees to people during congestion times and pay those fees outdistributed equally amongst those who enter during non congestion.
Then there would be no net revenue/toll. The optics would also be far better than green washing a net toll on people driving in from outside the city/state.
Charging people from outside the area so that they are less likely to come in a personal vehicle is one of the direct goals of congestion pricing. It isn't an environmental program, it's a traffic management program and isn't greenwashing anything.
You can call it whatever you like. I didn't say it was an environmental program, it is first and foremost a revenue generation program under a clever guise to dupe towards political leaning of new yorkers.
You can read their own description, they green wash advertising cleaner air, less emissions, etc.
They didn’t need to dupe anyone; the program is indisputably not popular and they implemented it anyway. The two goals of congestion pricing have always been to generate revenue for the MTA and reduce congestion/pollution in Manhattan. They never hid that. Most transit advocates support both of those goals, and the beauty of congestion pricing (as opposed to a revenue-only option like an extra tax on businesses in the congestion zone) is that it can accomplish both at once.
I’d also note that popularity has been going up as everyone sees the benefits immediately and the predictions of a business meltdown turned out not to be true. It feels very similar to the bans on indoor smoking where smokers predicted restaurants and bars would close and the opposite happened.
What is harder to fight against, however, is when they make deals with corrupt officials (looking at you democratic NYC Mayor, Mr Adams) to get what they want: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c80yrglnn79o
> They are in favor of state and local government, but object to federal, which they assert reduces the ability for states to have different rules and regulations that can drive competition amongst different legal frameworks.
As demonstrated by efforts to prevent state and local governments from acting independently...
You want to distinguish between favoring federalism VS favoring the policies/culture/etc. of specific states.
So yeah; they are in favor of more state government in lieu of federal, even though they hate certain states’ policies. I think that’s obvious. Now, the question is whether or not they will succeed in handicapping states’ autonomy when they disagree with things. My take is they will try (and have tried), but it isn’t a foregone conclusion that they will succeed. There’s soft power and there’s violence, and I’m optimistic that it will be more the former.
An opposite question is interesting: why not abolish state governments and only have the federal government? I haven’t thought about it deeply so don’t have a strong sense that it would be better than the status quo, though I suspect it might.
Centralization and size comes with inefficiency and slow decision making. It also comes with economies of scale. For something like the Medicare, the economy of scale dominates and it makes much more sense to be federal. When it comes to running schools, there really isn't much economy of scale so it makes much more sense to run it locally.
Economies (and diseconomies) of scale exist, of course, but aren't central to what is the responsibility of the federal government and what is the responsibility of the state governments. That, of course, is laid out rather plainly in the founding legal document of the country.
The more people are ruled by a single government that is ostensibly a representative democracy, the less representative said democracy actually is. This should be rather evident - you can't grow parliament size indefinitely if you want it to continue functioning as a deliberative chamber, which in turn means that every parliamentarian represents more and more people, which in practice means that they don't represent them well.
The Civil War settled that the feds could rule over the explicitly authorized powers of the federal government. In the 30s the feds reneged and decided blatantly unconstitutional stuff like the (later passed) Civil rights act could hold if they just call everything interstate commerce.
When the US falls apart this will be a likely central focus .
CRA under the 1875 version was found unconstitutional per the Civil Rights Cases of the Supreme court [0].
In the 1930s the executive threatened to pack the supreme court and many analogous private/intrastate commerce regulations were allowed federally by this bastardization of 'interstate commerce' by the court. Then they repassed the CRA with yet again stuff found unconstitutional, using their new version of 'interstate commerce' (everything).
The CRA objectively has been found unconstitutional by the Supreme court, and I believe it may be again under the latest generation of the court.
so, probably restating what you said, if someone wanted to pass something like that, a constitutional amendment is the better way since relying on interstate commerce clause is shaky ground... is that right interpretation?
Indeed. It should be noted that the Commerce Clause underpins most federal powers at this point. This is one of the big reasons why it's such a sacred cow - its ridiculousness is rather obvious, but all players have important things that depend on it that they don't want to risk losing.
They to have just enough government for them to extract as much wealth as possible. States rights is about them doing whatever they want without interference.
The US had a civil war that its defenders describe as being about "states' rights", with the most important right of all being the ability to literally own other people as property.
Make America Great Again is a about returning to those glory days.
