Degrading the ability of government employees to do their jobs leads to greater inefficiency and more failure, which can then be pointed at to validate assertions that government isn't efficient and produces bad outcomes.
Absolutely insane that this is what we've come to. It is mind blowing to me that this is what people want. We are regressing this country so rapidly that we are likely to become one of those shithole countries the president so loudly proclaimed Haiti, El Salvador and others were.
Well, Russia is destabilizing the US and winning which is why I think we're acting like that. And it seems all of our military and counterintelligence capabilities can't stop it. Too much offense, not enough defense, it seems.
They can be really stupid on their own and it can also be Russia who's got their buttons labeled and is pushing them as needed for the dance recital. Except the recital was 4 years ago.
It's going to be difficult to get more of a smoking gun than a plan to drop sanctions and ceasing offensive cyber operations against Russia, as well as the US's lopsided Ukrainian peace deal and pulling financial support for Ukraine.
Russia has no military advantage against ours, so there is no reason to placate them due to a threat of war (nukes excluded here, unless Russia has rapidly outpaced us). The only thing that's left is the relationship between the leaders themselves.
If Trump were truly interested in isolationism, he'd instead have simply pulled support for Ukraine and not offered to be a part of negotiations, but many more things were offered for no obvious gain to us.
Russia is running a full-scale war against US and NATO weaponry in Ukraine for three years, studying it and refining its tactics.
What was the last battle for USA? Houthis in Yemen? Few airstrikes and limited engagements.
It is very naive to believe Putin doesn’t want to cripple the US economy or that war is not a real threat. The US is critically dependent on semiconductors, and TSMC is much closer to Russia than to America. Think it through.
The US has perhaps the most battle hardened military in the history of the world. It’s had real combat deployments continually for going on 25 years.
At best you can suggest it would be too allocated to counter insurgency but combined arms battles is the heart of American doctrine and its shown its value in Ukraine not its weakness.
I think there are real questions about US military composition, particularly its navy, but battle experience is not a problem.
The US military might be battle-hardened and ready for war, but the US public is not. The public is soft and fragile and totally unready for the sacrifices and losses that come from a serious war where we're not an overwhelming force against a tiny Middle Eastern country. The public will not work together collectively to get through a war. We're not going to put up with rationing programs, collecting scrap metal, Victory Gardens, buying war bonds, and take a detour from our careers to work in factories producing ammunition. Hell, half the public couldn't even deal with stay-at-home during COVID and went out protesting when they couldn't eat at the Olive Garden and buy their khakis for a few weeks. Ain't no way we have the intestinal fortitude to put up with a sustained hot war.
There is no military in the world without nuclear weapons that can put enough of a fight to require the US public to collect scrap metal. If the US goes to war with a nation with nuclear weapons, what's left of the whole planet's gonna be collecting scrap metal for the next 200 years.
We acted quickly post-9/11, buying duct tape and trash bags and taking off our belts at the airport.
You may be surprised how the public can be united against a human enemy. The success of the Right during COVID was turning the outrage away from the invisible virus and onto the humans forcing them to wear a mask.
I'll believe it when I see it, hopefuly we never have to. 9/11 was almost 25 years ago--an entire generation. A lot has changed since then. Today, the public is softer, fatter, less healthy, less sane, lonelier, more individualistic and isolated from each other, more addicted to drugs, more addicted to phones, chronically online, narcissistic, and self-obsessed than they were in 2001. And when it comes to playing well with other people they are less tolerant, angrier, more belligerent, less capable of cooperating, defiant against even minor sacrifices that might help others... We have this "in it for ourselves" religion that wasn't as strong in 2001. I don't think even a land invasion by a foreign aggressor could unify us anymore.
You assume that continuous combat deployments automatically translate to full-scale war readiness, but there's a big difference between counterinsurgency operations and peer-to-peer warfare.
The US military has been engaged in conflicts for decades, but most of them involved fighting non-state actors or weaker conventional forces, not a high-intensity war against an advanced military.
The US military is far a cut above everything else, in terms of tactical readiness, sheer firepower and especially effective size.
We outspend any other nation - China included of which we spend an estimated 2.5 times more than - and we have been in that lead position for decades, not just years.
While yes, US forces haven’t squared off against conventional militaries of any note in some time, the US military has at least been engaged in real conflict. To my recollection the Chinese military have undertaken no significant military campaigns in the last 20+ years and lack the air & sea power to functionally match anything the US military can throw at it by comparison.
Which leaves ground forces, which is both vulnerable to air power and is effectively the numbers game the Chinese can win outright in a protracted war that escalated to that level, and cyber warfare, which the Chinese have proven to be quite adept at but the US military has been aware and developing counter measures against that for a long time as well
This talking conventionally of course.
China being a nuclear power means it would be unlikely to escalate past a certain point if anyone is acting rationally. There’s no reason you want to give another nuclear power a reason to use those weapons, and certainly the US nuclear arsenal is not one anyone wants to see fired either.
I agree with the spirit of your statement, I truly believe that the US military is the by far most advanced and well equipped force on earth.
Nonetheless, I feel the need to point out that it's budget is a terrible indicator for that.
I'm not even american and have heard just how massively overcharged everything is that's sold to the US military.
It's entirely possible that i.e. China, that can produce their military equipment could actually be way better equipped then it's budget implies. I don't think that Chinas military has caught up to the US yet, but the military spending feels like a bad comparison considering how differently they're financed.
As the comment from phillistine notes this doesn’t square with known data and I have no evidence to the contrary.
To which I want to add, that even though the DoD modes have its own (and worth addressing) budget process issues they’re at least largely getting what they are paying for in most circumstances as well as continuing to fund R&D at a fairly robust clip.
In the area of defense R&D in particular that large gap in budgetary spending will matter a lot more than building any “well known” military equipment as the next generation will come online faster than other nations can keep up without ramping their own spending
Doesn't square with any sort of real data we have. The West have better, and more, of everything. For crissakes, the Germans have artillery that fires while driving full speed with the same precision as any other nation's artillery.
>China being a nuclear power means it would be unlikely to escalate past a certain point if anyone is acting rationally.
Well, Russia is a nuclear power, and not everyone is acting rationally. Russia got part of it's own territory occupied now, and some important oil and gas facilities are literally being bombed, not talking about regular cities and homes.
Russian nuclear doctrine is: Russia could launch nuclear weapons in response to an attack on its territory by a non-nuclear-armed state.
Their warheads are still at bay, why is that? I don't believe they will ever fly, because no-one is stupid enough to make the first move, and the war can go on neglecting them.
It would probably depend a lot on the type of conflict. The US would almost certainly have air-superiority, which would have a significant difference. Of course, air-superiority didn't "win" the US wars in Afghanistan or Iraq, but those were more guerilla-style wars with a somewhat (at least) hostile larger population. A US-Russia conflict would probably look pretty different. Or it would just go nuclear, in which case... well, so much for tactics.
I think you have to be careful about assuming the US would have air superiority. It doesn't take a lot for what, on paper, looks like a superior air force to turn out to be not fit for purpose.
The famous example is the F4 Phantom getting beat in dogfights against the Mig 21 in Vietnam. It was mostly solved by changing the tactics and to improvements to later model aircraft.
Obviously dogfights aren't realistic in the modern age but that is just one of many variables which might lead to an unexpected deficit. Robustness, reliability, repairability, availablity of parts, ability to operate out of unimproved airfields, using poor qualify fuels etc.
I think future US-Russia conflict will revolve around semiconductors, and you know where it will take place. It would not be possible to just use nukes or airstrike it to the ground, because factories need to stay. Also, a nasty marriage of convenience between China and Russia would work perfectly for the case, what then?
And the Russians had to get re-enforcement from North Korea to bolster the bodies they’re losing to a significantly smaller force.
Western military tactics are still working well against Russian commanders, but they being simply larger population wise, can if they’re willing, win a war of attrition simply because the Ukraine doesn’t have the bodies or internal resources to fight forever. It’s the same strategy general Grant used to decisively win the US civil war
Putin really waited out the US election. For reasons I can’t seem to grok Trump wants to ally with the world’s dictators. He’s proven himself a reliable ally to Putin at this point.
Had Trump lost the election I imagine we would see Russia seriously considering or even starting its withdrawal from the conflict.
Back to the military bit again: there is no way the war in the Ukraine is showing anything other than how vulnerable and poorly aged the equipment of the Russian military is and how their tactics have not improved much if any since the 1980s
They can, but they won't because nobody dares to stick their neck out for fear of losing their job. And that's been going on for decades, the slow dismantling (if there ever was any) of job and income security, to the point where the majority of Americans, including federal workers, are only one or two paychecks away from financial ruin. Nobody wants to lose their job.
Of course, if they get fired and there's nothing else for them to do, there will be uprisings.
> There is almost zero causality in the U.S. government’s hiring and firing right now. Particularly relating to current conduct.
The first firings were all people who knew a guy who knew a guy who wronged Trump. With that kind of retaliatory example, do you not think openly trying to course-correct would result in being fired?
