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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   34188 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025

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Update on the continuing dramatic saga of DOGE: apparently the Department of Education no longer exists.

Now this could be a sensationalist media headline, but if not I am shocked that the DOGE team and Trump's cadre et al are going this hard, this fast. They must basically be saying they're going to get a ton of legal challenges anyway, so they might as well do as much as possible and keep up the momentum, destroying everything before the dust clears. It's a bold strategy, and frankly as a spectator it's incredibly exciting, I must admit!

Curious for people's thoughts on the Dept of Education getting shut down? Personally I think it's a good thing - our education system has had terrible outcomes with no accountability for far too long.

In other related news, FEMA send $59 Million dollars to house immigrants in luxury hotels in NYC last week, and Social Security has been sending money to dozens of people over 150 years old, among other issues like the system for SSNs not being re-duplicated.

I'd be curious to know what he thinks should be done with people who have filed asylum claims

Put them in concentration camps and make them pay for food and shelter, I presume.

Is there any formal requirement that "asylum" implies anything other than safe(r) living arrangements? I'm not aware of any treaty or international law requirements that would require free travel permissions or right-to-work within the granting nation. As far as I can tell, dumping refugees into camps of some sort (hopefully hospitable ones) is pretty common in other parts of the world.

"I'm being persecuted by my government" can be fixed with, in theory, three hots (meals) and a cot in the Nevada desert. Presumably the current strategy of work permits, free travel rights, and housing assistance was at some point deemed easier, cheaper, or nicer, and that's why we do it. But I don't see why we're bound to it beyond the usual process for changing actions of Congress or the Executive.

On the other hand, I know people who arrived in the US as refugees as young kids (from Iran in the late 70s and the Balkans in the 90s, for example) and have gone on to do great things for the country. I'm not opposed to the program on principle even if I question it's lack of guard rails as of late.

Trump doesn't even seem to want to end asylum, though- he designated Afrikaners as refugees.

Is there any formal requirement that "asylum" implies anything other than safe(r) living arrangements?

The Refugee Convention gives refugees numerous rights, and is legally binding in the US under the Supremacy Clause (as a ratified treaty). It contains numerous clauses setting out what rights refugees had, including freedom of within-country movement, working rights etc. on the same basis as citizens. It doesn't contain any procedural provisions on how you tell who is and isn't a refugee, which has become a problem, to say the least.

That said, most of the rights the Refugee Convention protects only apply to refugees who are "lawfully present" in a country. The simple and obvious reading of the Convention text is that refugees who illegally cross a border from one safe country (e.g. Mexico) to another (e.g. the US) lose most of their Convention rights - although not the right of non-refoulment, which is absolute.

non-refoulment, which is absolute

For legitimate refugees, not economic migrants or those affected by crime in general.

Lying on an asylum claim is a dictionary example of fraud. I can't think of a better word to describe it.

I totally believe that FEMA sent this money, but it doesn’t actually violate law.

“Provided further, That $650,000,000 shall be transferred to ``Federal Emergency Management Agency--Federal Assistance'' to support sheltering and related activities provided by non-Federal entities, in support of relieving overcrowding in short-term holding facilities of U.S. Customs and Border Protection”

Do you know of any non-federal entities that are equipped to relieve overcrowding in holding facilities? I can think of two: state holding facilities, and hotels.

One might reasonably assume that the proper response to overcrowding at immigrant detention facilities is to change the law to make deportations happen faster and raise throughput. What our congress actually does is give out money to NGOs to put detained illegals up in hotels instead.

It would violate the law if they intentionally disobeyed their direct orders from the president. Even if inpoundment isn't allowed, the executive has the ability to choose which shelters to fund. If he directed the money to be spent building concentration camps in the desert, then that's how the money should be spent. Anyone who steals that money and spends it on luxury hotels is in the wrong.

I sort of agree with you. But I think this would fall under the funding freeze issued by President Trump. This isn’t a brand new program. There are migrants in New York hotel rooms right now. It’s not like Concentration Camps Incorporated has the tent cities in Nevada ready to go. If the funding gets stopped, then the migrants get kicked out onto the streets of New York with nowhere to eat, shit, or sleep.

It’s sort of a hard sell to say, “oh yeah, we had money appropriated to shelter these migrants, but the hotels they were at didn’t fit the president’s criteria, so we let manhattan turn into a biohazard slum instead. No impoundment act implications here.”

