SSCReader
7d ago
Even if no-one does respond, we have to do our best to write as if they will and we want them to. Otherwise we'll get fewer and fewer people who will.
And I did have a response, I was rewriting when he got banned. I don't know if I would stand up for all of it, but he is wrong about leftism murdering his neutral libraries and wearing the skin suit. It was already murdered when anti-Christian and anti-American books were banned back in the day and libraries had a very different lean. When the Wizard of Oz was banned because witches are theologically evil or portrayed women in leadership roles. It was already a weapon in the culture war, that's why leftists got involved. Because they felt just as disgusted by the way it was previously as he does now. It's a new zombie in the skinsuit that he doesn't like but there will always be a zombie.
"The Wizard of Oz was banned by public libraries in 1928 because the book was deemed ungodly for “depicting women in strong leadership roles.”"
"Pressure was brought to bear not only on the materials in the library but the staff who ran it. Loyalty programs sprang up around the country beginning in 1947, the year that President Harry Truman enacted a federal program for employees in the executive branch. Typically, these programs required that employees sign an oath indicating whether or not they had had or continued to have any affiliations with organizations considered subversive"
"The 1960s brought about turmoil in libraries across the southern United States. African-Americans attempted to access white libraries across the American South."
Once libraries are used as a cultural weapon, you cannot be surprised when your opponents decide it is a weapon they need to contest.
Whether equity based weeding is right or wrong is irrelevant, you can prefer one or the other, but starting history 20 years ago obscures WHY these things happen now. Why did a coalition of the left want to control libraries? Because those libraries had previously been weaponized against their coalition - feminists, leftists and black people at a minimum. Free and neutral libraries had already been skinned and inhabited long ago. It's just a fight over which zombie gets to wear the skin so to speak. And I am sure the Christians in the 1920's would argue that libraries had been corrupted and that is why they needed to assert control and ban ungodly books ,and the patriots of the 50s would cite the rise of un-American communists for why they had to fire people and so on and so forth.
If you hit someone with a club and then they wrest it away from you and hit you with it, your complaint about your opponent using a weapon is void. Your real issue is that your opponent has the club not you, not with the concept of the club being used as a weapon at all.
Probably with some introspection about why you feel violent disgust, so you can control that reaction I think. The below is my own interpretation and idea of the space.
The whole point of the space is I should want even (or especially perhaps!) the people I find violently disgusting to read what I say and want to respond to me so we can have a dialogue.
So if I am going to talk about something I find disgusting I have to take a distant view of it and try to be more dispassionate.
You'll note many people who catch repeated bans it's because they can't (or won't) disguise a seething anger that underlies their post. They aren't thinking first and foremost how do I write this in a way a progressive gay librarian (for example!) would want to engage with. They are writing from emotion first and foremost.
I could rant for days about the damage the Christian "brain parasite" does, and have in other places, but here if I post about it, it has to be with the idea I WANT Christians to read and engage. And calling their faith, something they feel very seriously about a parasite is not going to optimise for light over heat. It's starting an argument not a discussion. Its already a steep ask for them to try and discuss their own heartfelt beliefs with criticism, so my job is to try and make that as easy as possible for them, by trying to remove as much heat as I can.
I rewrite my posts usually after thinking if I were an X, how would i feel about the language being used to talk about the principles and actions I hold dear? How do I alter it so we can engage in a discussion not a fight? Try to put myself in the shoes of whoever I think believes the things I hate or find disgusting and edit my wording to offend them the least possible to make my point. I'm not always successful I don't think, but I have never got a ban or even a warning (that I recollect), so I think I get reasonably close.
You have to want to actually communicate with the people whose ideas you hate and find violently dusgusting I think, to get the most out of this space. But of course for most people they don't want to communicate with people like that. So not everyone is a good fit for what the space is supposed to be. If you can't at least pretend you WANT to engage with someone whose ideas you hate viscerally and are critiquing and make some effort to aid that, you'll probably be picking up Mod actions sooner rather than later.
Edit - spelling
SSCReader
16d ago
Even if we don't strip citizenship from people who have come to reject those ideas, I am okay with making their lives otherwise so unpalatable that they renounce citizens on their own.
Why not the opposite? Reform the nation on the beliefs that the now majority of your citizens espouse? To an extent that is what the Civil war did no? Massive disagreement about a specific ideal, fought a war over it, reformed shattered state with the new status quo in place (to an extent at least).