As a matter of personal character, the people who would be more likely to stand up and shout or protest vigorously in today’s situation are the people which society generally considers obnoxious and disruptive.
So in each workplace most were already marginalized or learned to hide these traits for their benefit. There are way more people in the ‘flight’ than the ‘fight’ camp.
Russia is surely involved, but it's pushing on an open door - there's a huge streak of the American right that actually wants this massive catastrophe to befall the US and for the US to become ungovernable and largely ungoverned.
no, they don't, this is a very dumb thing to think.
there's a medium sized chunk the American Right, which has now won, who unrelated to Russia or China or whatever actually want the US to become sci-fi dystopia of authoritarian christo-white-nationalism.
To say that Russia is destabilising the US basically takes the agency of the US out of the equation. Makes the US (the so-called greatest country in the world, so-called leaders of the free world) unaccountable for its own actions.
The US is destabilising itself with the help of Russia.
People like to say that Obamas jokes about Trump got him to run. But I wonder if Obama never helped Ukraine keep their democracy if we still would have ours.
That’s what the successful decades long Russian psyop would want you to believe.
I’m not talking primarily about agent Krasnov allegation from a top Kazakh ex-spook (though that is an actual possibility), but about the well known Russian influence operations by financing what used to be extremists (both far-right and far-left) across the West.
And one day they'll get into an accident, run into the wrong person, or die of old age and then what? Their legacy will be AI generated gold statues and maybe their name on a building.
If they ctually used that wealth to advance the human race (on the ground, not a hypothetical but infeasible future on another planet) that'd be another matter. A percentage of Musk's theoretical wealth can solve every American's financial trouble, give them an education, and make the US great again. But that means giving some of it away and they may need it for... What, anyway? What does Musk use his money for besides buying companies and spawning babies against their will?
At least MBS (an autocrat whose wealth and country are one) spends his money on stupidly large building and opulence like The Line and whatnot, which will either make the UAE the center of world wealth and prosperity, or which will be interesting to archeologists in 2000-4000 years.
> And one day they'll get into an accident, run into the wrong person, or die of old age and then what? Their legacy will be AI generated gold statues and maybe their name on a building.
But that's the problem of the 'capitalist west' (i'm not sure what is better or what would work); everyone is out for short term gain. Most people care about themselves and some of their close family/friends, but in the end, they couldn't give a flying f if the entire planet implodes when they die. We should be planning on a 2000 year timeline as humanity but instead we plan on 4-8 years instead. So far (but that might be reading the wrong propaganda), China seems to have a plan beyond 4 years and beyond Xi's life and not be in such a neckbreaking hurry of breaking everything over a few years more or less.
Or in jail. We’re not at the coup stakes of life and death, but we’re also like two months into this Presidency. (For what it’s worth, Trump isn’t currently being coup-ish. That’s been left to the pretender.)
It doesn't look like they're targeting the right things, given how much they've put into going after the FAA, NHTSA and NOAA. Not exactly dark-state power centers. Rather, they're people who've pissed of Elon specifically.
It seems like they're spending 30% of effort on the areas that are likely to foment a counter-coup and 70% of their time attacking groups they have personal beefs with.
But of course they're not just focusing on the powerless, they're also annoying the powerful enough that I don't see how it ends well for them.
Haha, yeah, it's not like the president hasn't put in 3 of the SCOTUS judges who give him a 6/9 majority. Or replaced the chief joint of staff and each respective head of every military branch and each respective judge of each military branch. Or the head of the FBI or the director of the FBI. Or the secretary of defense. It's not like he once ordered protesters to be shot for a photo op and had to be stopped by people in those very positions saying "no". That would be crazy.
It's not like he's stopping aid to Ukraine while ruminating on dropping sanctions on our second largest enemy state and repeating word-for-word Kremlin talking points after having a prior relationship with their criminal enterprises for his real estate and an intelligence community espouse the use of foreign power to influence his election outcomes. That would be nuts.
It's not like he attempted to overthrow the government when he lost an election 4 years ago, then pardoned the violent criminals who were incarcerated for that act. Or outright saying he will ignore judicial rulings from unfavored judges while making executive orders that change explicitly language in the constitution, with an EO making it illegal for his executive branch employees to oppose his interpretation of law and installing Aparachniks in each agency to report those in non-compliance. That's a loony idea.
It's not like he's destroying all trade partnerships with allies and internal infrastructure/manufacturing investments simultaneously. That would be silly.
Reaching the altitude of space is much, much, easier than reaching orbital velocity.
This meant that during the Global War on Terror, people had legitimate questions about if Al Qaida could damage the ISS. The answer then was "no", but amateurs reached the Kármán line in 2004, students in 2019, and the current altitude record holder is 143 km.
I suspect that it is well within the capacity of random drug cartels in the US, Mexico, Cuba, Dominican Republic, the Bahamas, Haiti and Jamaica to destroy a Starship during launch, if they so desired.
A functioning US government is a reason not to do that. Nobody in any of those countries will want to risk Musk asking Trump for a favour in the form of a USSOCOM operation.
Destroy a Starship on the pad? Possible. Destroy a Starship during ascent? That's much harder.
There are two problems: You have to have enough greater acceleration that you can catch it, and you have to have good enough targeting (and maneuverability) to actually hit it. Those are highly non-trivial problems.
You don't have to catch it from behind, just put yourself in it's path and let Starship's own kinetic energy cause the damage with your own velocity being nearly stationary vs the ground at the time.
Aiming is one of the easier things: huge target, multi-gigwatt heat signiature.
For an extremely well advertised launch into a predetermined flight path of something which isn't even trying to hide its signature and where you can watch the livestream of the countdown?
Perhaps I'm still underestimating the challenge, but I think boost stage vs Starship is a much less of a challenge than boost stage vs. an actual weapon.
But yeah, given your background, if you say I'm wrong, I know to defer to you on this.
The fact that Musk will probably end up like Hugenberg if nothing changes doesn't make me jump in joy. 2 of every 5 people living in the US don't deserve it (the fifth who voted against and the fifth who can't vote), and I'm quite sad that they will have to bear with it for at least a few months (it took 6 months for Hugenberg to lose his empire and power, but I don't see the long knives happening in the US in the future, so it might take longer). At least the week-long pogrom didn't get a pretty name this time and was quite limited thanks to activists and pissed of neighbours. USians are a lot of things, maybe too passive at times, but cowards they are not.
Getting into government to make it worse to show that government is bad has been a pillar of the Republican party since Reagan. They just used to pretend about it.
Why? Current action is no different than when Private Equity buys a company. The American public asked for the government to be ran like a business, and sadly, this is how big money men in the USA run businesses. Take control, fire everyone, leverage everything to their gain, bankrupt, then walk away.
This IS what people voted for. American business practices applied to the government.
> It is mind blowing to me that this is what people want.
I very much doubt this is what people want. But people aren't asked their opinion, and there's a difference between disagreeing and starting an insurrection to prevent a coup.
Exit polls from the November elections don't bear this out.
The lowest income voters trended towards Harris. As did the highest income voters. Trump's support lies solidly in the middle class.
If somebody is middle-income and thinks they aren't benefiting from a stable government and economy, I'm not really sure what to say... could we collectively do better? Absolutely. Is burning it all to the ground even remotely sensible? No, not even close.
Tons of Trump's most-dedicated supporters appear to be able to afford very expensive trucks and boats and such, and to be able to do stuff like travel to DC to attempt a putsch in the middle of the work week. They're benefitting plenty from the stability of the system. Unfortunately.
It's been a core tenet of Republican ideology for as long as I've been politically aware (30+ years now). People voting for Republicans are absolutely aware of this - they either explicitly want it, or are willing to accept as a cost of some other policy. Maybe 2026 mid-terms will prove me wrong, but if there isn't a wholesale turn away from the Trump-led GOP, it's safe to assume they're explicitly ok with this stuff.
> It is mind blowing to me that this is what people want.
It is not what people want. The Trump administration’s popularity is already below 50%, and much lower among independents (around 30% depending on the poll).
Many people aren’t yet aware of what’s happening. A lot of the electorate is getting their news from filtered sources like Fox News or various far right media outlets. Joe Rogan has gone all in on praising Musk and Trump. People who get their information from Trump are being fed lies that are obvious to anyone not inside the bubble. They don’t know what’s happening because their heroes are telling them it’s all necessary and good.
When you start polling people on the actual actions taken, things being cancelled, and consequences the approval is very low.
Anecdotally, I have some extended family who were very pro-Trump. One of them recently discovered that her job was funded through a federal grant, and now it’s likely going to be cut even though she doesn’t work for the government directly. They also discovered that one of their family members is covered by Medicaid through an avenue that’s looking like it will be cut. They went through a stage of disbelief, but now they’re in a phase where they’re sure everything will be fine and Trump will get it fixed. It’s only a matter of time until they realize that they were the intended targets of the cuts, not accidental damage.
> It’s only a matter of time until they realize that they were the intended targets of the cuts, not accidental damage.
I suspect that other scapegoats can be found to blame for their problems; as you say, their news sources will offer them all sorts of filters to deflect blame from the obvious source.