People who make false asylum claims are illegals. We haven't proven it individually for each of the cases, but based on the numbers from previous years, it's a given that a vast majority of asylum claims will be proven false when they reach court.

So even if not all of the people being housed are illegals, it's a fact that the majority of them are, so it's also a fact that illegals are being housed with the fema money.

Curious for people's thoughts on the Dept of Education getting shut down? Personally I think it's a good thing - our education system has had terrible outcomes with no accountability for far too long.

Is there a good breakdown anywhere as to what the Department of Education actually does, aside from administering national standards of achievement and the testing thereof?

A quick google shows that it mostly administers policy, sets standards, and disburses federal funds to states.. On it's face I think that if we don't care about federal education policy and allow states to just educate as they please, there should be practically no issue with destroying the entire department.

As long as the funding continues to flow to the states of course. I'm sure if this means that DOGE is pulling the funding... that could get quite messy. The optics would be terrible there I'm sure.

A programme which is block-granted to states is the best possible grounds for Trump's opponents to fight a legal battle on - it is essentially impossible to claim that you're not impounding money which Congress wanted spent (as opposed to "temporarily pausing spending to investigate possible fraud and inefficiency" or whatever Trump will tell the judge he is doing at USAID) when what Congress wanted is for cash to flow to state governments. And there is a well-resourced plaintiff with unequivocal standing and no incentive to back down.

Does anyone know if they make grants to NGOs?

On it's face I think that if we don't care about federal education policy and allow states to just educate as they please, there should be practically no issue with destroying the entire department.

Then what does the fact that there is a lot of people who are really quite invested in the department not being destroyed tell you?

That a lot of people are deeply invested in the federal government telling states how to educate.

They administer grants to the states for secondary education and financial aid and primary education in districts whose budget vastly exceeds their property tax receipts (Title I funding ).

I think it's just Musk being Musk.

Congressman Frost tweeted:

They are blocking members of Congress from entering the Department of Education! Elon is allowed in and not the people? ILLEGAL.

Musk replied

No such department exists in the federal government

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1887971408573018370

Which isn't true (the Trump Administration has said they'll do that through legislation), but I think Musk is just trolling; that's what he bought Twitter for.

I love the bit about the congresswoman saying "we appropriate the money for the Department of Education"; I expect if Musk had been there he would have said something along the lines, "So what are you going to do, take it away? Oh please, Congresswoman, don't do THAT"

The president is obligated to spend money appropriated by Congress. If Congress appropriates $1000 to buy a gay wedding cake, president Trump must go to the nearest bakery and buy a gay wedding cake.

This is a non sequitur. The congresswoman was not complaining about Trump not spending appropriated money, she was complaining about not being allowed access to the DoE building. In that context "we appropriate the money for the DoE" is basically a threat -- "let us in or we'll take away the money".

I'd have parsed it as more of an appeal to fair's-fair ("We're the people who paid for this building, the least you can do is let us in"), or even just "we're not random activists sticking our noses where they don't belong, we actually are involved in the DoE's operations and have legitimate cause to pay them a visit".

The point of separation of powers is that Congress actually isn't involved in the administrative operations.

Social Security has been sending money to dozens of people over 150 years old, among other issues like the system for SSNs not being re-duplicated.

So many people have been saying "we can never fix the deficit because Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid are its primary drivers and can't be touched".

And yet, every time we look under the hood of a government program we see waste and fraud. Why should those programs be any different?

Another thing that I've thought of but which nobody has mentioned: the tendency of multiple of illegal immigrants to work under the same social security number. Are people who fraudulently lent out their identity now becoming the recipients of Social Security because of this?

If what Musk says is true, than it might be very easy to realize tens or hundreds of billions in savings simply by "fixing the glitch" and removing fraudulent payments.

I agree! And yes I know @2rafa has been beating that drum. I also think we should easily be able to save tens of billions by addressing the waste in these programs, or making things more efficient.

I've lately become attuned to a harmful pattern of thinking which I might call the "just so fallacy".

Anytime someone talks about ways in which things can be improved, there are others who chime in with the equivalent of "No, that's impossible. You see, all problems are intractable. We're doing the best we can. The exact way things are right now is the best they can possibly be, or at best, it will be extremely complicated and time-consuming to change them". And then they come up with elaborate rationalizations to explain why the current system is exactly the way it is.