Slavery was never actually banned. The 13th Amendment leaves a Death Star sized loophole.
> Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
I do not find it strange or otherwise see it as a loophole that duly convicted prisoners pay some of their debt to society by being forced to do labor.
It at least hinges on what people are convicted of being things that "deserve" slavery. Not all agree that possession of drugs for personal use meets that. Or performing or having an abortion. What if the government turns full Russia and makes political dissent illegal? Or championing/practicing "non traditional family values" like LGBT?
There is also a moral hazard in being able to earn money on prison labor, as it incentives putting people in prison.
I agree that the moral hazard is there, and it's fraught with potential for abuse[0]. But prison labor also has the potential to teach convicts skills and discipline that would be useful after their sentence.
> Not all agree that possession of drugs for personal use meets that. [...]
I'm not sure if you're saying that there is disagreement in society about what things constitute crimes, or that there should be a difference in how we treat convicted prisoners on what they were convicted on?
On its face, I'm not sure why, say, someone convicted of manslaughter is "deserving" of being made to do labor and someone convicted of, say, felony reckless driving is not, or vice versa. But I'm sure there are arguments to be made in either case.
[0]: Like the "Kids for cash" scandal in Pennsylvania, though I'm not sure if there was a labor component involved there and not just a per-prisoner payment (which is just as bad).
The vast majority of slavery historically is this. While I can't say I disagree with you, it's also awkward because you must then conclude that the vast majority of slavery historically was "okay"/"justified". Clearly some subjectivity and subtlety is needed.
Yesterday, Trump announced he was killing congestion pricing in New York City. A program set up by the state of New York, to help fund infrastructure in New York.
Seems like an issue that should be left to the state, and yet here they are asserting federal authority over it.
I’m not that familiar with US politics but I read that this was more a symbolic move and he actually can’t influence this law since as you pointed out it’s a matter of the New York state. He can announce things all day, which is exactly the strategy - do at least 5 ridiculous things every day and the media/people can’t react fast enough — bury them in shit
He is just a tell is how enablers made all these people sound innocent and their detractors crazy. At this point I believe it was often deliberate strategy. Plus crazy paranoid were actually 100% correct over years.
Like many things in US politics, “it’s complicated.” The program had to get approval from the federal government (which was granted by the Biden administration), it’s now up to the courts if Trump can rescind that approval.
The point is that saying power should go back to the states is really just a talking point conservatives use when it’s convenient for them, not actually a strongheld belief that guides their actions in any way.
Louisiana wants to punish a New York doctor for prescribing medicine. Project 2025 in general wants to ban and criminalize medication abortion nationwide.
If I kept a running list of all the ways conservatives preach states right but don't really practice it, I wouldn't have much time to do anything else.
And "states rights" has been coded language anyway. Refer to Lee Atwater 1981 interview. Now the coded language has focused attention on "DEI", "trans", among other things.
That states' rights were claimed to keep slavery, or any other morally reprehensible thing, does not mean that the concept of states' rights is wrong. It means slavery and other morally reprehensible things are wrong.
Of course, at any given time, there exist a number of issues facing the public over which there is no clear consensus on whether they constitute something morally reprehensible.
You're making the argument that what the federal government decides is right is always or usually the right thing compared to what states are claiming. I challenge you to claim that this is the case for, say, federal law forbidding marijuana versus states allowing it, or as was the case until very recently, enthusiastic support for pediatric gender reassignment from the federal government versus states outlawing it.
They are making the point that "states rights" is empty hypocritical talking point. It is meant to win argument by pretending you care about something you don't.
Everybody knows "state rights" imply conservative policies, but don't apply to anyone else.
> Everybody knows "state rights" imply conservative policies, but don't apply to anyone else.
Is that right? Has there been a widespread backlash on the states' rights grounds against, say, Colorado or Massachusetts legalizing marijuana despite it being classified as a Schedule I drug federally with no acceptable use?
How about sanctuary city or state laws? Those in support of such policies base it on the concept of shared sovereignty between federal vs. state and local governments, i.e. states' rights. So there's clearly liberal or progressive uses of states' rights, in addition to conservative uses.
>You're making the argument that what the federal government decides is right is always or usually the right thing compared to what states are claiming.
Nope. The word I used is "usually." Go back and read it. You're the one who decided to replace that "usually" with "always" and I'm not obligated to play the strawman role for you.