> The political purpose of the Two Minutes Hate is to allow the citizens of Oceania to vent their existential anguish and personal hatred toward politically expedient enemies: Goldstein and the enemy super-state of the moment. In re-directing the members' subconscious feelings away from the Party's governance of Oceania and toward non-existent external enemies, the Party minimises thoughtcrime and the consequent subversive behaviours of thoughtcriminals.
The only thing it gets wrong is the variety of Goldsteins.
It will be far too late. That's why they're going so fast. The damage comes with a huge latency. Perhaps America can be saved and this is nothing but a bump in the ride, I'm no Nostradamus, but this could very well be the end of the Free West.
If I was a governor of a blue state, I’d be strongly encouraging laid off government workers to work for my state. I’d also be working to eliminate the trade deficit (including federal taxes and spending) with rest of the US.
Why subsidize this crap if it’s not going to lead to economic prosperity, security, or even pretending the constitution still exists?
"States rights" is not going to save us. Conservative think tanks push "state rights" so hard because they know they can get overrepresented in state government via gerrymandering/voter suppression. Anything that slips through the cracks after that can be appealed to a higher court, up to SCOTUS, which they have made sure is full of judges sympathetic to them. A recent example would be SCOTUS overturning the Chevron doctrine and its possible effects on California's environmental rules.
Sure it has but only when a Democrat is in office. Look at all the things that Biden/Obama were prevented from doing by the legislative and judicial branches.
Eh, there's latency in some places sure but a bunch of cuts are going to have rather obvious and seriously negative impacts on the financials around this summer's harvest, and the Ag lobby usually doesn't fuck around. It'll be interesting to see how farm communities are kept in the traces then.
Also, Ontario supplies half the US’s nickel, and is threatening an embargo. That’d shut down a bunch of our factories in short order. They could also cut off electricity supplies to the north, but I get the impression the US grid would mostly absorb that (probably thanks to investment in smart grids for renewables, ironically).
> this could very well be the end of the Free West
Europe seems to be realising it must get its act together. Europe + Canada + the Americas have a hope in hell of containing America if it goes off the rails internationally. (When Trump & Musk tip the economy into recession it will be tempting to drum up a stupid war. My guess would have been Iran. But who the hell knows.)
> Anecdotally, I have some extended family who were very pro-Trump. One of them recently discovered that her job was funded through a federal grant, and now it’s likely going to be cut even though she doesn’t work for the government directly. They also discovered that one of their family members is covered by Medicaid through an avenue that’s looking like it will be cut. They went through a stage of disbelief, but now they’re in a phase where they’re sure everything will be fine and Trump will get it fixed. It’s only a matter of time until they realize that they were the intended targets of the cuts, not accidental damage.
I keep hearing stuff like this, but it doesn't seem to be widespread enough to seem to matter, at least in my circle. There's this whole topic of conversation where there's this voter regret thing. I'm in Michigan, so there's been a few of these I've seen proclaiming the Muslim community are having regrets voting for Trump (it was a big thing around the election due to the whole Gaza situation, because voting for Harris was apparently not going to be enough). But I am worried I'm just seeing bullshit propaganda and these types of things aren't actually what's happening because everyone I've talked to seem to be content with the way things are going. It's incredibly weird.
They will always refuse to admit they were wrong or that they were duped. The reasons for hardships and failure will always be due to the group of "others" stymieing their progress. The enemy is both cleverly evil and simultaneously feckless. I know some trumpies and they think things are going swimmingly.
All of the news stories about unlikely Trump voters having regrets are just ragebait. Journalists can always find someone for readers to laugh at because they voted for someone who was openly against them, but that’s a different issue.
The real interesting voter regret is when the likely Trump voters start realizing that their guy isn’t who they thought. It’s not going to happen quickly because denial and rationalization can go on for a very long time.
I am starting to see it in some of the VCs and crypto people I know personally and follow on Twitter. The launch of the Trump memecoin went through a rationalization cycle where the crypto people tried to spin it as a good thing, but now nearly all of them have given up and agreed it was a bad move for crypto
One of the loudest pro-Trump VCs in my state has gone from being a cheerleader to asking questions about what DOGE is actually doing. The trigger for him was, strangely enough, Musk having public issues with the parents of two of his children. Something about realizing that he’s not a good family man and father finally broke his illusions of Musk as the perfect hero.
I think it’s little things like this that will start making people ask questions about their heroes. The more topics and agencies they get their hands on, the more people will be impacted and be forced to reconcile their reality with their imagined ideals of this administration.
Yeah, I'm sick of the "I learned I was wrong the hard way" clickbait that's cropping up everywhere. We are past the time for that.
We need to be building a platform that houses the left and right in order to have a chance at standing up to this. This will be a real litmus test for the US: do we favor our tribal affiliations more than the country that enables us to have those affiliations? Or are we willing to put them aside for the greater good?
Crypto is a technology. Pro-crypto vs anti-crypto is just as stupid as pro-computer vs anti-computers.
We're seeing a moment now where the "pro-crypto" team is bifurcating (really this has always been true but it's more obvious now) into good crypto vs bad crypto. Or mission driven vs profit maximalising. Oversimplifications of a nuanced political, tribal landscape with many many sides but you get the idea.
Democrats being anti all crypto was clearly wrong, attacking the more legitimate parts MORE fiercely than the illegitimate parts. But the flip side is Trump's "crime season" as they call it in crypto twitter, which also sucks. Maybe some day we'll get crypto that is useful, profitable, and designed in a beneficial way. That day is not today.
> I keep hearing stuff like this, but it doesn't seem to be widespread enough to seem to matter, at least in my circle.
It also hasn't fully hit yet. The layoffs are in progress, already awarded grant money is still paying salaries. 3-6 months is when the pain will really begin. Until then, I think a lot of people are still thinking that it either won't really happen to them, or that Trump will somehow make an exception just for their particular federal money pipeline.
I work as a software engineer in the non-profit sector, within education. It's going to be a wild ride as to whether I have a job or not in a year. We are (almost) entirely dependent on grants. The money we get that isn't from grants is tiny (like less than 1% of our total budget). We applied for a few government grants recently and it sounds to me like they are definitely not something we will be getting now so it's back to the private foundations we have to go to for funding. With all the mixups happening it's going to be interesting to see how private foundations pivot, will non-profits like ours see big grants or will we die because other areas are more important?
On top of that, I am no expert top of the job market software engineer. If I lose this job I am going to be competing against people significantly better than me because so many others have (or will) be losing their jobs. Basically, this is the potential beginning of the end of my career.
Thankfully, I think I'm okay through this year, and probably next... but after that, completely a mystery. And that's only because we have agreements for funding through 2026. There are no guarantees beyond that.
Tons of voters reverse many of their positions if you explain the issues to them without using the labels they’re used to.
I’m not sure “they could have known, but didn’t bother to learn, and instead voted based on Fox News and talk radio and podcast and Facebook post bullshit” is enough to say they didn’t vote for this. If it is, that’s… kinda usually the case.
> voters reverse many of their positions if you explain the issues to them without using the labels they’re used to
…and that reversing lasts until the next time they turn on their TV and get reset by Fox News. I used to see it all the time with my parents. Now I just don’t talk to them much.
The 51% of voters that voted for him… (correction: 49.8%)
> I hear that it is the same people who voted Donald last time who voted Donald again this time. No others voted for him.
This is wrong. There were more republican voters this time around than last time.
> The issue seems to be that many people who are not trumpists did not vote at all.
Maybe i'm wrong, but it seems that if everyone who could vote actually did vote, then Donald would have lost.
This is a constant issue in the US. Low voter turnout causes seemingly unpopular candidates to win.
Go out and vote, people. Please.
> So ... maybe he won, but i hardly think he represents the majority is US citizens.
Never said it did. But if you don’t voice your opinion when it matters, then your opinion literally doesn’t count.
So, the American people voted for trump and this administration. Either through their vote or their inaction.
The isn't meant as any kind of defense regarding Trump or his supporters, but it seems under-discussed to me:
The Democrats offered a really bad alternative (Biden) for most of the campaign season. Even if you liked his politics, there was (IMHO) legitimate reason to question his mental competence.
My guess is that Trump would have lost if the Democrats had fielded a less-bad alternative.
But isn't that how Trump campaigned and ran his first presidency? He vomits a stream of random garbage and, if you like him, you pick through it to find the half digested bits you like while ignoring everything else. His opponents do the opposite but, to be fair, it seems like a perfectly reasonable stance to listen to what a person says and assumes they might actually do what they are promising to do.
His "charm" is that he won't do 3/4 of what he says, the difficulty is figuring out which quarter he is going to enact.
> Did people vote for Trump because they thought he was a liar?
Yes! I know apparently smart people who voted for Trump because they thought that his more extreme rhetoric was merely intended to wind up the left. Like the first time he got elected. Except that this time he had a plan.
How could they fall for it. I mean, even during the first time it was obvious that he actually meant it, as he did try to enact all the crazy bullshit. The only saving grace was adults in the room around him. Now all the adults are gone.
