anon_
4d ago
Oh sure. But part of that is "Elon is willing to do the wrong thing in order to more quickly iterate to find the right thing".
That is not at all contradictory to the thought of "gee this looks wrong".
anon_
4d ago
I'm not sure what the clause "were it not the law" means. In any case, it's not implicit, but explicit, that a bankruptcy court has broad authority to modify or set aside any contract or part of a contract necessarily to achieve the objectives of bankruptcy law.
I also don't think it threatens the theoretical basis of sanctity of contract! This is a small thorn in that basis that is readily explainable and proves nothing about the general case. Again, this isn't the internet gotcha-game.
anon_
4d ago
I mean, there is this institution called Congress that can set funding and headcount and whatnot. In this respect, the Presidency is much unlike a modern CEO who has both supervisory and fiscal authority.
When the dust settles, if this all fails, the blame will be placed on the blob rather than on the ham-fisted execution. So it goes.
anon_
4d ago
Your senior management would not resist the HR in these circumstances.
The flipside is that HR would, after getting the mandate from the CEO, would never send it before coordinating with my senior management.
Indeed, in the model of "this is a CEO-mandated data gathering activity", I'd have expected the heads of the various agencies to write their own email: "Hi Team, as per the direction of {CEO} our HR team to do {whatever it is}. Shortly you will receive an email about {PROJECT}, please do your best to help {HR TEAM} complete this important activity".
The fact that Kash and Gabbard (and Bondi?) ended up writing the exact opposite means that the project very apparently doesn't appear to have any such mandate. And, if we're being honest, that's not out of Trump's personality to do -- to tell subordinate 1 to go do something without telling subordinates 2,3,4 to support 1.
Also, only a small fraction of government employees have security clearance, and if you lie to your employer about your work being classified when it’s not to obstruct them, it is grounds for disciplinary proceedings.
There are a large number of legitimate reasons to redact activity besides security clearances.
But yes, withholding it without a reason from a program or project is malfeasance.
anon_
4d ago
Gabbard is not the blob, is she? I thought we were all bullish on her.
If someone with your values is pushing back on you, maybe this is one instance for actual mistake theory.
anon_
4d ago
OK, I've been a bit negative about this elsewhere in the thread, but this is understandable.
Still, if DOGE are prioritizing speed over getting things right, then it has to be open to feedback in order to get on the right track, even if it means eating the L. Much of the criticism here can be reframed that way -- hey they are quickly iterating and look, here's a strategy that didn't work.
anon_
4d ago
You can't "play by the rules" and get anything done. Every inefficiency is someone's personal cutout. The agency will not simply allow DOGE to cut waste. DOGE has to force the agency to do it.
The best way to do that would be to devise the appropriate plan and then get the head of the agency, the one selected by Trump, to supervise and execute it.
DOGE has to force the agency to do it and the worst conceivable way to force it would be by not having the direct leadership of the agency on board.
anon_
4d ago
The correct analogy would be that you receive a phone call directly from the CEO's deputy, where he verifies his identity, and tells you "you're about to receive an email saying...". In such a situation, I imagine the calculus would be different
If that email didn't copy at least 1 person direct management chain, it would be extremely irregular.
The main reason, of course, is that if the CEO or his deputy wanted me to do something, he would want to direct my management chain to make that happen and to supervise it and to remove any roadblocks.
anon_
4d ago
If I received such an e-mail from HR in my day job at a bank (and I don't think any other large manager-mode organisation would be different), it would be unprofessional to do what the e-mail says and send a quick response cc my direct line manager.
I work in a giant corporation. If HR tried to send this email, my senior management would (politely) blow a hole in them so large, the crater would be visible from space.
Kash and Gabbard had it right: "thanks OPM, we will manage our own".
And this is just looking at the office politics perspective, From the infosec angle, this is worse. The e-mail said "don't send classified information", but if you work in a job where you are actually trying to keep secrets, there isn't a short, safe unclassified summary of what you did last week.
Obviously the answer is send a troll email
- [REDACTED]
- [REDACTED]
- [REDACTED]
- [REDACTED]
- [REDACTED]
anon_
4d ago
Yup, and I totally understand this.
The weird thing, in my view, is that bankruptcy is an impairment on the fulfillment of a consensual contract that all parties actually want, in some sense. Lenders like it because it provides for orderly and final disposition of insolvent creditors. Creditors like it because it means they won't be on the hook indefinitely and can get another chance.