Or to put it another way was the Confederacy or the Union the anti-American ones in this context? Slavery had been part of America for some time, so was the abolition unAmerican or was the fact slavery contradicted some of the idealistic founding rhetoric enough to make abolition actually the American thing to do?
SSCReader
16d ago
It seems at least possible that sustainable maintenance of public order necessitates a lot more punishing bad people than we're currently doing.
Are you sure? Even last year homicide seems to have fallen again and certainly in PA's large cities we are now at a near 10 year low, and much much lower than we were in the 80's.
In Philly the homicide rate peaked at over 44 (per 100,000) in the mid 1980's. Dropping to about 16 in the early 2010's, it peaked again at about 35 in 2021 but has dropped again down to just over 17 for 2024. And so far in the year it is about 35% down on last year, which means we might actually get the lowest homicide rate in the last 50 years in 2025. Pittsburgh's numbers seem to following the same rough trajectory.
For the whole US the peak appears to have been 1991 with 10.7 before reaching a low of 4.7 in 2014 before increasing to 7.75 in 2021, and decreasing to 5.2 for 2024. So similar trends across the nation. Estimates for the 1950s and 60s put the figure around 5 then as well. So 2024 was one of the least violent (looking at homicides) years in modern US history.
The evidence seems to suggest that not only can we actually maintain a level of violent criminality much higher than we are currently at (not that I am saying that is a good idea of course!) that our current rate is not actually all that high (historically) as the Covid era increase has largely now vanished.
Just for comparison, my homeland had a homicide rate about 31 per 100,000 at the peak of the Troubles in the early 70's but had decreased to about 0.8 before Covid. It spiked up to around 1.3 during Covid and dropped back to 0.7 in 2024.
I think the evidence shows that public order can in fact be maintained with significantly higher levels of criminality and lower levels of punishing bad people. I am not advocating for that being a good idea just to be clear!
Just pointing out we do have a pretty high tolerance all in all, and that if current means whatever punishing we are doing in 2024 and so far in 2025 it seems to be working pretty well.
SSCReader
21d ago
Though of course non-combat skills actually out scale combat skills in Skyrim quite significantly. With alchemy and smithing alone (even setting aside the infinite loop trick) you can loop to create weapons that will kill even a max levelled Draugr in 1 or 2 hits even on Legendary difficulty, and boost your combat skills with alchemy if you wanted to. Not to mention you'll be rolling in gold to pay for training in combat skills if you want.
The equivalent to AI in the real world perhaps? The self-improving loop leaving behind the basics of ships and planes.
SSCReader
21d ago
Remember when Cameron promised the referendum in 2013 he was in charge with a coalition. That gave groups an out-sized power. There absolutely were enough in the euro-sceptic camp to cause him problems with votes because he didn't even have a majority on his own. The conventional wisdom as shown below was primarily because of the euro-sceptics with SOME others because they feared UKIP would cost them seats. But the biggest concern was the euro-sceptic bloc. Without them he probably could have wrangled the rest, because it was the euro-sceptic wing which was feeding the fears of the others. Cameron did not want a referendum. He did so because of the pressure he was under driven primarily by the euro-sceptic power bloc which was able to muster first 60, then 80 MPs to defy the government in votes, then over a hundred demanding a referendum. He only had 306 MPs at this time so over 100 is definitely enough to force any issue. As they did when they rebelled and sided with Labour.
"For Clegg, the reason Cameron moved to a referendum commitment was to manage his divided party.19 Echoing Harold Wilson’s 1975 European Community plebiscite, rather than a conversion to the merits of direct democracy, Cameron needed a mechanism to control an issue that was destabilising his party.20 As early as October 2011 Cameron had ‘faced 22 rebellions on Europe, involving 60 Tory backbenchers’.21 However, the pressure ratcheted upwards later in October when 81 Conservative MPs voted for a referendum in defiance of a three line whip. Both Cameron and William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, spoke forcefully against the motion in the House of Commons yet could not prevent a larger rebellion than anything seen during the Maastricht legislation in 1992.22 Political pressure from Conservative MPs continued to grow. In June 2012 John Barron MP collected over 100 signatures from Conservative colleagues asking Cameron to commit to a referendum after the 2015 general election.23 The PM publicly rejected this from Brussels which angered his critics and eroded his ‘authority over the party’.24 Pressure rose further in October 2012 when Conservative rebels united with Labour to defeat Cameron in Parliament over EU budget contributions."