IGs and others stopped him from doing some of the worst and dumbest stuff.
This time he (illegally) fired a bunch of them right out of the gate. The Heritage Foundation wasn't caught off guard (and a bit out in the cold) by his success this time, and backed him with a plan. They did it out in the open, the recruiting and a whole lot of specifics about what they wanted to do and how they were going to do it. It wasn't even close to a secret, you could literally go download and read documents, watch interviews of key figures in front of friendly audiences, that kind of thing.
With the Vance pick, you could also easily spot the Yarvin influence & connections and make some guesses about some things. When Elon started worming his way in, it was clear that side of it wasn't just going to be in the head of a VP who can't personally do much, but was going to have traction.
His voters who are now like "WTF?" need to sit down and have a serious think about how they got conned by someone who was standing under a neon sign with a flashing arrow pointing down at him that read "I am conning you! Signed: Donald Trump". Like I'm not sure it even counts as a con, it was so transparent.
Totally agree. It’s like, I get the hard core MAGA voters. The smart ones knew exactly what they are voting for, and they’re now super elated. The not so smart ones just voted for the movement, and their leader, unlikely to be disappointed by anything he does (read Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt).
I enjoy reading the comments explaining how the whole Trump / Vance meeting with Zelensky spat was some epic move in 3D chess.
Meanwhile Trump isn't even able to keep phrases like "rare earth minerals" correct in his head (repeatedly calling them "raw earth"). To be honest 90% of the meeting was him waffling on about how this news organisation was brilliant (because they give him a softball question) and this one was going bankrupt because their rating suck (because they asked a difficult question). You could see Zelensky trying to keep himself from rolling his eyes.
I don't think voters are dumb. The more I talk to Trump voters to understand why they voted how they did, the more it becomes clear that they knew he was serious when campaigning on taking rights away from and making life harder for marginalized people in America, and this is what they voted for, everything else be damned.
In some cases, like some small business owners, people living in some states with higher than average taxes, people paid more in taxes during his first term, due to his tax plan limiting deductions. Additionally, the next administration froze tax increases for people making under $400k. Harris campaigned on this as well.
Again, I don't think people are stupid. I do think they'll say one some things in mixed company to hide their racism.
> Again, I don't think people are stupid. I do think they'll say one some things in mixed company to hide their racism.
This continued labeling of all fiscal conservatives as racists is a key reason Democrats keep losing to an obviously crazy person. Nobody’s going to vote for the party which calls them a racist.
A lot of fiscal conservatives are “middle class” undecided voters who have mortgages and kids to worry about. Unsurprisingly they voted for the party who promised lower taxes over the one which did nothing but accuse them of racism.
It can't be only attributed to ignorance, you see many comments here on Hacker News defending it with vitriol I had never experienced on this forum even during Trump's 1st presidency.
Somehow Americans have really bought into it, the lies, the disinformation, the destruction. I cannot understand, the moving targets shift (CRT, immigration, DEI, cancel culture, wokeness, whatever is next) so it isn't about them whatsoever, they are just the distractions being fed to gather support, there's something else much deeper and darker broken in American society that became so obfuscated by these distractions to the point where I have absolutely no fucking idea why half of the country seems to hate everything that brought the USA to the position it had on the global stage.
Perhaps it's just hubris after a very long period of quasi-absolute power, seems like power corrupts not only individuals but whole nations.
We know that Russia has run a very long, very extensive disinformation campaign against the west. It might be expected that that extends to HN. Not everything posted here is someone's actual opinion. Some of it is deliberate propaganda and attempts to manipulate.
That's hard to accept, given what HN was once. The difference between ten years ago and last year was noticeable; the difference between last year and this is much starker.
Russian propaganda isn’t magic: rather, the people crafting it are very adept at finding and exploiting existing fault lines and the areas where the major American media and tech companies can be exploited to amplify a message. They aren’t doing anything which, say, Rush Limbaugh wasn’t doing in the pre-Internet era, and it’s not like they aren’t just part of the larger disinformation sphere.
What they did was see the way 9/11 reset what was allowed in mainstream American discourse, and that as conservatives moved into a tightly-managed bubble they were also willing to give up the idea of verifiable facts in favor of what felt right. That created a big weakness for a patient adversary as they didn’t need to try to get people to trust, say, RT but rather pick which existing voices to quietly support or try seeding ideas to.
I think it’s better to treat them like a catalyst or the accelerant on a fire where they didn’t start it but they both made it worse and might not have much control over it at this point.
That being said, the writing was on the wall in 2016, the first time Trump ran, HN (and the anglosphere internet in general) took a sharp dive down in quality, and Covid made it all worse.
I just try to remember that the printing press caused a lot of wars, but over the longer term it lead to a better world.
- I live in a deeply partisan state where the outcome was predetermined: a disproportionate amount of those who didn't vote would have to vote in the opposite of those who voted (if I lived in a different state the pressure to vote would have been greater)
- I lack an easy means to get to my polling ___location and my state makes absentee ballots difficult to get
- I would have probably also needed to do some ID stuff (my ID is currently expired, for reasons)
- Registering to vote puts my name/address/registered party/etc onto easily searchable public websites like https://voterrecords.com/
My reasons aren't great but they're reasons. If there was less friction to voting I would have voted, as I recognize it's an important civic duty.
I was pretty flippant and your reply makes it clear that there's a lot more going on than the apathy I was hinting at. Anybody who cares about democracy should look at those reasons very seriously to see what we can do better (polling locations, difficulty with absentee ballots, privacy issues to say the least).
This what a huge chunk of HN wanted! HN was all aboard the Trump train for years and the mods admonished anyone being too critical of other users for it, it's when I wrote off most of the people here as morons.
That's a bit harsh. Maybe a bunch of political juniors thinking the system needed a rewrite by a bunch of folks foreign to the system. Don't write it off, it could work. Probably not though
It's in an inexperienced engineers blood to demand a full rewrite. I mean, it's just so tempting. Learn from our mistakes, a build a system that solves them! Then, we don't have to wade through the crud on top of crud on top of crud to get simple things done!
But, anyone who has ever been through such a rewrite knows they're usually more trouble than they're worth, and no matter what, you will lose A LOT. Doesn't matter how thorough you are or how many requirements you capture. Most are lost to the ether, never again to be seen... until the exact moment you need them.
For what it's worth, while I don't agree with the moron bit of what OP said, I have felt like I have seen HN leaning more pro-Trump. And it does also feel like saying anything critical of him can be heavily downvoted. There really does appear to be a large contingent of pro-Trump people on here, at least in my experience. I don't have citations, just my own experience, so, obviously take it for what it is.
Pay attention to usernames. There are some pro-Trump, pro-Russia people here, but honestly not that many. Maybe six or eight, total. They just tend to post 50 times each in any thread that touches on the subject.
Capital is inherently conservative and this is a website focused around venture capitalism. It makes sense that more than average this website's users/staff would lean towards more conservative politics than a random sample of Internet users. This should be even more clear when you read pg's essays. Of course this has an effect on the moderation, including voting/flagging.
OP didn't say a majority. It's hard to deny that a sizable portion of the tech community is made up of ancap techno-libertarian types; and that the dismantling of the US government is their dream.
I'm starting to think the "government is inefficient" folks have never actually worked in any corporate job. I've worked in two companies since I left the federal government 5-10 years ago, and both were significantly less efficient, and less effective than the federal agency I worked for. I'm sure that's not _always_ true, but it just seems like any large organization full of people is difficult to keep efficient.
Same experience. The "government = inefficient" propaganda has been repeated ad infinitum for decades so that now it feels like a law of nature to people. My experience is however that every large org is inefficient in its own unique way, no matter which sector.
Profit in it of itself is an inefficiency. It's a bandaid for the fundamental problems of the private sector. The fact the public sector isn't burdened by a requirement to make profit isn't a downside, it's a super power.
That's my experience too.. When the public sector wastes something its an error. For a corp, its business as usual. As long as number-goes-up it doesnt matter to them what they are doing.
The problem is the people who quit because they cannot work are not those you want to lay off. Those who stay in those conditions? That's those who were not adding anything useful before.
At this point, anyone remaining at Xitter has to be aware that they are working for a neo-Nazi. And anyone using Xitter in a country that has a history of fighting Nazi's in WWII has to be aware of who they're supporting. It's maddening how many people just don't seem to give a shit.
The narrative is more complex than that if I am not mistaken.
It seems the general public outside the affected regions were not completely aware on what was going on with concentration camps. This does not mean they were not aware of at some level.
It is quite common for old people to say that they only became aware of many of the atrocities months or years later the war was over. The US was not keen on putting pressure to concentration camps as, well, they had their own full of "japs and n*"
Since you mention the FAA, I wonder what will happen if the NTSB's report on the Washington disaster doesn't match Trump's preconceived conclusions, e.g. by placing most of the blame on the (female) helicopter pilot. If he interferes there, that will be the final straw convincing me that the US is unfortunately no better than the "banana republics" it used to make fun of anymore...