And yet China can build an entire metro systems in less time than it takes New York City to add 1 station.

I think that the existence of Musk is proof that things can change a lot more than anyone anticipates. A huge percentage of what the government does is waste. What if we just stopped doing that?
As a society, we are not guaranteed to decline and fall. We can fix it.

AAQC for this, strongly agree. This fallacy is deep in the western mind at present and is quite a rot.

Ironically the most liberal people who talk about manifesting and such have it right - if you engender the right mindset, you can absolutely do far more than you think you could.

That sounds like you are just treating AAQC as a super upvote for statements you really agree with. Upvotes based on agreement are already being a blight; taking even AAQC there would just complete the descent into circlejerking. Maybe Zorba should consider introducing MotteGold™️ awards to capture some of that energy instead.

I think it's a quality contribution, though. I don't understand the issue.

I don't AAQC random one liners that I strongly agree with.

I don't particularly want to dunk on jeroboam (whose post is really perfectly okay), but I don't really see that post as adding any particularly new insight or explaining the old insight that is in it from an unusually persuasive or interesting angle. Would you like it if the forum were made up of posts like that, but for views you don't care for or strongly disagree with?

I think it's fine that my post doesn't win an award. It didn't take me too long to write and I didn't even do any research or sniff my own farts at any point while writing it.

But, yes, I would prefer that this board is mostly social commentary of short to medium length. I want to learn new things and hear interesting perspectives. I hope my posts provide that for others, even if they disagree with me. In fact, if they do disagree, I hope they can sharpen their mind by writing a good counterargument. Someone might even change their mind. I do occassionally.

I find the 5,000 word galaxy-brained posts to be insufferable.

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There is no conceivable award system that WON’T devolve into super upvotes for comments you agree with. This is a human universal. You can tell people to vote on quality and not ideological alignment, but they (typically) won’t. There will always be a bias towards perceiving comments you agree with as being intrinsically higher quality. And that’s fine. Let’s face it instead of hiding from it.

You can't just conflate a tendency in a direction with the endpoint that would be reached if no countervailing forces existed at all. Every law will be broken, but it still brings benefits to have and enforce laws; every system will ultimately devolve into disorder, but it still makes sense to tidy your room sometimes. We can, for now, push back against having a super upvote system and thereby eke out some more time in which the incentive is not just farming agreement, giving us more of a window to reap benefits in the form of posts that give new insights.

Hmm, this sounds fallacious.

Yeah I've grown to detest the "just so fallacy". Not just in politics/government but in health/medicine, too. It seems too common to just accept things as axioms that don't have to be true, or are at least modifiable.

This is exactly why “you can just do things.” Is such a powerful meme / rallying cry at the moment. It’s funny but also 100% true; you can just do things.

Agency is back, baby.

Historians take this of reasoning as an axiom. Ask them for a plausible alternative worldline, and you will treated worse than a holocaust denier. Too bad as there is space for an academic, rather than fantastical and fictional, exploration of historical possibilities, but history departments refuse to be that space.

As perfect information isn't avaliable to hissorian specializing in any era or area, any historian who ventures into interpretation or narrativizations (mainstays of historical thought) already leaves the safe confines of evidence. So it can't the fear of speculation.

Bias against counter-factual reasoning, if you will.

Historians take this of reasoning as an axiom. Ask them for a plausible alternative worldline, and you will treated worse than a holocaust denier.

That's too bad. Perhaps historians could benefit by spending some time on prediction markets.

I find post-hoc explanations for why things happened to be utterly unconvincing. If there were consistent principles that could be applied to explain historical events, then they could be used to predict future events. But this obviously doesn't happen.

Perhaps there is psychological comfort in thinking that events can be explained.

But imagine if Elon Musk hadn't been born. Or Trump. The world would be entirely different. Random events matter a lot. The number of possible worlds is much greater than most people can imagine.

Bias against counter-factual reasoning, if you will.

It's a cheap shot, but I am reminded of this green text.

You know, there was that one viral clip of Sam Harris that is like the inverse of the "But I did eat breakfast" green text. Where he is really doubling down with how, in a different world with different on the ground realities, he would have been correct. Which is a funny way of admitting that in the current world, with the current ground realities, you were wrong. Or way of not admitting. But it's this retreat into counter-factual reasoning to justify yourself after the fact is incredible. And people rightly mocked Sam Harris with "But none of that did happen".

