sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
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User ID: 636
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
9mo ago
Even having US interests close to the border would serve as quite a deterrent in my opinion.
How true is this, really? Off the dome, I can think of at least two cases where governments have nationalized American interests and gotten away with it (Cuba, Venezuela). Economic interests don't seem to guarantee immunity.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
9mo ago
Much of the phosphates for that fertilizer comes from Russia
No, they don't. Russia produces 5.6% of global phosphate output which is about 60% of US production.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphate
which is part of why food prices have been going up so much over the last few years.
Could be wrong but I doubt it. Phosphate prices started going up in Feb 2020 and were quite high, but have now reduced to the merely elevated levels of 2012 since the end of 2024.
https://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=rock-phosphate&months=240
That said, this graph is a little weird looking, so maybe it's not totally trustworthy.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
9mo ago
So you don't believe that any useful research is imperiled by funding cuts?
If you do believe this, then there's really nothing objectionable in OP's post, because it's entirely possible that he was doing such research.
If you don't, what evidence would change your mind?
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
9mo ago
Do you? Why call him a bureaucrat if that turns out to be neither true nor relevant to your argument? Surely you did know that he's not a bureaucrat given that it's in the second sentence of his post? I am trying to gauge how carefully you actually read the post we are discussing.
I'm having a hard time understanding what exactly your objection to this post is. I also know postdoc cancer researchers whose funding is imperiled by doge cuts. Do you think that:
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I (and OP) are lying, funds are safu
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The people I know (and OP) are not actually researching stuff that's useful (based on what? Who are the cancer experts in DOGE advising on what research is useful to fund?)
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Something else?
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
9mo ago
He's not a bureaucrat. He's a PhD student.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
10mo ago
My understanding is that the median male homosexual does not "love their partner" in the same way that I do.
What does this mean?
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
10mo ago
America has spent $150B on Ukraine in three years, representing 0.7% of total federal outlays over that period. Sounds pretty ignorable to me.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
10mo ago
It's not clear to me why your version of American ideology is the one true version to the exclusion of all the other ideologies that have been popular in America. Even the founders did not always support what you claim is American ideology. It's basically a no true Scotsman.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
10mo ago
four of the eight justices in the majority in this case were nominated by FDR. A bit of a stretch, I admit, but you can't have everything.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
10mo ago
I knew one of our resident firearms enjoyers would come by to set the record straight if I was mistaken.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
10mo ago
Specifically American ideology, no generic 'Western democratic values' – I'm talking no-holds-barred free speech, right to bear arms, rule of law and private property, a federalized system where the states are important and sovereign, freedom of religion.
Was FDR against American ideology? I think he stomped on all of those except guns, to the raucous applause of the American public.
I mean, maybe you think he was, but that would suggest that this ship has sailed some time ago. America contains multitudes, for better or worse.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
10mo ago
chip局的
This all but confirms my suspicion that you're a PLA infiltrator.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
10mo ago
This kind of smart, walkable, mixed-use urbanism is illegal to build in many American cities.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
10mo ago
I'd only put a gym in the garage which is basically always on a slab as far as I know. I think it is possible to encapsulate crawlspaces these days to keep the rodents out. Not sure about costs or downsides there.
Creakiness is a good point.
join your supervisor on the proscription list.
Happy to place bets on the number of federal employees fired for not responding to this email if you're willing to make this interesting. Otherwise, talk is cheap and this isn't ancient Rome.
Don't be snarky, the thing LLMs are best at is sentiment analysis.
So they do need to open the responses? Or they don't? Let's put the cards on the table so we all know what we're discussing here.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
10mo ago
I'm getting a little lost in the motttes and baileys. Your other response was talking about sentiment analysis to find people who dislike the administration. Now you claim that sending a response, any response, is enough to be put on the good boy list. Which, exactly, is it?
If you are confident that you are useful and friendly to the administration, you will answer. If you aren't, then you won't, and will be be subject to increased scrutiny.
In reality, you won't answer because your boss told you not to do it, because his boss told him to tell you not to do it, because his boss etc etc. and that's how any job works.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
10mo ago
they are happy enough to create a proscription list of feds who fail to disguise their contempt in their email responses.
I am pretty sure nearly all federal employees are against this because the stated goal of this administration is to make them (the federal employees) miserable. Don't need to send an email to figure that one out.