I was under the impression these offices closed during the pandemic and the return to office order is bringing people back into those places. If that’s the case I don’t think this is some sort of planned disruption but rather poor planning. Incompetence vs malice right?
But they should've shown their assertions and proof thereof beforehand. It's been pointed out that they say organizations are wasteful, but those are vague weasel words; show some numbers, do a root cause analysis and fix what is broken.
But the goal is not to fix what isn't working, it never was - it's a diversion and an excuse to dismantle the federal government, checks and balances, and move to an unchecked oligarchy/autocracy. Taking the whole country with them, of course.
That's certainly true in general but I can't think of an attack that was preceded by such a visible effort to make the country more vulnerable. There would be some rallying effect, but it might be smaller and shorter lived than usual especially if the response is bungled. Then again, things might have become so cultish that reality completely stops mattering and trump skates by once again without any responsibility.
Reality isn't simple enough to peg responsibility on any one person.
Unless you go with the "shit rolls down hill" approach and ultimate land blame for everything on the person in charge, it'd be extremely hard to find a clear line between 6 weeks of Trump's presidency and an attack on the scale of 9/11.
Maybe you could tie it back to connections with his first term, but any attack on that scale takes years to plan, not weeks, and has plenty of facets to consider when it comes to what motivated the attackers to actually do it.
If the point was to make the government less efficient to justify political platforms, why have private companies been doing the same thing for the last 3 years when there's no political upside for them?
I'm not saying the RTO policy is good. I'm very skeptical of it myself. But this explanation doesn't seem to hold water - especially when better explanations are out there.
They could be using it to thin out their staff without layoffs. They could be propping up real estate values. They could be dealing with sunk costs on office space and looking to justify them. They could be accomidating poor managers who cannoy evaluate employee productivity without seeing butts in seats every day.
Not to mention some people really actually do work less efficiently from home. I can't say exactly what proportion or what the overall productivity impact is. It's probably very hard to measure. But it isn't hard to imagine leaders (in both the public and private sectors) genuinely believing the RTO movement will improve overall productivity.
It also isn't hard to imagine large organizations doing a poor job when implementing their RTO effort. I saw similar issues with the RTO effort in my private company. The same issues also happened with the WFH effort during the pandemic. Mismanagement is commonplace in large organizations.
They could just be doing it to be petty and cruel to "government workers" in general. There doesn't always have to be a genius 5D-chess play. It's very possible the administration simply believes the federal workforce is full of their political opponents and just wants to grief them. A major component of the campaign and their base of support is rooted in cruelty to out-groups, so they're technically delivering a campaign promise to their base by just making people miserable.
Not sure if they even think they need to prove their assertions, after all Musk (same as his "boss"/BFF) has made the most outlandish claims without a shred of evidence (the "radical-left Marxist vipers" at USAID). To me it looks more like they are already 100% convinced that any work done by federal employees is completely worthless, so they can indiscriminately fire anyone they wish without doing any harm. Same for the attrition tactics - they tell people to return to the office and at the same time end leases for offices etc.
> I have no doubt that it can be cut down by 50% without adversely affecting anything long term.
Is this percentage based on anything more than vibes? Does it matter to you which eggs get broken and do you agree with the methods being employed to choose/break them? And sorry for all the questions but how do you feel about the conflicts of interests with people like Musk overseeing so much of this?
JFYI federal government headcount of 2M people has stayed constant over last 100 years with ever increasing population and things to take care of. I wouldn't call that bloat, honestly.
What has been growing a lot are mostly municipalities, which I guess boils down to more people helping disadvantaged kids in schools, which I guess is nice and more policing, which many are calling to shrink and replace with something less violent.
US government is not bloated. It's corrupt by the revolving door policy, which definitely won't be fixed by letting people go. But even with revolving doors some things have worked for you. Such as predicting weather, fighting diseases, disrupting or bribing competing nations, opening new markets and protecting your fucking imaginary property everybody in the world fucking hates.
> disrupting or bribing competing nations, ... and protecting your fucking imaginary property everybody in the world fucking hates.
Wait, I'm confused. Are you upset that Trump might stop the CIA from disrupting foreign nations? Because that's something I've always been ashamed about as an American so I'm having trouble being upset about the intelligence apparatus that everyone hates worldwide apparently getting fired. The media is telling me that it's the end of the West but I just keep thinking about the Tuskegee experiments and South America and I just don't feel sad for these organizations
> US government is not bloated.
Regardless, it has come to the point where we cannot afford the interest on our debt
There is a big difference between disrupting a neutral country versus an active adversary. But I suspect you already know that and aren't being sincere.
> Regardless, it has come to the point where we cannot afford the interest on our debt
I agree that our debt payments are a growing issue. That's one of the many reasons I think that this administration is going to leave behind a vastly weaker country. If you actually believe that Trump/Elon are serious about this take a look what percentage of the federal budget is comprised of salaries, and look out how much money they want to spend on tax cuts, border security, and a myriad of corrupt contracts. You'll find that the latter is much larger than the former.
I'm sure you won't be swayed by anything I say but I hope you will take a look at the current national debt and check it again in a couple years. When you see that it has become vastly worse under this administration perhaps you'll reevaluate whatever has led you to believe their obvious lies about trying to balance the budget.
I have no doubt that it can be cut down by 50% without adversely affecting anything long term.
As long as you don't care about American soft power, or the many lives we save with our humanitarian programs, you may be right. If you do care about these things, then you're already demonstrably wrong.
I'm not seeing that in either the deportation/removal rates, nor the encounters rate. Which time period 2021-2024 should I be looking at to see this? I'm looking only at annual rates, not month by month.
It wouldn't show up in deportation rates because they're not talking about deportation, they're talking about people illegally entering the country. That administration was enabling it through the CBP One app, up to some limit per day (which I remember being 2000 but am not sure that's right).
> However, the end result is the same—tens of thousands of inadmissible aliens being released into the interior every month. This is evident through the number of appointments scheduled through the CBP One mass-parole program, which skyrocketed to more than 852,000 since January 2023.
Spike in encounters, and spike in deportations, no? I’d expect to see both drop, but certainly deportations, if what was claimed had happened, but I’m not seeing it.
[edit] if the stopped-doing-their-job thing had happened, not CBP One, I’m aware of that.
> “The only thing a return to the office has given me is an hour of traffic while driving and a loss in efficiency,” said the worker, who requested anonymity for fear of job reprisals.
RTO in a nutshell.
As someone who chose my living ___location based on where my family wants to live first and jobs second, this sudden turn to RTO mandates is infinitely depressing. Most of my work involves talking to people in different offices, states and countries anyway, so RTO means doing the e-mail and video call work but from a different ___location that requires battling traffic both ways. It’s insane that this is being done in the name of “efficiency”
Return To Office policy: middle-management language that assumes “office” is a neutral position, we’re somehow “returning to”. This term has been carefully crafted by corporate strategists to sound as palatable as possible.
Mandatory Commute policy: centers the outcome for workers - spending hours each day on an unpaid commute to and from the office just so we can be on video calls all day.
> spending hours each day on an unpaid commute to and from the office
Reminds me of a NYC startup I was at (while hired living on the west coast).
CEO was really big on in-person (well except for all the LATAM devs I had to manage...) so they required me to fly out frequently, and my boss was incredulous I would book the 6 hour flight during week days because it "ate into work time". Like WTF is sitting on JetBlue flights on weekends for me but "work time"... I'm on salary anyways
It's insane that anyone actually believes that it's being done for efficiency.
It's not, and never was.
It's being done a) to drive people to quit, so they don't have to lay them off, and b) to restore the power dynamic to the status quo ante, where your manager could just look over at your cubicle and see you in your seat, and know that whether or not you were working, you were still there to bow to them. (And many of them genuinely have zero metric for gauging "how much is Aurornis working?" besides measuring the amount of time a butt is in a seat, and are desperate to avoid having to admit that.)
At my former job the (then) CEO said outright that forced WFH mandated in 2020 actually brought some minuscule improvement in general process efficiency.
> many of them genuinely have zero metric for gauging "how much is Aurornis working?" besides measuring the amount of time a butt is in a seat
This is a legitimate problem though. Obviously making people do all their work from a centralized office ___location is a horribly inefficient solution, but it is a solution, and if there really is widespread slacking happening it might still be more efficient than doing nothing.
I am currently at my desk, in my office. Am I working?
For roughly two years during the pandemic, I was at home using my laptop. Was I working?
Furthermore, for most office work, there is more to working than a binary "are you doing it or not?" Being at your desk working says nothing about the quality of your work, which any competent manager should absolutely be capable of assessing from the work itself.
Finally, you're making a huge assumption:
> if there really is widespread slacking happening
Is there any evidence that this is happening? I guarantee you that the kind of manager who does this will not know, because they have no effective metrics.
It's also precisely the kind of thing that toxic management culture says workers are always doing (or trying to do): It perpetuates the idea that Managers, who are perfect, pure beings with only the Might Company's best interests at heart, are always at odds with Workers, who are lazy good-for-nothings only ever interested in getting the most money possible for the least amount of work possible, and who must always be treated as if they are trying to steal their time from the Mighty Company.
