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Posted11 days ago
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That's not really how taxes work (in the USA anyway).
A raise might move you into a higher top marginal tax rate, but only the money you earn above that new bracket threshold gets taxed at the higher rate, everything below the threshold continues to get taxed at the same rate as before.
we certainly charge at least 3x cost for gov to employ them on top of whatever severance they might have received. the work still needs to be done and specific people know how to do it. sort of becoming a staffing agency because theres so much profit in it. makes my stomach sick writing this out
Almost enough to make you think that gutting then offering employees back at higher cost and pocketing part of the difference was the goal.
The selfish kind. Unfortunately that seems to be the end goal of the American dream: "I got mine, fuck you." I can't tell you how many times I heard the "protect my family" argument from people I never thought would vote for that clown.
That does not preclude them from being uneducated and gullible to misinformation. In fact, there is a strong case to be made that being well-educated and affluent primes one to become more likely to be uneducated and buy into misinformation. When you are well-educated and affluent, the "yes men" show up and start to make you feel like you are the definitive expert in everything, and it becomes really easy to lose the skepticism that one normally has.
Giving zero f*cks for the massive harm caused or the legality of it.
> Unlike the Peter principle, the promoted individuals were not particularly good at any job they previously had, so awarding them a supervisory position is a way to remove them from the productive workflow.
> An earlier formulation of this effect was known as Putt's Law (1981), credited to the pseudonymous author Archibald Putt ("Technology is dominated by two types of people, those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand.").
(From a broader society point of view, I'm a bit sad that they didn't actually manage to run Twitter into the ground. I think Twitter's a net-negative for humanity. But that's a different topic. People obviously like using it.)
How is it not global scale? Or do you mean it only target a specific slice of your life (even if it makes not much of a difference where on the globe you are)?
They actually had competence at something..?
So I don’t think being looked at for the kind of stuff many companies do all the time explains <checks notes> infiltrating the government and personally disrupting the people investigating him, in public. If he’s worried about a financial hit, souring Tesla’s reputation as he has is obviously not worth it. If he’s worried about prosecution, surely he would be better off being nice to everyone in politics, not pissing anyone off and strongly supporting choice causes off the mainstream radar that happen to be in the interest of politicians.
So if he is doing it on principle, he just needs to be hubristic and reckless and possibly very autistic. If he is doing it to mess with the people investigating him, he needs to be outright stupid. Hubristic and reckless (and autistic) are much, much more realistic adjectives for Musk than “outright stupid”. I know a lot of people will just assert that he is stupid, but if you yourself are sufficiently intelligent and you listen to the guy talk for a long time, you can at least tell he isn’t stupid. You can tell because he doesn’t do the rhetorical things stupid people need to do in order to mask contradictions or logical holes in what they are saying. They always do it. Even smart people do it quite a bit. Musk very rarely does it, and when he does it’s so completely obvious you can tell he’s bad at it and didn’t get where he is by being good at it.
Hanlon's razor is wrong to suggest an either or scenario when it is just as often some mix of stupidity and malice.
Musk strikes me as an juvenile and naive man, precisely the kind of man that would take a hatchet to a complex system while believing what he is doing is ingenuous. His experience with taking over Twitter probably reinforced his belief that you can move fast and break organisations and nothing will really happen.
So Musk is exactly the man to honestly believe in what he was doing, and he was immersed in a right wing echo chamber, which for 50 years has been talking about government waste.
This was years in the making. He basically made a $200 million bet on the USG, one that translated into hundreds of billions. This was all calculated, and the veneer of government inefficiency was good enough to mask his actual objectives.
I can say this confidently because that's what I would have done too, and I'm not half as smart as him (given that I haven't built a Paypal or a SpaceX myself). That's what anyone in such a privileged position would have done. The upside to doing it that way was just that much massive.
That’s what anyone who’s self-centered and morally bankrupt enough would do perhaps, but no, not “anyone”. Some people are committed to being good (or at least striving towards it).
Your take strikes me as sociopathic at worst, and misguided at best. Much like musk, to your point.
Usually what people mean when they say "smart" is actually more like meaning of the word "canny," which helps explain the distinction. A canny decision is one that makes you look smart in retrospect.
