domain:arjunpanickssery.substack.com
hydroacetylene
7hr ago
Uh, westerners trying to do the rough equivalent has mostly not worked very well, although the neuroses of fundamentalist Christianity may be a major explanatory factor there.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
7hr ago
If you only take the raw number of employees across time then it's confounded by population growth and labor force participation. It's like not adjusting a monetary metric for inflation. So sure, the total headcount has only dropped slightly from the 90s, but if that's put into context then it's clear that the federal bureaucracy has been quite constrained as a percent of the overall labor force.
In terms of of whether using the term "budget" is correct here, you're slightly more correct but I'd say you're being pedantic. It should have been clear that I was talking about personnel budgets specifically, given the context of the sentence. Also, for the record "slashed" probably is less true than "constrained, especially in regards to inflation", but I digress.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7hr ago
Yes, Trump's grand move is to empower Desantis, the man who tried to kill the king less than a year ago
...Could you elaborate on your model here? Like, it seems you're positing that Trump and Desantis are enemies, and further that his supporters should consider them enemies and prefer conflict between them rather than cooperation. Would that be accurate?
hydroacetylene
7hr ago
Mass shootings that make the news are whiter than average but mass shootings in general are blacker. It’s possible that this points to red overrepresentation- like in the military- but my impression is that while one or two of the well-known mass shooters were meaningfully connected to gun culture but not staunchly political, most of them were just mentally ill people from broken homes who are hard to place.
And, uh, breadtube isn’t a reliable source.
wqnm
7hr ago
Musk's been vocal about transparency and even mentioned having a public "leaderboard" for biggest wastes of government money they find; I think this is where the true potential lies. If all they do is maintain that leaderboard publicly, like a Most Wanted List for fiscal conservatives, I think it will help. Even if they have no legal power to cut funding, they can still act as a giant spotlight on some of the more egregious examples, and in turn get some organized public opinion churning on specific cases, which would be plenty useful IMO. Every little bit counts.
yofuckreddit
7hr ago
This has far more to do with Trump monday-morning quarterbacking than anything else.
AvocadoPanic
7hr ago
I would think that applying the gender-transition model to cancer would be for cancer patients to identify as a Cancer-person and advocating for Cancer-person pride.
In my mind applying the cancer model to gender dysphoria would be targeted treatment to realign the misperception of their gender with their anatomy. Restoring their natural anatomy to health.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
7hr ago
We’re not actually worried about being attacked. Not like Russia rolling over the border to Ukraine. It’s the rest of our interests that are at risk. Erosion of our hegemony over the ocean, space, finance, etc. A long series of bad trades just under the margin of what we’re willing to fight. Securing that is more complicated than just looking dangerous.
MaximumCuddles
7hr ago
I think the whole idea, and I’m sort of on the fence about how true this is, was that you didn’t have to give Bagram back and we could just have kept it as essentially imperial property, like Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
Apparently it would have been extremely easy to defend basically indefinitely with minimal manpower. Bagram is (was) absolutely a huge airbase and was a massive strategic asset to the US & Allies in the region.
This isn’t as strange as it might first appear, this was a live issue in the whole “counterinsurgency vs counterterrorism” debate on the fate of Afghanistan. The counterterrorism camp basically said sod the afghans internal politics, they were unimportant and not worth any nation building effort, and that they should just use Bagram as an operational base to hunt Al Qaeda.
They do see kind of right in retrospect.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
7hr ago
Oh goodness.
Yes, Trump's grand move is to empower Desantis, the man who tried to kill the king less than a year ago, with whom there's still bad blood privately, and who has only begrudgingly fallen into line. To replace Rubio... a senator who hasn't really made an anti-Trump stink since 2016.
Why not do this against Murkowski instead, a senator who voted to impeach Trump?
Alternatively, why not do this to a House seat, given that chamber is likely to be far closer.
And Rubio gets fired as SecState inside 2 years, probably.
Unironically plausible, given Trump is so utterly capricious with his nominees. Rubio could be setting himself up to get the same fate that befell Jeff Sessions.
ControlsFreak
7hr ago
That's not a problem of budgets, though. That's just a head count. Of course, it's also highly confounded by general employment in the denominator; surely, you wouldn't say that looking at the spike in that plot in 2008 is because they suddenly decided to hire a bunch more government workers. And oh wait. Ahem, I think they say.
I can't find it right away, but Tyler Cowen recently shared an image showing the extremely different composition of the federal workforce over the years when binned by location on the general schedule; far more folks on the higher end of the schedule. This is likely much more directly in the control of the bureaucracy. Additionally, if your complaint is that entitlements are getting in the way, I'm not sure who's to blame for that.