It's an unsolvable problem, because any sufficiently complex job will therefore be complex to measure. I mean, if you could measure it, then you could just do it, no? Why spend all this time measuring how good an engineer is?
If you really want to know, you have to look at the code, sit in on the meetings, write the code and see the challenges with integrating with the existing system, submit a PR to see the pushback and... oh wait now you're just an engineer.
If we hire two engineers to act as one then maybe, maybe, we could measure performance. At the cost of the largest inefficiency imaginable.
It's not unlike using generative AI for coding. Writing code is the easy part! Making sure it works is another beast. Honestly, I'd much rather write code than read it. If it takes X time to write code and > X time to read it, which in my book it does, why bother with the reading?
"Unsolvable" in the sense that there's no one magic algorithm you can use, sure.
But every job has some ways to determine if the person in it is actually, y'know, doing it. And off the top of my head (and it's early, so YMMV), I'd say that remote jobs tend to have more easily-auditable products than many in-person-only jobs (particularly the type where the main purpose is direct interaction with the public).
> If we hire two engineers to act as one then maybe, maybe, we could measure performance. At the cost of the largest inefficiency imaginable.
And why should "efficiency" be our most important criterion?
"Efficiency" is why we have lean staffing that forces the "bus factor"[0] of nearly every position to 1. "Efficiency" is why we have stretched, fragile supply chains that break down the moment any one supplier or middleman experiences a crisis.
Efficiency is the enemy of resilience. The only people it really helps are shareholders.
Efficiency is perhaps not the right word, but I was under the impression that attempting to measure performance is a cost saving tactic. I think you lose the cost saving if you just double your engineers while keeping the same amount of work.
I mean, from a certain perspective, nearly everything management tries to do is a cost-saving tactic, but I wouldn't say that measuring performance is primarily about "cost savings". It's more about making sure that people are doing the job they were hired to do—which, on the face of it, is definitely a valuable thing to be doing.
The problem is when it's being used as a whip to get people to work ever harder with no more pay and no more support than before.
Doubling engineers while keeping the same amount of work is something that can increase resiliency—both in the engineers themselves and in the business. Making sure you have at least, say, 125%-150% coverage of all duties makes a huge difference in everyone's stress levels, and makes sure that if someone gets sick, gets hit by a bus, or just goes on vacation, their duties neither stop getting done, nor get piled onto other people who are already at 100% (or more) capacity.
In addition to your points about managers (upper and middle) being bad at their jobs, the c-suite must consider that sometimes tax breaks for the company hinge on physically bringing workers to a specific place: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-02-21/another-t...
Don't want to be the cynical guy, but having talked to just such a ceo who gets-off by being hired to fire people. RTO is literally a badge, or at least an excuse to exercise authority. Often yes, to get rid of free loaders, but more specifically to shove it in the face of a lot of engineers that they are subservient. This guy actually would put it that they saw a gig as, and I'm recalling, a place to 'eat shit', until he moved on.
Quite a different perspective than what I'd think most devs here would see their field as, something they love.
There's also alot of pent-up indignation about how executives see engineering in general. They. Don't. Understand. It.
and so they marginalize it.
Its not at all surprising behavior , that of executives, from what you'd expect to come from a group more likely that most to be represented by those doing nothing more than winning a personality contest.
I think a lot of executives see engineers as uppity, well-paid factory workers, and absolutely hate that the gap between their own pay and engineering's pay is so small. In order to maintain their world view that they are better, higher-class people, they need to be making 10X-100X what their median worker makes and they need their median worker to be afraid for their jobs and subservient to them. Current software engineering comp. (and until recently, the ease of engineers to job hop) contradicts this world view. The last thing they want is to be seen as [ugh] PEERS to regular workers. That won't do at all. Workers need to be taken down a notch and shown their place on the totem pole.
Wild that oil & gas subsidies, Medicare negotiating more drugs and foreign military base reductions are off the table. But god forbid we see another hurricane coming.
I don't care what side you fall down on, the only reason someone would rollback Medicare negotiating drug prices is so that they can make more money on their big pharma stocks.
I can't believe a bunch of grown adults voted for this shit.
Most of the people I talk to seem to have one thing they are holding on to as the thing they'll get out of their vote. Like "he's going to eliminate the income taxes I pay on my social security" etc
The thing is almost never true, and even if he were is a horrible self centered justification.
> he already passed tax cuts, but only for the wealthy
Well, they’re about to expire and their extension hasn’t been passed yet. But yes. I’m getting a tax cut while the farmers who voted for him get tariffed out of their export markets. Sort of wild.
Well technically the existing tax cuts already did blow a whole in the budget; its keeping them that's at play here. Its one of the reasons Trump was popular amongst his base - he cut taxes but didn't cut spending, so many people got a tax boost without any austerity. People can hand wave the spending as spurious Democrat led initiatives because there's no real discussion amongst the base about how to actually cover the tax losses.
The actual choices are one of: cut medicaid, cut medicare, cut military, cut social security, raise taxes. Tariffs would technically work to if they result in higher prices, but then they seem equivalent to raising taxes (very generally) so not sure if its worth breaking out.
Just so everyone is aware, Vought is the man behind the moron (the Donny). He is the architect of Project 2025.
His goal is to traumatize the civil service to bring about a re-christianization of America, which he believes can only be done by expanding the power of the executive branch.
We are living through the machinations of a religious fanatic.
> (...) returned to ethernet cords in piles around the floor, random wires sticking out of walls, and motion-sensor lights that weren’t working correctly
I don't understand that part, maybe I'm missing something - what happened there? Why would the abandoned workplace not look exactly the same as they left it? Where did the ethernet cords appear from? Someone stole TVs from the walls?
The federal government is generally pretty efficient. They probably sold off surplus equipment. They definitely have been consolidating office space. It could be that the remaining leases were cheaper to keep than buy out, or that selling the buildings didn’t make sense.
Regardless, there’s no reason for them to hire facilities people to maintain vacant space. Leaving furniture in those places would attract vermin, ruin the furniture, etc.
> The federal government is generally pretty efficient.
Then either Musk and Trump are lying about needing to focus on government efficiency, or some of the brightest and most brilliant minds that the American people willingly voted for are wrong.
> I don't understand that part, maybe I'm missing something - what happened there?
It's hard to think, I know. But don't worry, I'll give you some ideas.
> Why would the abandoned workplace not look exactly the same as they left it?
There might have been some animals who came along and decided that the TVs were very important. Maybe there was a hurricane or a tornado which decided to fuck this place in particular, but only by taking the desks and TVs.
Or, maybe the workers who used the office weren't the last people in the office.
> Where did the ethernet cords appear from?
They were always there. Some people actually know how to have a reliable, secure, and fast data connection. Protip: it's not wifi. Usually when the TV or computer is installed, all of the extra wire is hidden in the wall. But after the TV or computer has been removed, the extra wire length is often left on the ground ready to be tested or installed with the next device.
It's just very annoying (read: time-expensive for little profit) to pull the wires all the way out of the walls to be taken, and even more expensive to re/install in a new ___location (it's significantly cheaper to just install new wiring instead).
> Someone stole TVs from the walls?
It's possible, but not likely. Those TVs were most likely g(r)ifted to the managers and/or executives. You know, the same people who actually own the building. That's not the same as stolen. Also, the missing TV can now be written off of taxes as a loss for the business. Everyone likes double-dipping, right?
It's been a few years. In that time, leases will have ended, and not been renewed. Refurbs and buildouts of new space will have been abandoned. Outdated and surplus equipment will have been decommissioned and scrapped or sold off or sent to other sites where it was required. I'm sure there are some offices that are just like how they were, but also some offices which _no longer exist_, and it's unlikely their replacements will have been fitted out if it wasn't expected that they would be imminently used.
So, this thing called Covid hit. It was a pandemic, and because it was infectious, a large push to work remotely was made (both in private and public businesses).
When employers realized that work was being done despite not being in the office, they started to shutter their offices (ya know, to save money).
I can't believe I have to explain to another adult why offices after Covid don't look the same.
What an insulting and willfully obtuse answer, that does not address any of these perfectly reasonable questions. When you leave your house on vacation, do you rip the cords out of the outlets and pile them on the floor, and dismount all the TVs?
The comment was demeaning; offense was clearly intended, to belittle the GP's intelligence.
To call a statement that is intended to insult, "insulting", seems to be accurate? It was not intended to indicate offense on my part, but to chastise for unnecessary hostility. Maybe I'm reading your reply wrong, though.
Some people just live under a rock; or they have never been impacted by god awful management decisions.
Sometimes I wonder what that life looks like? Maybe just sipping champagne at beach side (or on the couch) all day in ignorance. Watch whatever reality trash is on streaming services. All while the world burns around them.
Maybe if we'd stuck it out with Hoover... "given a chance to go forward with the policies of the last eight years, and we shall soon with the help of God be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this Nation." (campaign trail, 1928) He only got four of those years.