When states make a special case out of states' rights it's usually not for a good reason, otherwise they could just pass state laws. States' rights arguments imply things the Federal government would be opposed to, that states would need to weaken the power of the Federal government to accomplish, usually where regulations or anti-discrimination laws are concerned.
If they were in favor of state and local government, why is the federal government threatening to sue California for admissions in the UC system and demanding that NYC's congestion pricing be ended or else lose federal funding? Why are faculty members at state universities being forced to change their research because it is on a verboten topic?
The idea that Trump, Musk, or anybody involved in leadership of Trump's administration care about state and local government authority is, frankly, fucking ludicrous.
There's a certain sort of anti-intellectualism that revels in the idea that if there doesn't exist a simple solution, then there must not exist any solution. It is either an inability to grasp the notion of complexity, or a childish refusal to. Therefore, any system that is too complex for them to understand must be demonized and destroyed.
Not sure why you're being confrontational? I'm not the OP but it's clear there's some misunderstanding
The quote is:
- neat
- plausible
- wrong
"Just get rid of the cancer" is
- neat because it sounds obvious and tidy
- plausible because we can and do cut out cancer
- wrong because it ignores the nuance that cutting into a patient's body can have massive impacts on long term health. It can also be wrong because certain cancers have no tumor sites.
It’s emotional immaturity, like you said very childish.
Narcissists are deeply emotionally immature, in a way that is incredibly resistant to healing. Their entire life narrative and every action is based on a fundamental delusion. Most of us struggle with change and admitting when we are wrong… To heal, a narcissist must change their entire world view and admit they have been living a harmful lie their entire life.
It’s quite bad when such a person gains significant power and has goals that conflict with well-being of others.
It's very sad that the Nazis made eugenics into a taboo for the next century. The conclusion of WW2 should've been the opposite - narcissism and lack of empathy (also known as psychopathy) endanger the entire world and need to be minimized in the gene pool. It is, of course, too late now.
Lack of empathy is not just inborn trait, it is ideological expectation. Nazi praised lack of empathy (especially in men) and ended up raising people to be like that
And currently, quite a lot of what conservatives see as traditional masculinity is that - you look at what they teach young men and lack of empathy is seen as asset. Compassion is seen as weakness.
But it has zero to do with genetics, it is values.
I think related to this is the notion that if people are unhappy with the status quo, and a clearly defective solution is offered, they still go for it.
"Something needs to be done. This is something. Let's do it".
The fact that this something might make it worse is ignored.
A variant of this is watching someone demonstrate years of practice and assume you could as well(without practice). The underlying assumption is if something works that easily it must also be simple.
Remember that "probationary" doesn't mean new. I just learned this, but apparently when getting a promotion it puts you back into the "probationary" period at your new role. So people with 10+ years of service are being let go because they had recently been promoted.
That's what's fascinating. Given the capture of all three branches of government, they could presumably get all their wishes "above the board." Congress would willingly rubber-stamp shrinking the government to three nuclear missiles and the guy who polishes the exhibits at the Smithsonian, but actually enumerating what they want and waiting for it to wend through procedure was too slow.
Part of that might be that they know it's a smash-and-grab operation: the moment they started the cuts, the alarm was already ringing and it's only a matter of time before (Congress | the courts | Luigi Mangione | Several million annoyed pensioners) man up and interrupt the process. (exactly the nature of the interruption is clearly TBD).
When the dust clears, the fascinating thing to study will be the real priorities. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the collateral damage is a smoke screen around very specific grudges against specific people and agencies-- the financial equivalent of burning down the entirety of San Diego because your ex-wife lives there. There was the whole USAID/Starlink angle already, but surely other people got theirs.
Yeah, probationary in most civil service systems is attached to a particular class, so if you move up promotionally, or (in many cases) into a new career path, you retain seniority but are in probationary status again for some period of time. Usually, failing probation at the new level without additional problems means that you have reinstatement rights at your last non-probationary class.
Yes, and this example right here tells you how much research DOGE does (with anything they are doing). Highly inept people if measured by what their stated goal is...although we all know what the real goal is.
This is committing the classic mistake of forgetting that a government is just a corporation with an army behind it. "The government" isn't going away; just the one where you had any semblance of say in its operation.
This is exactly the insight that shifted me from being libertarian to progressive. Humans create organizations to coordinate behavior. Corporations are good for risk taking ventures, governments are good for social cooperation and coordination. Different purposes, time scales and objectives. Both are important and necessary. We should make them the best they can be.