Official guidance from the chain of command is now for federal employees not to respond to these messages (see other comments on this topic), undercutting both Musk's stated goal of getting responses to these emails as well as his authority. I guess they should have started with login times!
Perhaps those people aren't stupid and are also engaging in motivated-misunderstanding. If it bothers you, that means it's working. This is current year +9, 9th year of the post-truth era, you should have caught on by now.
Who said I'm bothered? People believe the damndest things.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
10mo ago
That's helpful reading. Congrats on the purchase, hope your construction goes well!
Thoughts on slab vs crawlspace? Slab seems like a maintenance nightmare if you ever need to replace wiring or plumbing that's in the slab.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
10mo ago
Just like auditing welfare records found people over 200 years old
This is at best Musk not knowing what he's looking at and at worst totally made up. There's zero evidence of this and back of the envelope math demonstrates that the table Musk posted can't possibly be correct given how much money is spent on SS.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
10mo ago
Anyone here have experience custom building a house (in the US)? How was the process?
I'm starting to look at buying but the housing stock in areas where I'd want to buy is largely fugly, so I'm thinking of maybe just buying a plot of land and building something custom. I'm in California so I'm particularly concerned about permitting nightmares, but that varies a lot from city to city as far as I can tell.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
10mo ago
Clustering of denials throughout the government can be honed in on through analysis and targeted for further investigation.
Cool, so to get Elon off your back you and your department just need to tell him you're hard at work fixing bugs and updating localization files, and then the eye of sauron will move on. This isn't SpaceX and you can't expect Elon to personally understand all aspects of the business that is government, after all.
Surely you guys have read "seeing like a state"? This is not how you make legible those who are trying to be illegible.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
10mo ago
It's not so much termination as identifying and outmanoeuvring opponents.
As far as I can tell, the opponents here are all civil servants, so consider the opponents identified. It's not obvious to me how demanding snippets from them is outmaneuvering and I don't feel that it's been made clearer by this thread.
If I were running fake employees, I'd arrange for them to log in on the clock. But it'd be a little harder for them to achieve things and send email.
I don't get it. We're postulating that managers in the civil service are hiring people who don't do anything and faking their logins and badge swipes (presumably the managers are personally benefiting in some way), but sending an email with some bullshit bullet points is a bridge too far to keep the gravy train rolling? Doesn't pass the sniff test. If they can log in they can send an email.
Actually achieving things is neither necessary nor sufficient to send this email, and it's not proof either way.
I expect he'll catch out some of the stupider/slower ones who can't access their faked emails or make other errors trying covering it up.
How, exactly? We already agreed that many of these updates could/should be of the "bug fixes and performance improvements" format due to classified work. There's no way to detect who's doing useful work and who isn't at that granularity.
He's fishing for anecdotes and political power with this tactic.
I don't see why this is necessary given that he can basically just make anything up and people will believe it at this point (see the claim of millions of 150 year olds collecting SS).
The benefit is sniping the people who kick up a huge fuss
I've yet to see a job where complaining about your task is grounds for termination and I don't even work in the public sector.
finding the employees that don't exist (who won't answer).
Or employees who happen to be on vacation when Musk sent this email (or the upcoming final warning, apparently).
It must surely be trivial, given musk's team's apparent level of access, to figure out when each employee badged in / logged in to their account. last(1) has been around for probably sixty years and I know at least my company has a database with every single badge swipe. That would actually be a useful signal, but that's not what we're looking at.
Also they'll probably run it all through Grok 3 and have it spit out something politically useful that some hysterical fed puts down in a moment of foolishness.
I think they "probably" won't because they haven't done this yet and I don't see why they would start. Not that you could actually fit all this into grok's context window anyway.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
10mo ago
The guy working on the top secret AI-powered satellite missile guidance system can say "I helped train a model and adjusted hyperparameters"
Okay, so what is the benefit to doge from a hundred thousand emails saying the moral equivalent of "bug fixes and performance improvements" / "updated localization files"? This level of detail is not enough to determine who is actually doing useful work (does anyone actually need that model that's being trained?) and at the same time the volume is too large to actually go through these emails and come to any conclusions, unless doge employs the ol' Ctrl+f as they did for scientific grants.
On top of everything else, 40% of American corn gets turned into ethanol and added to gasoline despite this plausibly being worse for the environment than just burning gasoline and corn ethanol having an EROI much worse than gasoline.
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