Yeah, we’d be much much better off if the Great Depression was still happening, and Hitler got to slaughter our ancestors. I’m guessing the congress critters are pretty nostalgic for stuff like polio, tuberculosis, measles and the bubonic plague.
Also, screw breathable air and drinkable water, even more than the internet and microwave. Above all else, ballpoint pens and velcro need to just stop.
Excuse me. It’s rush hour. I need to go yell at a busy bridge until the thing just falls the fuck over.
Interesting that the CNN article makes no mention of how badly under-utilized government office spaces are.
https://wolfstreet.com/2025/01/25/doge-seeks-to-shed-vast-am...“A recent report from Sen. Joni Ernst, a Republican from Iowa who chairs the Senate DOGE caucus, found that not one of the headquarters for any major agency or department in Washington is more than half full. GSA-owned buildings in Washington, D.C., average about a 12% occupancy rate. The government owns more than 7,500 vacant buildings across the country, and more than 2,200 that are partially empty.”
DOGE is hamfisted in its execution but why are we spending massive amounts of money for office buildings while people work from home? I'm a fan of remote work and would prefer that we crash the Commercial Real Estate market by canceling leases rather that stuffing people back into cubicle farms, but I think the context of trying to kill two birds with one stone (improve building utilization and also identify who is actually doing work and not just fucking off) makes some sense.
Well a few thoughts. I feel like your question is trying to excuse reckless disregard (at best) as mere incompetence.
I don't think if you sum up all the value on all the leases of wasted buildings it would be a drop in the bucket against the psychological damage (e.g. distrust in the system) being caused by this administration. Like unless it's more than 1% of the national budget (i.e. > 67 billion a year) then it isn't worth the chaos.
And a competent administration that wanted to end leases really shouldn't have started RTO, so let's try not to fabricate plausible deniability here.
> why are we spending massive amounts of money for office buildings while people work from home?
Valid point. But if that's the problem, why don't we get rid of the buildings and save the money, rather than force people back to the office so we have to keep spending money on the buildings?
> I'm a fan of remote work and would prefer that we crash the Commercial Real Estate market by canceling leases rather that stuffing people back into cubicle farms,
Do you have even the slightest bit of proof that wasn't already the case? How do you know this wasn't already in progress?
Your article said GSA pays $5.2 billion in annual rent to private-sector landlords. Fiscal year 2024 discretionary spending was $1.6 trillion. So we are discussing 0.33%.
Commercial leases are 5 or 10 years commonly. Many of the leases began before 2020 probably.
Owned real estate increases in value in high demand markets and is difficult to sell in low demand markets.
Completion of work can be and is tracked remotely.
It's GSO-owned real estate. Most cities have seen a precipitous drop in office utilization post-COVID, and it's a weak market for selling commercial office space.
It's likely tax-exempt from property taxes, upkeep is likely minimal, and even empty office space is an appreciating asset. I'd be more surprised if it didn't exist.
> hope your leased car has a driver's seat and can be driven
Huh?
And what does my own money have anything to do with this? The leases were bought and then they had to pay. Are you implying people knew Covid was going to hit when they got these leases? It's hard for me to understand why this is such a complex thing to grasp. Particularly since it's been a focal point in our lives for 4 straight years.
You are speaking with 100% certainty of the timelines. You don't know any details of these leases and are simply making assumptions. Even if your assumptions are correct, the pandemic officially ended 2 years ago.
> Even if your assumptions are correct, the pandemic officially ended 2 years ago.
You think the effects of a pandemic that literally stopped the world for over an entire year just goes away with the last case? I knew I was arguing with children on this site.
The pandemic pushed everyone home. The office buildings that were leased are no longer needed. And EVEN SO, you could make the argument that prematurely ending a lease when you weren't sure the biggest raging dipshit on this planet wouldn't get elected and force everyone back in (like he is doing right now) despite it being a really really dumb idea isn't that far-fetched.
You idiots will go to the ends of the earth to defend the absolute shitshow that is Doge and have this unbelievable need to believe that the government is chalk full of poeple who couldn't be bothered to make sure they weren't spedning millions on useless shit. GFTO
Finally someone remembers this quote! He told the GOP voters what was coming and they still gave him the keys to the kingdom. When Medicaid is severely limited, we'll see if they get the message. (for instance, childbirth costs and seniors in nursing homes.)
there is no intention of reconstruction. destroy government to ensure nothing stands in the way of the oligarchy. they want to create the world's first trillionaire at our expense
Out-of-touch billionaires who never did an actual day of work in their entire lives are convinced all workers are lazy slobs collecting social security checks while procrastinating their WFH jobs on their couch.
They hate us, and now that they're in power, they're showing us just how much.
i do wonder how Musk is planning to get FAA approvals for SpaceX if the federal stuff is decreased. Is he going to wait many weeks, months, years like the others will be waiting or is he personally going to cut the line?
Or may be getting rid of FAA permits at all? Back to the time of great unlimited aviation and rocketry innovation. I personally have a bunch of non-traditional designs i'd like to get airborne/launched which if we lucky would fly and stay airborne on the planned trajectory and for the planned amount of time :)
...and then the judges, so anything that does get enforced gets ignored. It's like someone bringing a lighter and matches to a board game tournament: "there's nothing in the rules against it..."
The power dynamic between labor and capital (or managers in this case) in the US has shifted so much since our grandparents generation.
It’s hard to ignore it now. Our rights and safety nets have been stripped away. 40+ years of trickle down economics and other failed neoclassical/neoliberal economic theory have directly caused the situation we are in.
They want to destroy the so called "dark state" by scaring and scarring officials out of their wits to do their biding, "the art of the deal", trimming the budget is the excuse.
And yet, the federal government was paying for all these things, city-scale numbers of unused office space. I’ve worked on the GSA side and seen first hand.
Anyone who still thinks Elon Musk is trying to make the government more efficient is willfully ignorant at this point. Elon, Peter Thiel, and JD Vance all want to dismantle government. Trump is a pawn in this.
An organization allegedly about reducing waste is creating it instead, by arbitrarily forcing a tight timeline and using heavy, specific, and inflexible top-down mandates that don’t let those closer to the work use the information they have (say, that their offices aren’t ready to work in).
Spending freezes, blanket firing of tons of provisional workers (fun fact: the recently-promoted are also provisional, this doesn’t just mean brand new workers), and other measures have probably also disrupted the ability of offices to sensibly execute the orders. That is, it’ll take them longer to get the offices ready.
> An organization allegedly about reducing waste is creating it instead
The point you missed in the parent comment was that this is temporary. I don't have a strong opinion on the matter, but if the way we discover that government offices were sitting vacant for years (i.e. big waste) is by having people return to them and be unproductive for a few days (i.e. small waste), then the trade will be worth it. I doubt anyone wants employees to be sitting in offices that aren't functional. We have discovered something bad...which would seem to be part of the reason of doing it.
The counterargument is obvious to anyone willing to think about it for a few seconds, but the article doesn't even bother addressing it. They even admit that the headline office without wifi was only without wifi for a few hours:
> In one Department of Health and Human Services office, there was no Wi-Fi or full electricity in the first hours when people returned last week.
...and yet this is in the headline. This all reeks of cherry-picking.
I didn't miss the point. This waste could have been avoided, is the thing, and anyone who cared about running and knew how to run an organization well, might have. Such a person might even have guessed there were excellent reasons that the executive has not, previously, been run by one single person issuing surprising and very specific decrees that reach down to the lowest-level workers, across large swaths of it at once, and not done that.
> I don't have a strong opinion on the matter, but if the way we discover that government offices were sitting vacant for years (i.e. big waste) is by having people return to them and be unproductive for a few days (i.e. small waste), then the trade will be worth it.
This doesn't save anything. Now utilities and maintenance costs are higher. It's more spending. Leasing out or selling the buildings would have cut waste.
> I doubt anyone wants employees to be sitting in offices that aren't functional.
I don't know how many times and ways people involved in the admin have to say that their goal is to wreck the federal bureaucracy before people believe them.
> This waste could have been avoided, is the thing, and anyone who cared about running and knew how to run an organization well, might have.
Sure, by not having the vacant offices in the first place. Different ways to achieve that goal include: not allowing huge numbers of employees to stop coming into the office; or if you do allow that, by then competently following up on the implied reduction in office usage.
There are clearly lots of ways to avoid this kind of waste, but all of them go back for years, and were not done. So here we are. And instead of being critical of that, you're choosing to fixate on the most recent events, where someone is actually discovering and fixing the underlying problem.
> There are clearly lots of ways to avoid this kind of waste, but all of them go back for years, and were not done.
What waste? The offices? Filling them doesn't reduce the waste.
No, the waste is lost hours of productivity, and chaos making these offices less efficient. You solve that by rolling this out very differently. The waste I'm talking about is entirely avoidable and 100% DOGE's fault.
[EDIT]
> where someone is actually discovering and fixing the underlying problem.
What underlying problem? This 1) didn't need to be done, and even if that weren't true, 2) was done in a hamfisted way that wasted money.