Government ultimately is power over the citizenry -- it will always exist in one form or another whether it's the Church, the Mob, Warlords, etc. I believe our existing government is the least-worst option.
The goal is literally the end of democracy and a king reigning over techno-feudalist "states". They make no secret of this.
I would like to see the IRS take my income when it's disbanded.
> a government is just a corporation with an army behind it
This is a bad analogy. A corporation, and a corporation that can use force, have completely different properties. Walmart cannot hold a gun to my head and force me to pay for illegal alien's hotels. They can only get by if they sell products worth buying, and in a free and fair market, they can flourish only based on merit. They must cut the fat and make better deals and better products if they want to grow. The government does not have the pressures of a free and fair market. If the government needs more money, they print it, or they take it from me. Both are a form of tax. They don't cut their own fat. They have no incentive. They only grow. I may get downvoted for this, but I think Elon is doing good work. He managed to get twitter running on about 20% of the employees and I think he can do the same with government. From my perspective, the only people who complain about this are those that want to see a perpetually growing central government who don't see the danger of having a centralized power encroaching and taxing every aspect of our lives, and those who are in on it themselves.
A big part of what the government does is provide stability. It's supposed to be slow an inefficient. It provides a lot of jobs to people who are otherwise unemployable.
If we aim for 100% efficiency we end up with massive unemployment, because a lot of jobs and businesses are just not necessary. We all just got to experience that first hand, as when COVID hit something like 1/3rd of people either stop worked or worked massive reduced hours and the truth of the matter is the world kept spinning JUST FINE, save for a some inconveniences.
The more efficient things becomes, the more another mechanism is needed to control people, so you are going to eventually have to bring back some kind of formal class system or slavery.
"It provides a lot of jobs to people who are otherwise unemployable.", what a ridiculous and condescending statement. If that was true, the number of federal employees would be much higher but in fact the number has stayed relatively flat for over 50 years at 2.8 million federal employees.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES9091000001
I'm sure there are bright and talented government workers, but it's not a stretch of the imagination to say that a lot of factors make government employment cushier for some people than they might otherwise find in private employment. Or do you think the 60k employees of the TSA actually stop terrorist threats to commercial aviation?
And I'm not sure how your logic follows; there's no link between GP's claim that some government jobs effectively function as a form of welfare and your claim that the number of people eligible for this welfare must increase over time.
> It provides a lot of jobs to people who are otherwise unemployable.
You seem to be implying that this is a desirable property of government. I don't think that's true, and I think that the Broken Window Fallacy applies to your argument.
For creating new legislature. Because the relationship between the government and individuals is fundamentally that of force.
> It provides a lot of jobs to people who are otherwise unemployable.
I disagree. The purpose of the government is to secure individual liberties and provide national stability. ALL its programs must serve that strategic objective. Its purpose is not to provide handouts or employment; that is incidental. You don't want incompetent buffoons running the government anyway, or you'll get a bureaucratic inefficient mess.
> a lot of jobs and businesses are just not necessary
So what? There's nothing wrong with having people learn skills in the private sector. At least their relationship to the people around them isn't based on force like it is with the government. Who are you to proclaim what businesses and jobs are necessary anyway? If a business is successful, it must be serving someone, somewhere well enough for them to be paid anyway.
> when COVID hit something like 1/3rd of people either stop worked or worked massive reduced hours and the truth of the matter is the world kept spinning JUST FINE
A lot of people lost their jobs and livelihoods unnecessarily, because they were forced out by the new government regulations. Sure, they may have still lived, but I can promise you their quality of life has reduced. There was more unemployment. More people depended on government benefits provided by productive people still working, rather than depending on themselves and their own businesses. It takes a lot of mental gymnastics to make rhetoric that twists that into a good thing. It's only good if you want more and bigger government with more control, all at the taxpayers' expense.
This does kind sound like the same kind of doomsaying people did of Twitter. Now it's functionally better than ever and the centerpoint of where conversations happen, possibly even more than before.
Maybe let the guy iterate. That's what he does. Remove things till there's actual pain and not just moaning. Moderate by that. Has worked actually wonders till now.
> Surely, there are so many employees in general that probationary employees aren't needed.