To put it another way, I might climb to the top of a hill. Climbing the hill doesn't make me taller, but it does get me the benefits of being able to see everything for miles around.
Perhaps after climbing a hill/Ent I see Saruman's army marching off to war, and realize that even though I may be a halfling, right now a thing I could say would be "as the falling of small stones that starts an avalanche in the mountains." This is a canny moment, and like any canny moment or is filled with surreal possibility. But it isn't because Meriadoc is a tall hobbit and, not because only a tall person could do this thing that involves seeing a great distance.
What he really is is a sociopath who uses the idea of “doing good” to infiltrate systems and setup laws and legal structures that benefit him and his companies
I don’t buy any of the goody-two-shoes “for the sake of humanity” persona and neither should you. But the worst thing you can do is dismiss his sociopathy as naivete or stupidity
* make white nationalism acceptable on Twitter
* while increasing the US government's dependence on it
* at the same time that the US president owns a competing social media app
I think nearly anyone would have told you that's impossible. Strategic chaos in service of a bad goal just looks stupid from a distance.
Musk is thinking far down the line
His net worth figure certainly seems to indicate that it wasn’t stupid
You don't get to claim incompetence while being one of the richest people alive.
https://futurism.com/advanced-transport/spacex-buying-unfath...
0.0067%
Do you still think your claim makes sense?
Losing a big CT sale is bad vibes. If the finances don't matter on the way up, why would they matter on the way down?
maybe disrupting things badly is more preferable as that gets more attention, but ultimately the impact is good or bad doesn't matter at all.
A strong claim is severely weakened by lack of evidence. In this case, all evidence points to the claim being untrue.
> but ultimately the impact is good or bad doesn't matter at all.
That's essentially a rewording of the above claim and again without evidence.
In fact, it's detrimental for the perpetrators of disruptive actions to attract attention to them/selves when these actions don't achieve their purported benefits.
If they wanted only to simulate activity, they'd have used less damaging to themselves ways to achieve it without inflicting damage to the system. The latter is so important that it excludes accidental or PR-related actions to that end.
It surprises me if anyone thought anything different. I mean, how could you think anything else if yo know what group of cronies there people are?
It's like Americans forgot all about what was wrong with the Rockefeller-era oligarchy. Even the MAGA slogan is just a copy from back then.
For a long time, the US government has spent $4 for every $3 it takes in. The debt is now large enough that financial markets are beginning to factor it in, raising borrowing costs and threatening a death spiral.
It’s likely tax increases will be needed besides cuts.
Addressing the problem is much better done sooner than later.
Cutting their budget makes things worse, not better.
I've never experienced customer service half that good from ANY corporation.
It's also interesting that you draw a a correlation between "hard to fire" and "incompetent". It's very hard to fire Elon Musk, what does that make you conclude about him?
Yes, people isolated from consequences do tend to perform badly.
It’s very easy to fire Elon Musk. He stops performing the board turfs him like any other company.
But if we are in a situation where there's been a bond investor revolt, and there's nothing else to be done, we just give dollars to everyone as T-bills mature rather than issuing more debt, and we retract from the world stage, and become like other countries in the world.
We are a loooooong ways away from that position, but this presidential administration is behaving so erratically that the US dollar is closer to losing its privileged status than I ever thought possible. It's such irrational, damaging, and erratic behavior going on right now that everything could topple if it continues for much longer.
DOGE gave cover for the GOP to blow out our deficit by trillions of dollars. The net effect of the whole system was to massively increase our debt.
The USD as reserve currency has enabled lots of extra spending and growth in the US, in a virtuous cycle of being the reserve currency because the US has the strongest and greatest economy, and then the reserve status increases our economic strength. Over the past 75 years the US spent a huge amount of effort to place itself into such a privileged and lucky position.
There will be some point where the currency might be devalued on the world stage because of spending. But what is happening right now because of Trump is a huge devaluing of the currency because of loss of trust in the US:
https://www.morganstanley.com/insights/articles/us-dollar-de...
The true death spiral will happen when the rest of the world fully loses trust in the US. Right now we are too big to fail, but it doesn't have to be that way if we keep on pulling back from the rest of the world. The biggest losers from this pull back is the US itself, and the enormous economic privilege it gave us.