These are both complains about how the budget is spent, not that the budget has, itself, been slashed. The latter just simply isn't true.
mithrandir15
8hr ago
My heart is bullish on DOGE but my mind is bearish. Much of government inefficiency is not that too many people have been hired, like at X, but that its own regulatory requirements are too dense and too strict. Time and effort is sucked up by compliance, procurement, and legal. Firing people might not help, it might simply lower the resources the government has to comply with its own regulations, slowing everything down. If DOGE isn't given the power to reform procurement and cut red tape, I'm afraid it will crash and burn.
mrvanillasky
8hr ago
It's not much different from before; I still am doing roughly the same amount of work but have had days off because of goofing around. I did start waking up early to workout so better on that front. I met a friend of mine who posts about medieval and sorta pre-modern times, and his point was that women are overrated in a way that
- They are hornier than you think and way hornier than you
- They can't have any grand sweeping plans or ideas about civilization
Now, I have never had a relationship since I am a broke founder living with my parents at 24, but more than that, I have met very few girls that I liked, and none live here. More than that, I know that right now, I need to be alone to fix my own issues. Not just productivity but also baseline discipline, better self-image, and some skills so that I can actually be employable and build upon that. Anyway, I don't get the skepticism my friend has.
I know Goethe had a fantasy about having a smart girl he would lie around with and the pillow talk would be about something intellectual. Anyway, most people I know have a different opinion but food for thought.
I have a deadline to finish my book and build parts of my first web app by this Saturday. See ya folks around, also don't text women in relationships or married, it is not wise.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
8hr ago
Unions could be a source of savings, but only like 1/3rd of federal employees are in unions, and part of what makes federal employment bearable is the benefits and job security that such unions have been able provide. If Elon thinks he can get a workforce that has private sector benefits + job security, but with the paylevel of the federal government, I have a bridge to sell him. The notion that there exists huge swathes of the government where employees sit around doing nothing simply because "they can't be fired" is illusory.
jeroboam
8hr ago
Furthermore, one way to lower the temperature in politics is to reduce the size of government.
When the government controls everything, the question of who controls the government is paramount.
jeroboam
8hr ago
Fukuyama's work exists in the world of ideas, not of reality.
Fukuyama wins if his ideas sound convincing to other academics. But that doesn't mean his ideas work. Experience gained through trial and error will always trump academic theory in the real world. I don't think his voice adds much value here honestly.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
8hr ago
I wouldn’t be quite so bold about it as @Ben___Garrison, but, uh, I don’t understand why people keep expecting coherent plans out of Trump. He was the vibes-based President.
If Rubio’s shown the right kind of enthusiasm, Trump isn’t going to have a problem folding him into the enterprise. When he inevitably butts heads, Trump will throw him out. Whether Rubio accomplishes anything in the meantime is more about his level of ass-kissing than his stated politics.
Personally, I give this dynamic a lot of credit for the legal hurdles faced by the Trump admin. But I doubt that’ll convince anyone who prefers the Deep State explanation.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
8hr ago
jeroboam
8hr ago
Yeah, I'll further guess that he escalates more than anyone expects, then finds some surprising lever to accomplish something remarkable.
Betting against Musk seems like the most negative alpha strategy imaginable, yet people keep lining up to do it.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
8hr ago
He's gonna lose all the libertarian support, all the weird center-left? populist RFK support and so on.
He's going to lose maybe 1/3 of those, if that. The rest will get into the Trump cult mindset where Trump is always right and will either change their own ideologies to match wholesale, explain away Trump's actions (5-dimensional chess!) or just ignore the cognitive dissonance. I mean, that's been the general pattern with so many others Trump converts previously, why would it change?
jeroboam
8hr ago
Medicare and Medicaid can be made more efficient and are the largest part of the budget.
Defense can be made more efficient without "cutting" it. Spending != capabilities.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
8hr ago
No. He was willing to stay in dumb wars far longer than we should have (e.g. his endless delays on withdrawing from Afghanistan) because actually exiting would lock in the losses that had been practically inevitable for a long time, which "would look weak". One could say that being in the Middle East at all is a serious misallocation of American resources.
I don't deny the logic of not being seen as a pushover on the international stage, but Trump's fear of "looking weak" was far more driven by Fox News pundits than by actual geopolitical perceptions.
Alabasata
8hr ago
BreadTube would call this "sigma-coded" behavior, and they believe failsons from Red Tribe are more susceptible to it than Blue's failsons. Whether that's true is hard to say. I don't know if anybody has done the work to sort out whether Harris & Klebold were Red or Blue. That's not polisci I personally want to touch.
And then, most mass shootings that make the news & get talked about are also not most mass shootings. So many news consoomers get a slanted view of who's really doing the shooting.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
8hr ago
He delayed endlessly, and if he were re-elected there was a good chance he would have delayed even longer past the date he had previously set.
I didn’t bat an eye at the “bloody altar” or “evil [god]” comments, misunderstandings of my faith I expect from unbelievers, but it’s fascinating how much I bristled at the “gnostic” comment.
I’ll return to this thread later, just wanted to post first thoughts.
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