I did read somewhere - and I may be incorrect - but a lot of internal employees are put on 'probation' after internal promotions, and not all probationary staff are like new hires.
> I'm all about efficiency, but why be stupid about it?
USA is bankrupt and the elites have known this since 2008. Trump and co. are the front for the bankruptcy proceedings and the rest is stage management. So this is class warfare in a system that is about to lose its preeminent (power) position in the world. As for alliances, I can guarantee every power center in East Asia has taken note of how US just threw Europe under the bus under the pretext of "change of presidency" as if!
I wonder if the future holds a civil war or a revolution. One of the two is a given at this point.
- Even in the best of cases, if this is your approach, you need a plan for how to add back the stuff that you learn is critical. DOGE haven't demonstrated that minimal level of competence. Firing National Nuclear Security Administration staff and cutting them off from their work emails meant that when those staff were quickly discovered to be critical, it wasn't possible to quickly bring them back. This is amateurish.
- But further, this principle works with designing rockets because you expect to build multiple rockets during the development process, and failing on one rocket doesn't destroy your ability to iterate. You don't do this with a rocket if you're in the rocket. If we crash the US economy or start a war, we impair our ability to just pick up the pieces and carry on as before.
- And this works with something like rockets b/c no one is actively trying to blow up your rocket, or take advantage of its weaknesses. The US has adversaries, and the current administration is destabilizing agencies in a pretty public way which those adversaries may take advantage of. A crappy way to discover that the NNSA is critical would be if, e.g. some reduction in global monitoring meant that we didn't notice some movement of fissile material to countries we aren't friends with, etc.
Maybe the tactics that work at Tesla and SpaceX aren't universally applicable and governing requires at least a somewhat different approach?
It's even worse than you point out. DOGE/Musk/whoever is really in charge didn't learn the NNSA staff was critical because the firings cause some immediate impact. Someone who actually knows what they're talking about likely told them about the problems it would cause and the firing squad actually listened. Had they relied on waiting for side effects to understand the impact, it would be far, far too late when you're talking about something like nuclear weapons.
In other words, not only is the strategy wildly likely to result in you learning things are critical years past the point of no return when talking about functions like nuclear weapons, it was completely pointless in this particular case. They didn't learn anything they couldn't have learned beforehand, but did manage to piss off a ton of people with critical skills who are likely looking for the exit now if they even came back at all.
Being hired into a known-unstable situation needs to involve a lot more cash than a stable-for-decades one. Is the assumption you're making that there will be no other market to absorb the employees? The ones who remain available will be the ones unable to find work elsewhere.
Nice and efficient. Get the same work for more money.
Actually maybe less work for more money because the employee now knows how vital they are but at the same time knows you don't give a shit about them so why should they care more than they have to about you.
> It’s the same with firing people and hiring them back. Performance metrics are unreliable, but firing and then hiring back who you miss isn’t. It shows you who is really critical.
No, it's not. They're not running a test to see who is missed, they are realizing they've made a huge mistake and fired the people who look after the nukes and the people looking into bird flu. Knowing whose job is important doesn't require leaving nukes unattended or bird flu to run rampant.
But the government employs people. And in most of the civilized world, employing people comes with responsibilities over those people. For starters, the responsibility of not firing or changing terms that effects them on whim just for the sake of efficiency.
The functions of government are not like a start up or company. Getting these things wrong isn’t like a rocket crash or twitter going down. The government provides society scale services, and interruptions can trigger contagion. Doge stoping insurance payments to providers has already resulted in companies going out of business. There will be hospitals in rural communities that shut down, and the job losses will close gas stations and grocery stores and collapse housing prices. These things cascade.
They fired FAA staff (that was already understaffed) and plane crashes are increasing. I have several friends that have stopped flying due to distrust of the safety.
They fired the Department of Energy staff than monitors and prevents the international trade of nuclear materials and weapons. Do we really have the luxury of getting that wrong by running an experiment to see “what’s the minimum staff necessary”? Seems like a dumb cost benefit calculation.
Anyone with experience in a large org will hate this because it's a stupid, hamhanded way of forcing people to continually beg for the resources to do their jobs. Leaders think it's brilliant because it relieves them of the need to know what's actually going on in their organization, externalizing their responsibilities.
"Unplug it and see who screams" is not effective systems management.