"Cameron chose to commit to a vote, not because the country’s population was clamouring for one but because a significant minority of his own MPs, many of them frustrated by the constraints of coalition, were demanding that he do so – some because they feared that UKIP would cost them their seat (or the seats of too many of their colleagues) at the next election, some because they wanted out of the European Union and were more than happy to leverage that fear to their advantage."
SSCReader
21d ago
Well when we start enforcing the Johnson amendment on any church there is some room to talk about that. Given the amount of religious endorsements Trump got, its a wash, or perhaps even tilted towards Republicans just given numbers.
Either churches get to endorse or they don't. (I'd prefer not myself) but singling out black churches is just an isolated demand for rigor currently.
Also happy to remove tax exemption from both black and white churches just to be clear.
SSCReader
21d ago
Setting aside I think you're just wrong about the vote rigging, and that the black voting bloc has its own ideological things it wanted from Democrats, that make it willing to put up with some LGBT stuff, thats just reinforcing my point, the ideologues in the DNC were the ones pulling the strings, they had good control over congressional Democrats, doesn't matter how many moderate officials you appoint. Doesn't matter if the President is a pragmatist who just wants power, as long as he has it theres no point in going to war with the ideologues on his own side.
Sure trans kids, sure DEI and affirmative action even if unpopular. Sure flipping your own views from a few years ago upside down, Why would they care? The pragmatist just wants to win. If he can win without having to dial down his own side, so much the better, its political capital he doesn't need to spend.
SSCReader
21d ago
Indeed, but it was still a bone he had to throw. He isn't in power without that bone.
SSCReader
21d ago
Remember who looks to be in charge does not mean they are.
Consider that David Cameron agreed to a referendum on Brexit he did not want because of the internal politics of his party. He was reliant on the euro-sceptic wing and so was forced into calling for a referendum he explicitly campaigned against. He was in power, but he wasn't THE power. He was constrained in his actions by having to satisfy ideological power blocs within his party. He was pragmatic but he needed the ideologues. So he compromised his principles for power.
Further to that Biden won in 2020, you only have to dial your pragmatism up when you fail to win. Otherwise you can satisfy your ideologues and STILL get power. Biden is an experienced politician whose positions shifted overtime. Which ones are his real principles and which he was just wearing because his party politics wanted them, is very difficult to tell.
Thats why it is often losses or long periods in the cold that cause these realignments. Its easy to "be" an ideologue when you're winning. It's what you do when you're losing which shows whether you are an ideologue or are willing to sacrifice principles for power.
SSCReader
21d ago
But a religion acts on the elites who coopt it just as the elites act on it.
Well all ideologies do, not just religions, but regardless of that in politics you will inevitably have a mix of true believers, slightly less true believers all the way down to people who don't believe at all and are just in it for advantage. And you will also have a mix of exactly what ideology or what part of the ideology they believe or value most. So it's certainly more complicated than just pragmatists vs ideologues, I agree. You'll also have your alliance of groups (Evangelicals, business neo-liberals etc.) who also have their own internal balance of pragmatists vs ideologues.
You will have people who do not in fact care about the ideology whatsoever, but are in it for the power. They will push the most pragmatic approach (do whatever we can to win) and will be in tension with the truest believers (maintain our principles at all costs), and they will have varying webs of people who are on the scale at different levels and in different parts of the coalition to convince. That's why pivots are generally not immediate until an internal tipping point is reached.
In my direct experience at a national level most politicians are closer to the pragmatist end and will pretty happily jettison any principle they can get away with for power. It interests me that the Democrats may have accrued more true believers (or at the least truer believers) as it stands, because I think that generally makes it harder to win.
SSCReader
21d ago
They don't even attempt to explain a through line from open borders, trans kids and censorship to living wages and health care for their base.
That's the error in your model. If you think supporting trans kids is good, or open borders is good then whether it costs money or makes money is not the relevant distinction if you are not a consequentialist.
Consider the evangelical wing of the Republican party, they were still pushing for further abortion restrictions even though much of the polling was showing that was a position that might cost votes. Why? Because they really truly believe that it is wrong, and they should not compromise on that even if it means losing. They are not utilitarian. But they did not hold enough power within the party to force that decision and so Trump backed off it somewhat. Pragmatism won there. De-emphasize and move away from policies that are unpopular.