That big spike in deficit spending came from the initial Trump tax cuts in term one, and it looks like we'll be getting an even bigger spike in deficit spending now in term 2 with even bigger tax cuts for the wealthiest in the US, with zero relief for regular people (except those in real estate.... let me tell you about all the special tax benefits for real estate investors you see when you start doing your taxes as a sole proprietor, whew....)
Anyway, we will have to wait for another Democratic president before there's any addressing the deficit, if history is any guide. We only see deficit reduction under Democratic presidents and massive deficit increases under Republican presidents. But as I started, it remains to be seen if deficits are a bad thing inherently; it's more about the quantity of the deficit and whether we lose power or gain power economically from the deficit. Military spending is mostly "dead" money that does nothing to expand the economy, but research and funding the poor ends up increasing economic activity and growth.
Edit: and destroying small things like USAID greatly lessens trust in the US, and costs us far far more in dollars than we spend on it. And that's ignoring all the good for humanity that feeding starving people does.
Presidents that had a surplus include Coolidge (R), Truman (D), Eisenhower (R), Johnson (D) and Clinton (D).
Clinton is strong in my memory, he was working with Newt Gingrich’s Republican congress. The two seemed to work well together. Some suggest that Clinton’s stances on gay marriage, immigration, incarceration, etc. give him a right-leaning stance in today’s world.
There are also ways to reduce spending or improve spending efficiency without simply cutting spending on existing programs. A major point of spending is on health care, and I have seen analyses that the US spends much more per capita for health care with worse outcomes than some other western countries.
Careful, considered, data-driven healthcare reform that focuses on improved outcomes and reduced costs could make a much bigger impact than whatever it was that DOGE was trying to do.
Not just likely. It's certain. But instead, we got tax cuts.
Things that make you go "hmm..."
I can not tell you how much respect I have lost for anybody involved with the All-In podcast. They sold out all credibility for political wins for wanna-be fascists.
These jokers all got lucky, obviously. They can not perform basic analysis of organizations, clearly. What a joke of a result!
"Add it all together, and I've cut $282.8 billion, leaving a federal budget of $950.5 billion, to which I apply O'Rourke's Circumcision Precept: You can take 10 percent off the top of anything. This gives me another $95 billion in cuts for a grand total of $337.8 billion in budget liposuction."
Parliament of Whores, page 103.
And the CDC work is all pre-competitive work that boosts the efficacy of everything else in the economy. A tiny amount of money that results in so much more economic activity and savings than could be imagined in most private industry. And all the numbers for the public savings on, say, food safety are all clearly laid out in long reports. Reports that nobody at DOGE would ever read because they don't believe than anything good could be produced by people who accept lower salaries for higher impact.
There's absurd waste in private companies which always makes me laugh when people say the government is inefficient.
So you can get people working in the government who couldn't get a job in the private sector if they tried, working with total job security (they can't get fired) for an entity with zero competition so there is no drive or motivation to get better or otherwise improve.
Whereas with private companies you can get hired quickly and fired quickly, meaning you have to perform well (motivation), you are paid better so you attract higher quality candidates, and also if the company does badly you go bankrupt, which means the whole company performs better or dies. The companies which remain win the market and are more efficient (as they are the companies which survived).
If the US government is more inefficient than others then there's something to be said about how it works, how it could be improved, instead there's only this rhetoric that doesn't invite at all the discussion about what are its failures and paths to improve, just recycled catchphrases supported by a cliché.
Private companies are also inefficient in many ways even with competition, why is that if competition is supposed to make inefficient companies uncompetitive? Maybe there's something else to discuss rather than these thought-terminating clichés...
O'Rourke's take is an interesting read; it is commentary that is meant to be more humorous and entertaining than political, I think he excelled at that in the entirety of Parliament of Whores. It was published in 1991 in a different political climate. He does admit he's doing this for fun, that the takes he express are mostly uninformed about the nature of many of these government departments and programs, and takes a (traditional) conservative (high level, and ahem, naive) view of many government programs. For example, additional quotes from that PoW chapter:
> Training and employment is properly the concern of trainees and employers: $5.7 billion.