I agree and would add that people aren't machines either. The concept of 'fire everyone and rehire who is essential' seems to lack comprehension of human psychology. It seems analogous to 'cheat on everyone and marry the person who stays' in that you are settling for the people who have the least self-respect and/or the least amount of options outside of their current position.
Organizational inertia can be cut through without causing a tremendous amount of pain and disruption. Stopping things by default is a very lazy way to do it. Doing it this way is a strongman fantasy that inflicts large costs: now your employees aren't doing their jobs, they're going through a round of "justify yourself" (when you should have had the organizational controls in place already).
And there's nothing new about this strategy, either. I read about these tactics decades ago in management self-help books. They were just as crappy and inhuman then as now.
It's the exact opposite of "brilliant", it's extremely stupid and destructive. It shows they are absolutely incompetent at what they do and have zero understanding or even desire to understand how things work.
The issue is the goal with SpaceX is clear and something cool, whereas the Trump administration's goals are vile and DOGE's goals are at best unclear but probably just the same as Trump.
An aggressive anti-waste campaign would be more believable if it wasn't coming from an administration vowing to destroy the federal government and openly subverting the Constitution, led by a man who gets his political views from neo-Nazis that tweet at him.
You're only observing reporting about these actions. There's very little in the way of actual reporting on impacts. Are we actually objectively measuring government performance in any real way?
> will have far-reaching and serious blowback.
I doubt that it will be "far" or "serious." We did all of those things before credit cards even existed. It will be "minimal" and "altered on a case by case basis."
> The plane that we're all on is being dismantled midair,
I'm on the ground. Your government employees are in the plane. It's concerning to be sure, but not anything we can't fix if it goes poorly.
You (and other comments on this subject) reminded me of the old joke we had when working on the server farm and we found a server that wasn't registered to any specific owner.
We joked that we just had to unplug it and wait for something to fail or for someone to complain.
As a non citizen of USA, I'm genuinely curious of what will happen now that it seems that this joke is a normal way of doing this.
"Let's shut everything down and see what we're really missing! We'll fix it if needed be. "
55 years ago the Cuyahoga River caught fire (it wasn't the first time) and the fix was to kickstart the EPA.
> we just had to unplug it and wait for something to fail or for someone to complain.
You could also have kept better records in the first place so this sort of thing didn't happen.
> that this joke is a normal way of doing this.
You'll find that there are many differences between the operation of a profitable company and a government.
> and the fix was to kickstart the EPA.
The _natural human response_ once the media got involved was to start the environmentalist movement. Most of the work to cleanup the river was done by Cleveland and Ohio state. Which is just quibbling over details. What you should really explain is why the EPA needs credit cards to do what they do.
Each time I see or hear that kind of remark (because it's said everywhere in the world) , its paradoxical nature baffles me.
Many people want government agencies to be efficient, professional and productive... but they don't want to pay for it with their taxes.
The pure définition of wanting the cake and eat it too.
> Why the EPA needs credit cards...
As I said, I'm genuinely curious to see how all of this will pan out.
My opinion clearly don't matter on such weirdly hyperbolized subjects that I personally qualify as trivial.
> Many people want government agencies to be efficient, professional and productive
That's you moving the goalposts. I just want it to be efficient. This idea that government is going to be "professional and productive" is ridiculous.
> The pure définition of wanting the cake and eat it too.
Adding acute accents does not make your point any smarter.
> My opinion clearly don't matter
Yet you so readily share it. When the question of "does the EPA having credit cards prevent river fires" comes up then you are silent. Who's actually eating their cake and then wanting it too?
> That's you moving the goalposts. I just want it to be efficient. This idea that government is going to be "professional and productive" is ridiculous.
Efficiency refers to the ability for an agency to achieve its objectives using the least amount of resources while maintaining high-quality service, transparency, and accountability.
There is a paradox in expecting high efficiency from a government agency while offering low pay to its employees.
Don't expect motivated and talented employees when you have a low pay, because there's also a good chance that they're easy to corrupt.
Hence my words "paradoxical nature".
> does the EPA having credit cards prevent river fires
Does the EPA not having credit card prevent river fires ?
I'm still not sure about what's the best between a situation where someone has to fill 2 forms to asks for new pencils and that 2 directors have to approve it OR the same person has a budget of few hundreds dollars per year to buy pencils. (Back to the efficiency point)
Reducing those credit card to 1$ is just virtue signaling to poor people that thinks that those same employees pays their groceries with that credit card.