You're focusing on the trees and missing the forest. Please go back and re-read my original comment.
Small waste: the few hours/days of lost productivity while offices are re-opened.
Big waste: the empty offices that were sitting there while nobody was using them, for years.
Maybe they could have avoided the small waste by being more careful and methodical, or maybe that would have taken 10x longer. I don't know, and it's not worth arguing about.
Agree, there are bound to be some logistical issues during RTO and they will eventually sort themselves out. The article is grasping at straws. Do I really think asking government employees to work out of an office is unreasonable? No.
> those little shops, daycares, and coffee spots need people around to stay afloat
This is a strange inversion of priorities. Day cares and coffee spots exist to serve their customers. And you have lost sight of many important things if you think parents should be prevented from caring for their own children to support day care businesses.
> Now, they have to get dressed and at least physically show up to collect a paycheck. If they possessed real, marketable skills, they would just leave the government and seek employment elsewhere. You will have to pry these jobs from their cold, dead hands as they're never quitting voluntarily.
"fed employees I encountered every day did little to nothing" so arguing for the action plan of "get dressed and at least physically show up to collect a paycheck"
"they would just leave the government and seek employment elsewhere" when "There aren't any well paying jobs in the private sector" (because of "immigrants" and "corporations")
What a mental system ... or whatever! It is true then: there are people looking up to the level of Trmup!
Yes, it's a valuable lesson that, though it may become a nazi cesspit and vastly more annoying to interact with, an organization can survive for a surprisingly long time as a shambolic remnant of its former self, doing less and less well for fewer people.
As I understand it:
- twitter became less appealing to advertisers so revenue dropped
- you can't really firmly track the valuation over time after it was delisted but Fidelity late last year estimated its value had declined by 80%. There's a bump from people speculating that Musk's political position will somehow enrich it, but I don't think that's evidence that twitter itself was well-managed.
- a bunch of communities that had previously been very active on twitter did just kinda fizzle or go elsewhere as using their product became deeply unpleasant
It still works last time I checked – with fraction of headcount and with people working from the office.
Twitter had few months runway until it'd run out of money and go bankrupt.
Bloomberg analysis says (despite advertisers and communities leave etc) platform earnings seem to be staying at $1.2 billion a year.
Reports from Feb 2025 say that X doubled its adjusted EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) from $682 million in 2021 (the last full year before the takeover) – so they are on right track increasing profitability and big part of it likely due to workforce cut from 7500 to 1500 (they did more moves than that, all of them have some impact).
It seems argument around layoffs and working from the office leading to doomsday scenario (it'll stop working, it's gone etc. sentiments at the time) have been refuted with time.
It works in the sense that if you open the website it will open... probably.
Based off of what I've seen on Twitter, I'm not convinced it's very popular. I regularly see the stupidest people who walk this Earth making obvious rage bait. You know, Nazi stuff, women shouldn't vote, that type of thing.
The naive thing to say is that these people are morons because they're Musk supporters and surely that's the only thing left for Twitter. But I don't think so. They're bots. Millions and millions of them. Bots talking to bots talking to other bots.
The reason this bubble hasn't popped is because nobody has told advertisers. They're essentially burning their money but shhh it's a secret teehee!
In Twitter's defense, they're not the only ones doing it. Facebook deleted what, 1.5 billion bots a year ago? But if you log on, you'll see AI Jesus made out of cornflakes with 200,000 thousands comments that all say "God Bless". Hmmm...
Your argument seems to be entirely financial rather than what twitter _does_.
My understanding is their MAUs and DAUs have fallen. Fewer people are looking at it or posting on it, less often.
I think it's interesting that you mention bloomberg as saying that things are going ok.
My recent read was that they thought twitter was just messing with numbers.
> its improved fortunes owe much to heavily adjusted financials and investors’ fear of missing out
> The 2024 figures weren’t audited, but the 2023 figures were, said one of the people. None of them would qualify for generally accepted accounting principles, also known as the GAAP standard that the US Securities and Exchange Commission requires for publicly traded companies.
... i.e. the recent numbers aren't trustworthy
> Even under those unusual calculations, X’s debt burden was roughly nine times adjusted earnings — far beyond the baseline of six that bank regulators characterize as risky.
> The threat of litigation — and Musk’s advisory role to Trump — has been a topic of conversation among some advertisers as they decide whether to return, according to several ad industry sources. While few believe X’s product or ad offerings have improved in the past year, marketers are weighing the possible downside of ignoring X and what that might mean in terms of retaliation from Musk.
... i.e. to the extent that some advertisers have returned, it's b/c they think they'll be punished if they don't, not because it's a good way of reaching an audience or promoting their brand.
I think the actual revenue story is worse than the usage story. My first searches show that their Q4 revenue was $2.5B, roughly half of where it was in 2021.
Analogously, I don't think any of the recent sudden moves mean that the federal government at large is _over_ ("doomsday scenario") except for the departments that the administration actually wants to kill, but I think the current administration is setting the government up to do less and less well. Possibly it will be a great financial outcome for Musk.
My argument is around cutting workforce and requirement to be present in the office in context of efficency in general. Sentiment of people predicting total failure back then feels like flashback now.
I saw few predictions of rapid collapse. Many predictions of slow or delayed reductions in revenue, active users, content quality, service quality, and ability to deliver new features.
abeppu's argument was efficiency and health are not the same.
One off, politically driven reductions in advertisers and user groups is not caused by unhandled load from reduced workforce or implications of work from office policy.
Despite this out migration, so far their health looks exceptionally good. They're running at 20% of original workforce (!).
Just think about it (and I really mean it - taking aside personal dislikes, political views etc) – you have a company, you cut 80% of workforce and it still seems to work very well. This is insane.
It's also not one off example - he is well known for speedrun stunts (ie. e2e completion of colossus supercomputer in memphis in 4 months <<!>>).
The argument is – can you do something similar with government as well? As a body that is notorious for inefficiency it seems plausible the answer is yes.
> One off, politically driven reductions in advertisers and user groups is not caused by unhandled load from reduced workforce or implications of work from office policy.
I think this is basically backwards; aggressive cuts and short-term revenue attempts alienated advertisers, casual users and influencers with large audiences. In particular:
- they abandoned content moderation, including flagging misinformation, hate-speech, and targeted harassment. This obviously saves money, b/c it eliminates systems and ML models that needed to examine tweets/messages and accounts in real time. These are adversarial problems, so you can't just create the model once and leave it alone; you need to pay a team to keep finding the current abusive patterns. But abandoning this means that you have a network where (a) any post you see is more likely to be manipulative misinformation (b) you will see slurs and hatespeech and perhaps receive them and (c) if you're determined to be in some way objectionable to an army of trolls, you may be endlessly harassed. So it's a kinda awful place to engage.
- they tried to sell blue checkmarks. This had multiple bad effects. It let any rando with a few dollars impersonate large companies and brands. This alienated those large companies who felt understandably burned, and it made casual users less trustful of content even that appears to be marked as legitimate by the platform. Further, b/c they were trying to force previously verified accounts from notable people to start paying them, they alienated celebs and influencers with large audiences.
It's not just that people who disagree with Musk politically were moving away from twitter in some slow-rolling boycott -- the choices Musk made have transformed twitter to a place where it's harder to get real information, it's hard to have a conversation with your community without being attacked, it's hard to curate your feed (Musk posts may be injected whether or not you follow him), and far from being a "free speech" paradise, it's one where a bunch of people don't feel safe engaging at all.
Reports from Feb 2025 say that X doubled its adjusted EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) from $682 million in 2021 (the last full year before the takeover).
There's not even enough parking at a lot of offices. Despite an up to 50 mile commute, some are being told "well, you could take the bus. Or uber. Or walk."
The whole point of it is to be miserable. The decision makers literally said that!
Meanwhile traffic around the city has gotten WAY worse too. So it's not just the feds that are affected either.
This seems like a really political article with not really any tech-related content...
Also note the article starts with the qualifier "in the first few hours", meaning it's not like they're sitting there all day every day with no lights/wifi. This seems like an exaggerated, politically motivated piece that doesn't belong on HN.
People that work "in the field" don't need a home office. I know a hydrologist who now has to go to the office, when much of his work is travelling around sampling groundwater. Another person I know works at OSHA, where she also travels to various work sites, but now has to go into the home office. Ridiculous waste of travel to have to go the the home office only to then leave to go somewhere else.
Everyone did this during COVID. Either got rid of office space or didn't add any to keep up with demand, because N% of staff was now remote.
I saw this at Google before I left in 2021. Doesn't surprise me that gov't has the same problem. Desks that could only be reserved/booked, not owned. Insufficient desks if everyone had to come back. They clearly didn't see WFH as temporary, even though RTO was clearly the long term plan.
Other bigcorps are the same from what I hear. Facilities got all messed up.
The US-government is interspersed with oligarchs who want to diminish the ability of the government to actually act so that they can argue why everything should be privatized.
Degrading the ability of government employees to do their jobs leads to greater inefficiency and more failure, which can then be pointed at to validate assertions that government isn't efficient and produces bad outcomes.