> Insurance companies should gladly pay for consumer and occupational health and safety: $1.5 billion.
> If unemployment insurance is really insurance, it ought to at least break even: $18.6 billion.
I shared this for the Circumcision Precept bit; the portions of the quote surrounding that were context.
CDC? Every day you go home believing that you are part of a machine saving thousands of lives. BATF? Keeping guns away from terrorists.
And it's not a self-delusion. They ARE doing good things, even if the agency isn't perfect.
The problem is that Elon Musk has power (in the form of money) and was able to buy his way into the government.
Elon Musk is a smart salesman but that's about it. He has little deep knowledge in a lot of what he does.
How is it that most people here can see through it, but people in power can't?
Why do you presume they can’t? Musk failed phenomenally to sell DOGE to the public, the President or the Congress. The expectation was that he’d have been better at that.
Very different idea.
I will say that there are a few billionaires out there that do not get respect because everybody else assumes they "got lucky," but it's certainly not many billionaires. And those that people assume "got lucky" have mostly had terrible PR management on their way up, and not bothered to try to clean up their image. I have taken investment from one such billionaire that people would tell me "he got lucky," and though I don't think he got lucky to make his billions, he was also really terrible in his judgement and could not make the switch to investing even in similar industries successfully.
It took me a while to learn this lesson about complex systems.
First week at a new job? It’s easy to identify all the ways things are done wrong. Six months later you begin to understand why they were done “wrong”.
It is hard to say whether it is really understanding, or just stockholm syndrome of local optimum.
No, I think it's the opposite — he's extremely knowledgeable about engineering and science [1], but quite hopeless at social things. If he was ignorant of technical stuff then SpaceX and Tesla would not have succeeded, and conversely if he was a good salesman he would have foreseen how badly his political actions would hurt Twitter and Tesla.
It's quite foolish to think someone is stupid or ignorant just because you don't agree with their politics.
1. see these quotes: https://x.com/yatharthmaan/status/2001313180644266478
And a bunch of out of context quotes from folks that are either buddies with him or don't know shit is not convincing.
I do not think we all have the level of hubris required to shit all over large governmental organizations as Musk did. I think maybe even the majority of people would say woah hold up let’s take look at what’s going on before tearing it down.
And of course that’s under the charitable assumption his actions weren’t malicious.
I predicted it would net cost money if you did a full accounting. May end up being true.
People don't appreciate the role of a working executive branch and government bureaucracy in keeping the nation working, stable and relatively free from unfair practices, no matter how inefficient they may seem. In most cases, they are inefficient and have other problems because they're understaffed.
It's the same with Trump. Do you think he has ever been inside a grocery store?
But what perplexes me is the hostility against government bureaucrats shown by ordinary people who are getting impoverished. I see them routinely complaining online that government workers are lazy parasites who live off their tax money. Some people take it further, saying that these workers are part of the 'deep state' out to enslave them.
Sure! Any bureaucracy will have some bad apples and corruption. But how do they miss the part that the government bureaucracy is the last line of defense blocking their all out exploitation? Like others point out, most government workers are too qualified and work too hard for what they are paid. They often take a pay cut to work on their passion and help everyone in the process. You can see this in the numerous bureaucrats who strongly resisted illegal and/or anti constitutional orders from the regime. Why are the people so oblivious to these?
PS: I'm not from the US. What I know is from both mainstream and social media. I'm curious about the fundamental reasons on the ground too.
Surely you're aware of cable news in the US, like Fox News, etc. but before that, for about 40 years now[0], AM talk radio has played a huge part in developing this messaging. I grew up with this as my main channel for awareness of current events, hearing about everything that happens through this lens.
I'm not sure if this [1] is accessible outside the US, but give a listen between 3 and 9 pm EST (GMT-5) though certainly not limited to these hours. You'll learn a lot about the American right wing mindset, and how the middle class is effectively messaged to. Talk radio is a lot more free form and ephemeral, so you'll hear a lot more improvised and extreme ideas than you would in a TV broadcast. It's quite a spectacle.
It's just an extension of good ol' Chesterton's fence.
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