Supporting kids who want to transition will not help the economy or help people with healthcare in general, in fact it will probably cost money that could be used in other healthcare. But if you think those kids need that help badly ,then you should do it (from this point of view to be clear!) even if it costs votes and/or money.
They are NOT being pragmatic, so if you try to judge them by that measure their choices will look crazy.
"Even if everyone is telling you that something wrong is something right. Even if the whole world is telling you to move, it is your duty to plant yourself like a tree, look them in the eye, and say, ‘No, you move.'”"
In other words currently the ideologues hold sway within the DNC. Usually in a political party you'll have wings that are more pragmatic and vice versa and the power will move between them. Often a defeat will cause a realignment. Like New Labour moving towards the center in order to get away from all the "Winter of Discontent" strikes in the past which doomed them electorally against Thatcher. Pragmatically (or cynically!) abandoning some core Labour principles in order to become more electable. But those wings don't go away (see the resurgence under Corbyn for example).
It's too soon to know whether this loss will allow a more pragmatic core of the DNC to maneuver into power. A lot will depend on who the next flagbearer (Newsome?, AOC?, Someone new?) is going to be, and what direction they decide to go. Right now things are still shaking out, but within the next 6-10 months we'll have a better idea. I think there is some early evidence it might, as the more extreme left is already complaining about Democrats not fighting back enough, and that the handover of power was straightforward and peaceful. That indicates that the adults at the table have some understanding that Trumps popularity is based upon actual positional support at least privately.
To be clear I think that political parties need to be pragmatic, a lot of my job back in the day was to advise them on what areas should be de-emphasized because public support was low, and I think that the Democratic Party is going to struggle once again in 2028 unless they are able to shed some of the more ideological components (though if the economy tanks that will still be the biggest factor).
The problem of course is it is often your most committed ideologues which are willing to volunteer significant amounts of time and effort to your cause. Keeping them on side while transitioning (hah!) to a more pragmatic approach can be tricky.
SSCReader
23d ago
You start with an offer you are willing to back down from. But you don't pre-backdown from that position before you even get to the table. A return to status quo from 2014 is not going to fly, but you don't back down from that position until the Russians are actually negotiating. You are pre-emptively weakening your own position because now you have to make concessions in negotiations on top of the concessions you gave up without anything in trade.
You don't go to Russia with a reasonable offer, and they won't come to you with a reasonable offer. That is what the negotiations are for. If Putin wants to negotiate he will do so, regardless of what Zelensky is saying he will agree to.
SSCReader
27d ago
Except depending what gay means that is perfectly plausible. Consider that homosexual behavior in prisons becomes much more prevalent, even if those imprisoned would prefer women/men. Consider the idea of being "Lesbian until graduation". The prevalence of men who have sex with men but do not identify as homosexual etc.
"The LGBT slang terms lesbian until graduation (LUG),[1] gay until graduation (GUG), and bisexual until graduation (BUG) are used to describe primarily women of high school or college age who are assumed to be experimenting with or adopting a temporary lesbian or bisexual identity, but who will ultimately adopt a heterosexual identity."
Along with Kinsey reporting that sexuality seems to be somewhat more fluid than just gay/straight for many people (particularly women) and the idea that a quarter of the Gen Z population are LGB in that they would consider sexual acts with their own sex, under certain circumstances even if in general they will prefer the opposite sex looks to be well supported. And would have very little impact on sexual reproduction.
If those people identify as bisexual or pansexual, (so boosting numbers who identify as LGB) generally end up with the opposite sex, the circle is squared. They are both LGB AND will end up in a relationship capable of sexual reproduction. And handily the evidence of numbers we have supports this:
The biggest growth in identification as LGB is among bisexuals and women specifically. If you look at the breakdown in Gen Z, 73% of women who say they are LGB are actually just B. Only 22% of those who identify as LGB are L or G. It is the huge increase of those who are bisexual which is behind the vast majority of the overall increase, indeed the L or G percentage has only increased from 2% among the Silent Generation to 5% among Gen Z. And most of those Bi women will end up in conventional male/female relationships. And historically would have identified as heterosexual even after some experimentation with women. Now they identify as bisexual. Behaviors have not changed much. Just identification.
Back in the early 2000's some 20% of women admitted to same sex contact, but only 5% identified as lesbian or bisexual. Now about 20% of Gen Z women identify as lesbian or bisexual with 25% of Gen Z women admitting some same sex contact. Labelling explains pretty much the entire increase here. Hell upwards of 60% of women admit some same sex attraction. It's quite possible all or most women are technically bi-sexual!