> Adding acute accents does not make your point any smarter.
-1 for me for having a multilingual keyboard that auto corrected "definitions" to "définitions" (in French) and not proofreading.
>> My opinion clearly don't matter
>Yet you so readily share it.
I'm not in the US, that why my opinion doesn't matter.
You clearly didn't understood my point, I'm not saying it's good nor bad to do what they're doing, I'm curious of what's gonna happen.
From my joke, nobody ever decided to unplug that server and wait for someone to scream.
The current administration is now unplugging everything, everywhere.
The results will be interesting.
If it goes poorly, it will take years to rebuild. And the same people who intentionally destroyed it will do everything in their power to prevent you from fixing it.
It was easy for X to get rid of advertisers. It was impossible to get income back. And while the old infrastructure and features work, their new ones are buggy and frequently reversed.
The history of building institutions in literally any country and time. You wont build it overnight.
> They're the administration. This is their prerogative.
You said "It's concerning to be sure, but not anything we can't fix if it goes poorly.", so do not be manipulative here. Now if it goes poorly, we cant fix it easily, because same people will lie and attempt to sabotage.
> Perhaps your ideas about "fixing it" aren't shared?
My whole point is that they want harm rather then fix. They do understand what "fixing" means like I do, but they want to break. They do not share my values.
> Are we talking about for profit corporations or governments? Are we talking about a codebase or governments?
We are talking about how much easier it is to break things then to fix them.
Been working on markwhen for a few years now, originally inspired by cheeaun's life timeline that another commenter posted about.
At this point markwhen is available as a VS Code extension, Obsidian plugin, CLI tool, and web editor in Meridiem.
Some recent markwhen developments:
- Dial, a fork of bolt.new (Stackblitz's very cool tool that leverages AI to help quickly scaffold web projects): an in-browser editor that lets you edit existing markwhen visualizations like the timeline or calendar or make your own. I just released that yesterday so it's still rough but I have big plans for it (it's one of the visualizations in meridiem)
- Event properties: each entry can have it's own "frontmatter" in the form of `key: value` pairs. I wanted this as I'm aiming for more iCal interoperability in the future, so each event could theoretically have things like "attendees" or google calendar ids or other metadata. This was released in the last month or two.
- remark.ing: this one isn't ready yet by any means but it's like a twitter/bluesky/mastodon-esque aggregated blog site. So you write markwhen and each entry is a post. In this way "scheduling" a post is just writing a future date next to it, and you have all your blog in one file. This one is a major WIP
I skimmed the documentation and didn't see any reference as to whether Markwhen supports dependencies? I.e. MSProject-style make one event dependent on another task ending or starting.
Congratulations on your release! I've working on building exactly the same tool but you beat me to it... I cannot compete with this functionality, and completeness. Amazing work!
Remark.ing sounds incredible. I've been considering building something like Memos but based on Markdown files rather than a relational database for personal use, but this comes really close to what I was looking for.
Are you planning to open source it? I couldn't find it on your GitHub.
Very good point about the accessibility perspective regarding font size and contrast. I will also look into if the font should be replaced with a more readable one.
iPhone 15 Pro here and for me (old, eyesight finally starting to give up) they are a bit small and the contrast low - difficult to distinguish between the F and P in the middle channel of today's puzzle.
Could maybe do with the vertical bars being about 50% bigger and the letters scaled a bit more than that. Plus a high contrast option (white channels with black letters with white letters in the middle bit? Something like that anyway.)
There’s a CLI [0] that outputs html, alternatively you can encode the markwhen text as base64 and append it as a hash to timeline.markwhen.com which will render it. Would look like timeline.markwhen.com#mw=[base64 encoded text]
They created https://cheeaun.life, a timeline of their life, more than 10 years ago (which looks to be kept up to date), which was my inspiration for markwhen (https://markwhen.com).
Looks like markwhen[0]. When making it, which initially started out as a strictly timeline-making tool, I realized it is essentially a log or journal language - write a date, any date, and add some stuff to it. Good for notes, blogging, a calendar, etc etc.
I guess what I'm getting at is that there is no cost to making a request over the internet. Why not? Why doesn't every http request have a corresponding price associated with it? You can access the resource if you pay. I imagine this would be a minuscule amount ($0.00001 or less per request). Then, instead of trying to solve for monetizing eyeballs or personal data, these problems are solved with economics.