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PaperclipPerfector  14hr ago (text post)   2753 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 24, 2025

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Public servants have the pleasure of serving outside of the strictures of capitalism. The park service guy whose job it is to tell tourists about the flowers every day has an absurd privilege that this is what his job gets to be.

The idea that these people are seething THIS much about simply being asked what they do is infuriating to me. The American taxpayers work as de facto indentured servants for almost a third of their working lives to pay the salaries of these people. The balls for them to freak out and do these petty protests (hang a flag from the top of El Capitan) is ridiculous and embarrassing.

You’re a public servant. If you don’t want to be accountable to the actual president of the United States, then go try your luck getting a job telling people about the flowers in the private sector. You might be surprised at how many jobs there are for that with a typical HR structure (my guess is: 0. The closest would be working as a grounds keeper for some oligarchs garden, maybe?)

I’m pretty much here. I don’t understand just why these people are so allergic to the idea of having to prove to representatives of the elected government that they did five productive things in a week. Like how out of touch are they, that they don’t think they need to answer a question that most people with private sector jobs have to answer — what is it you actually do here, any why should you continue to get a paycheck from us. Rest assured, for even the lowest employee of any private business, if they are only doing 5 things in an entire week, they would be laid off as soon as possible. It’s an absurdly low standard. I think in most jobs if you only did five things a day, you’d be out. That’s all the public wants— they want everyone in the public sector to actually be held to some standard of actual productive work. We’re paying for it, and its unreasonable that they don’t think they need to do anything.

I don't know about your workplace, but I've never had a job where I had to prove that to HR (the rough private sector equivalent of OPM here) or shareholders (the rough private sector equivalent of the "public" here) directly. That's always been strictly between me and my direct management.

Not in a formal sense, but managers are held to justifying every employee, and yes, employees do have to sometimes write up their own job descriptions to send to HR. Other times, your direct supervisor informs HR of what tasks you are doing. The only really unusual thing is that the employee is asked to send that information directly to DOGE, and that there aren’t these kinds of job audits happening regularly (which is why DOGE is necessary). The interesting bit is that not only are the employees shocked by the demand that they show some form of actual productivity, but their immediate supervisors are telling them not to comply. If there’s a giant red flag of “these people know their employees do shit all all day” it’s them saying “don’t you dare tell DOGE what you do all day.”

yeah, but the upside is limited. no 'exits' or huge bonusses with park job. most of the waste is not from these jobs; it's medical costs when people get sick and cannot pay, for example. that is a big one.

medical costs when people get sick and cannot pay

I wouldn't call that a 'waste', per se, if the medical services billed for are needed by the patient and actually provided to them. (If doctors are getting paid for procedures that were never performed, on patients who never existed, throw the Physicians' Desk Reference at them.)

absurd privilege that this is what his job gets to be.

You're welcome to apply if it's such a good deal. Well, you aren't, because land management is in a hiring freeze, but you would have been before Jan 20.

If you are a non-minority non-veteran, those jobs are all but closed to you.

Somebody forgot to tell me or damn near everyone I work with, I guess. (Quite a few Mexicans, but there are a lot of Mexicans living around here in general and working outside around here specifically.).

I won't say affirmative action in government land management hiring has never happened, but it's massively overblown in online discussions by people who think it's called the National Forest Service, don't know the difference between district rangers, LEO rangers, interp rangers, and backcountry rangers, have never submitted an application or visited a potential duty station or Googled "how to write a resume for USAjobs", etc. etc.

LEO rangers

I'm glad to see the Space Force has begun recruitment, and avoided the accusations of ripping off 40k's Space Marines in favor of poaching Airborne infantry.

(I presume this isn't as exciting as it sounds haha)

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