This is no unjustifiable belief. Just a change in how (primarily) women label themselves.
Some excerpts to add anecdote to data:
"Once upon a time in middle school, I came out to my mother as bisexual. Like many girls that age who have non-hetero tendencies, I had a mother who didn’t buy it. It’s normal to experiment with other girls, she told me. "
"In high school, my label shifted to lesbian. Though I felt a rush of nervousness around my friend’s Goth guy pals, in addition to an embarrassing crush on one of my older sister’s hockey-and-football-playing friends, I wanted a relationship with a girl."
"Ten years later, I’m living in San Francisco and married to a man. My existence is still label-free, but my story is a hard one to explain to those who haven’t experienced any fluidity in their sexual identity."
"Research on human sexuality is pretty limited. The evidence we do have suggests women are “sexually fluid” creatures, which sounds like some kind of secretion issue but actually refers to a mix and match approach when it comes to the sex of our lovers, and not necessarily in equal proportion. I’m a member of this group"
SSCReader
30d ago
Can also get it from blood transfusions, though this is rare (but not unheard of) in the US, so it can hedge against unexpected surgery or injury. Also from accidental needle sticks depending on location (city playgrounds etc) So probably worth getting sooner rather than later as there are multiple vectors even for kids and the vaccine has a low risk profile.
Think we started my three at about 6 months old on that series so it would be complete before they were in the outdoor run around phase.
Though I did move around the world significantly when my kids were young so we were very aggressive with vaccinations. India, Pakistan, China, Egypt, at a certain point the risks outweigh almost any vaccine side effects if expecting to travel/live in non-first world countries significantly.
That probably doesn't apply to you though. But important for army/diplo kids.
SSCReader
1mo ago
provide believable explanations for their preposterous behavior.
That is indeed a believable explanation. My wife's grandmother did not trust banks and kept almost all she owned as cash at home. You have to remember there is a certain level of distrust towards white or governmental institutions particularly (and understandably) in black Americans of a certain age or that they inherited from their family members.
Now it may not be true in this case, but if so the reason he reached for that as a lie is precisely because it is indeed believable, it is an actual thing if you have exposure to black communities. My wife to this day keeps more cash at hand than I ever would (though in turn I keep more emergency supplies of food and water than she considers "normal").
Also why disliking taking the "government needle" of Covid vaccinations resulted in lower vaccination rates in black communities. It's certainly less common than it was, but it is still a thing.
As another coincidence between black and Ulster-Scots borderer behaviors MY farmer grandfather also kept large sums of cash in his house rather than in banks because he didn't trust them or the government, which led to us randomly finding money in bags with things like "8 cows to Smith" written on it after he had passed.
Perhaps not quite to Ron Swanson burying gold in the woods levels though.
SSCReader
1mo ago
Remember though your first child is the most stressful, it's common overreacting to stuff because you've not experienced it before. Second is easier and by the third you'll be almost leaving your kid with strangers (I exaggerate a little, but only a little!). Her overprotectiveness sounds pretty normal at this stage. Though the dog thing sounds pretty ok, dogs and babies is a risk I wouldn't take even now after raising 3 kids to adulthood. People routinely underestimate how unpredictable dogs can be with babies and kids in my direct experience.
But boundaries are not just for kids! It is ok if she wants to do x but that doesn't mean you have to. You have to agree on the big things but your day to day parenting can and maybe even should be different. You don't have to have the same reactions. Ferber is basically what we did and it worked fine, but the chances are whatever method you use won't have any long term impact on your baby. This is more for the parents. The baby will learn to sleep at some point regardless.
Negotiate you taking over the putting to sleep duties perhaps if she is finding it too difficult. Her relationship with your baby and her relationship with your baby are different. You taking different duties is entirely ok.
My top tip is starting to teach your baby sign language from pretty much right now. They can learn very basic signs pretty quickly and just knowing milk, more, done is very useful. For my three kids anecdotally they also seemed to be less stressed when they could communicate even very basic things. They won't be able to make the signs themselves probably for another couple of months but they will start to understand. So when you sign sleep or bed, after a month or two they will know what is happening, and my experience is that made things easier. That is probably the thing I was most skeptical about when one of my wife's friends suggested it, but was blown away by useful it was (and to be fair) how cute it is for your child to be able to make tiny hand signs and actually begin to communicate into the world before they can speak more than a few words.