As such, it's a (small) thorn in the side of libertarian theory. I'm still broadly a squishy-libertarian, but it's an interesting theoretical topic. And it's certainly interesting to think about in a forum that isn't dominated by people trying to drunk using shitty internet gotchas.
anon_
4d ago
I would wager pretty highly it is, based on the powers in art I.
It’s not some total unknowable mystery even if there is some uncertainty.
anon_
4d ago
They were already Russian they made it official later.
So they were not actually part of the federation till later. Which is what I wrote.
anon_
4d ago
Sure, but the Impoundment Act is pretty clearly written and very likely constitutional. It's not a regulation or a norm or a gentlemen's agreement.
There's good sense in pushing the boundaries, but at some point it becomes damaging to the rest of your platform.
anon_
4d ago
This does not seem like the right counterfactual to compare against.
In the absence of a gay couple doing this, what happens? The surrogate and egg donor (same or otherwise) don't have a kid. Neither does the couple.
In an actual kidnapping, the alternative is the kid actually living with his family. Here it's the kid not existing in the first place.
anon_
4d ago
Legal contracts between consenting adults are not something I think the state should be able to veto. I'm admittedly pretty libertarian in my beliefs.
As an aside, bankruptcy is a notable exception to this with a long historical pedigree -- the State gets to abrogate perfectly consensual contracts and has had that right for centuries.
anon_
4d ago
Office of Management and Budget will adjust so-called independent agencies’ apportionments to ensure tax dollars are spent wisely.
See, this is why I hate this. I support about 80% of this and then they have to throw in a blatantly illegal thing like this. Appropriations are clearly the realm of Congress and the anti-impoundment act has been on the books for a half century at this point. The OMB has no authority to "adjust" appropriated money.
I don't meant to start a flame war about the rest, which seems quite clearly warranted. Just the admixture of this inside that was jarring.
anon_
5d ago
The attempt to take Kyiv was on the 3rd day of the war! At that point none of the eastern provinces were part of the federation.
Surely by using the term 'transwoman' you're alrady ceding the field to the transactivists? The term implies that the person is a) in some way a woman and b) that it is possible for a human to transition between the sexes.
I don't think so. It is objectively true that some people claim to transition genders and just as objectively true that many do not see this as legitimate, or indeed as even sane. The sentence "Transwomen claim to be women but are not" uses the term and clearly doesn't cede anything -- it can't possibly be that the term itself is capitulation.
My preferred term is 'man in a dress'*, which may not involve any emotional cosseting of the individuals involved, but at least is completely unambiguous as to what we are actually talking about.
If we're being honest, it's no less ambiguous than "transwoman" as to the actual natal sex of the individual.
anon_
5d ago
That would no longer be, as you claim, intervening in the civil war.
You can claim Russia started the war to hunt nazis, just don’t dissemble about it.
anon_
5d ago
Eh, that might explain intervention in Donbas but it wouldn't have justified attempting to march on Kiev well away from that civil war.
anon_
5d ago
The fact that Jack Lasota is a man and not a woman seems like an important fact about the world for us to know.
I think referring to Lasota as a transwoman is sufficient to convey that fact.
For the people that believe transwomen are women, they can infer that.
For the people that believe transwomen are men, they can infer that too.
From a flow of logic perspective, we could say that the node for transwoman is strictly upstream of both of these possible inferences. That makes it strictly more powerful as far as conferring facts.
I don't really think, however, that this is at all about denotative facts in a way that can be usefully answered by information theory. Language isn't entirely (or even primarily) about conferring facts -- and on connotative ground, neither set of people will concede.
The most I'm willing to defend here is that you should probably just say "Lasota is a transwoman". That does not require you to sayanything you think is wrong nor does it require you to conceal any facts about the world, nor does it deceive any of your readers. That is probably the best we're going to do about it.
Do you perceive bad actors and slippery slopes to be a problem? If so, how do you defend against them?
The cleanest path I've found about bad actors is simply to say is a bad actors and to intimate that because " are people" and "some fraction of people are " that "some fraction of are ".
Part of the reason bankruptcy clauses work is that all debts to all creditors are subject to restructuring.
It is an insurmountable issue because it's in each individual creditor's advantage to defect from this system. It's somewhat like the multiple marginalization problem -- as a group, everyone would be better off if they could all be made to agree, but so long as each actor is independent and profit maximizing. Moreover, it wouldn't generally be permissible (or even possible) for a group of lenders to refuse to lend to any customer that had an outstanding loan to a non-member.
Ah understood, I misconstrued that. Agreed.
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