But the ring in the OP's post is the entire federal government not just the deep state. I simply don't see Trump trying to destroy what lets him govern. Downsize it sure, target the bits that have been problematic for him, absolutely. Take a chainsaw to agencies and NGO's? Yes.
But taking the whole thing down? Shuttering every three letter agency? Getting rid of the military, national parks, ICE?
I really do not see Trump as wanting to be the President who essentially ended the United States of America by delegating every single power to the states, including his own, somehow. Does he really want New York or Portland having control of immigration in their state?
Draining the swamp still leaves you with the land under the swamp. If you didn't want that, you wouldn't have to drain the swamp at all, just blow the whole thing up. And I don't see evidence despite much outrage, that he wants to do that.
SSCReader
1mo ago
I guess the analogy falls apart a bit here, I don't think they are actually trying to destroy the federal government, just size it down.
So I suppose the better analogy is the ring is at the jewellers getting resized. Which isn't really as dramatic. Unless the jewellers is Sauron's Discount Rings and Gems of course.
A reveal that Musk was part of the deep state all along would be a shocking twist worthy of Sauron deceiving Celebrimbor.
One DOGE to rule them all, one DOGE to find them, one DOGE to bring them all and in the Deep State bind them. In the Land of D.C. where the bureaucrats lie.
SSCReader
1mo ago
Except Tolkien's point is that no-one had the strength of will to do that. Not even Elrond, not even Gandalf. The ring could only be destroyed by someone not trying to destroy it but to possess it and destroy it by accident (or by divine intervention).
"Tolkien wrote that no one could have willingly destroyed the Ring, no matter how good their intentions were. He also wrote that the Ring was "beyond the strength of any will to injure it, cast it away, or neglect it"
Elrond would have rationalized why he should not push Isildur because he would not have the will to destroy it. Indeed, that might exactly be why he didn't! (well in the book they don't even enter Mount Doom so even more effort would have been required). Note that Isildur in the book is in fact on his way to destroy the ring when it betrays him and falls off his finger so he can be killed. But Tolkien is clear when it came down to it, no-one on Middle Earth had the will to destroy the ring.
Everyone will be tempted. Everyone will succumb at the end. Even the wise, even the pure. If you think the federal government is like that, then logically your prediction should be that Trump/Elon will not destroy it, but instead take it for their own. Or that Isildonald, heir of Fred and Elond of Tesla will turn against each other and in fighting over it, one will fall into the volcano and be lost with the government.
Hopefully in this analogy the volcano is not one of nuclear fire!
SSCReader
1mo ago
If we are bringing back higher standards of dress, a formal evening event at the White House should surely be White Tie?
Yees but we're talking about the entire male federal workforce here, we're already asking them to have 3 levels of fanciness. I'm not sure we can go with white tie as well. Maybe that's if they get invited to get the Medal of Freedom or whatever.
As for no brown in town. I repudiate them! A brown Oxford or Derby looks much better with a navy suit than black. And I wore brown in town all the time in my time in the City, and no-one ever assaulted me with an umbrella. A charcoal grey suit is a good choice though. But unless we are providing a fashion budget (re-allocate USAID funds to tailors for the Feds?), I am not sure how many suits we can expect them to have and keep well tailored.
SSCReader
1mo ago
Yeah if everything went perfectly they might just be in profit. More importantly will be revenue through 2025 which unless they have to reveal figures when applying for more licenses we may or may not find out about.
SSCReader
1mo ago
I don't think expenses will be down that much. Staffing costs in 2022 was about a billion. So assume that dropped by 80%, R and D was 1.5 billion lets say he cut that by 80% as well, and then sales and marketing was about another billion.
Even if he was as ruthless with all those he's cut maybe 2.5 billion. Which is a lot! But it doesn't look like most of the other fixed expenses could drop much. So it's more likely expenses are around 2.5 billion still at a minimum. And possibly with R and D particularly he might not have been able to cut so deeply but for sake of argument lets say he did.
Revenue was 3.5 billion in 2023. Looks to be about 2.9 - 3.1 billion for 2024 according to Twitter's own figures submitted as part of their applications for licensing for money transmission. But debt servicing costs are about 1.2 billion per year. So predicted loss of ~0.5-0.8 billion for the year would be more likely. It's going to take some growth before it is making multiple billions per year, just looking at the figures. Not impossible, but the debt servicing costs are off setting at least some of the savings Elon made, and self-reported revenue still has dropped from 2023 to 2024 so I can't see a way it is making multiple billions right now.
He has to find a way to arrest the decline in revenue if he wants to be making such a profit I should think.
SSCReader
1mo ago
Just by numbers most people in government posts are people who deal with the public and just want a job. Your description really only applies at management layers and above. Remember only a third of federal employees even have a degree let alone one in communications or similar, and many of those are in the Medical field as part of the VA and the like. Entertainingly USAID is the best counter-example with two thirds of its workforce having an advanced degree or higher! But that is not the norm across the Federal bureaucracy.
Your social security local office people are dealing with being yelled at by people losing their welfare and the like, they are VERY familiar with the lower/underclass and all their foibles and are probably not true believers in ideology as much as they are average workers worrying about making ends meet. Their direct managers will be as well. The local DMV is staffed by people from or close to the ghetto in fact here, so that wouldn't apply even for a lot of local government jobs. Remember most government jobs just by numbers are front facing. It wasn't until I moved to the higher echelons in the Civil Service I found all the politics and classics degree types.
From the point of view of the Federal government that would probably be the Senior Executive Service, of which there are about 9,000. If I were wanting to re-organize the Federal bureaucracy I would start with those 9,000 because they manage large projects and departments (basically the steps below political appointees) But of the sheer scale of the government in the US the vast majority do not appear to match your description.
In other words, the person most likely to take a government post is a non-degree having, neo-customer service worker, who (if you have never worked a customer facing job like that) will be very clear about how the rubber meets the road. Your Ivory Tower idea really only applies to a small minority in the upper ends of the government (but they are of course much more influential.)
So I tracked back that quote to Kristina Rosenthal at the University of Tulsa in 2014 but it seems she sourced the quote from R. Wolf Baldassarro in 2013 who doesn't appear to have named a source that I can find. The "strong leadership roles" wording does appear to be his paraphrasing with just the "ungodly" wording being a quote in his original piece.
"Nevertheless, it has come under attack several times. Ministers and educators challenged it for its “ungodly” influence and for depicting women in strong leadership roles. They opposed not only children reading it, but adults as well, lest it undermine longstanding gender roles."
I did find an article in the Chicago Tribune from 2000 which said this:
"In 1928, you would not have been able to find “The Wizard of Oz” at the Chicago Public Library; librarians there considered the book “not literature, but, somehow, rather evil for children.”" but again the quote is unsourced. The Chicago Tribune was extant in 1928 so I assume they would maybe have internal archives so as to verify that the banning actually happened, but it isn't specified in the article.
I do concede however that I cannot find a contemporary source for those quotes. Though I also can't find a contemporary source for the 1928 banning at all. Possibly buried in a newspaper archive I would need a library card to access, ironically enough.
For the 1950's though I think we have better evidence (this piece is about state librarians in Florida):
"When it came to employing the tactic of using the public’s anticommunist sentiment to remove the works of Baum from public libraries (and thereby empower the library in its fight against communism), Dreier and Dodd were not alone. These localities joined Detroit, Washington, D.C., Chicago, (ironically) Kansas City, and other local library districts across the nation in purging their shelves of the works of Baum. "
"Dreier was arguing that his movement to improve the quantity and quality of Florida’s libraries was a necessary front in the Cold War. He viewed libraries as extremely important institutions that would create a populace capable of defeating the Soviet Union in the marketplace of ideas"
This paper is sourced from letters held in the Florida State archives from the 1950's and illustrates that seeing libraries as a cultural weapon was already happening then.
"Outside the pages of his library newsletter, Dreier was an even more strident anticommunist. Elsewhere he wrote vitriolic propaganda pieces with stark depictions of leftists:
"The socialist is smarter than the capitalist. He has to be to get what he wants. The capitalist is the producer. He raises the fruits and vegetables. He makes gadgets. He accumulates profits. That’s when the socialist, himself unable to create anything, steps in and passes laws that compel the capitalist to turn part of his profits into socialist projects. The time will come when the socialist will actually pass laws that compel the producer to surrender complete control of what he has created."
"Given his antipathy toward leftist politics, the fact that Baum’s work was often suspected of containing subversive political ideas gave Dreier additional impetus to support Dodd’s list of books to be removed from Florida’s libraries."
Whether it applies to Baum in 1928 or not, the evidence is that libraries were already seen as a battleground for cultural clashes well before the current timeframe.
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