So I guess, counter-factuals are all well and good as thought exercises. Not so great at justifying massive violations of civil liberties.

So I guess, counter-factuals are all well and good as thought exercises. Not so great at justifying massive violations of civil liberties.

Agreed. In the real world, we have uncertain information. Maybe Harris is right about their counter-factuals. But we don't even know, for sure, what the baseline ground reality is.

For that reason its better to stick to simple moral precepts rather than complicated rationalizations. Don't kill. Liberty is good. God, family, country. That sort of thing.

Of course, this is nothing new. In "Crime and Punishment", Raskolnikov kills a pawnbroker because he believes he can transcend moral law to bring about a greater good. 500 pages later, he learns this was wrong and finds Jesus.

Experts think that they can start wars, lockdown the population, force their ideology on others, etc... They think they are above the simple rules that have stood the test of time. But they aren't. They are constantly wrong. The world is far too complicated for a person to understand, and even when we know what happened, we lack the ability to explain it correctly.

... sorry for the tangent.

Of course, this is nothing new. In "Crime and Punishment", Raskolnikov kills a pawnbroker because he believes he can transcend moral law to bring about a greater good. 500 pages later, he learns this was wrong and finds Jesus.

Does he learn that it was wrong, or does he realize that he can't and he is better off finding Jesus? I mean Raskolnikov's central thesis, that might makes right for certain people (with Napoleon as a central example) doesn't necessarily get disproven by the end of the novel. Only that he is no Napoleon.

tangent2

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But... starting wars and forcing ideology on others is what stood the test of time. Lockdowns were also a thing, from what I heard. It's not like every time someone started a war they were smitten by lightning from on high.

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It’s also a problem because when you spend so much time immersed in the post-hoc, you gradually start to forget that none of the historical actors at the time had access to this level of information and analysis, and that most of them were very much flying by the seat of their pants. Forget Bush or the CIA, most of Iraq’s own generals thought Saddam had WMDs up until three days before the invasion started.

That isn’t even remotely my argument. The change I want is far more radical than anything imagined by Trump/Musk.

But the public demand their bennies, and if you want to significantly cut spending you have to cut them. It’s that simple. Nothing DOGE has uncovered even somewhat challenges that thesis.

That isn’t even remotely my argument. The change I want is far more radical than anything imagined by Trump/Musk.

What is the change you want?

But the public demand their bennies, and if you want to significantly cut spending you have to cut them. It’s that simple. Nothing DOGE has uncovered even somewhat challenges that thesis.

I agree with this, and frankly it seems like most people in my generation (early 30s) tacitly accept we are never going to get social security because of this issue.

What is the change you want?

Repeal birthright citizenship (through congress, or at least fight for it there, given its central importance to the entire future of the country), repeal CRA (certain limited provisions of which can be replaced by much more limited, targeted laws), begin preparations to hand Taiwan to China after domestic chip production scales up and use intimidation and force to relocate as much of what remains to the US, end all federal student loans and tuition support, force Ukraine into the most realistic peace deal (threaten to unilaterally revoke sanctions on Russia if they drag their heels), begin realistic preparations to deport ALL 13+ million illegal migrants in the US (investing tens of billions in holding facilities, hire 300+ thousand temporary ICE staff, checkpoints in every city, raid every blue collar contracting business in any major city, mandatory nationwide E-verify enhanced with biometric security to get around existing loopholes as part of a national ID program - as discussed above the feds probably already have your biometrics), abolish all postal voting (Americans abroad can vote at embassies), end the carried interest loophole, tax childlessness heavily, jack up interest rates to unfathomable levels to force an asset price crash, abolish NASA (fold some defense programs into DOD, Elon can explore space on his own dime or for commercial interests), breakup Google and Amazon, allow and encourage hospitals to refuse to treat homeless drug addicts, hand out free lethal dose fentanyl in certain urban centers and ban narcan for first responders in overdose hotspots, execute roughly 20-40x the number of criminals per year the US does now, mandate all office-based male federal government employees and their peers at all institutions that receive federal funding wear a suit, tie and black oxford shoes to work every day, NO exceptions, hand Ozempic out for free to every fat American at taxpayer expense, destroy much of the HFCS industry, grant unlimited 5 year work visas with pathway to citizenship to citizens of all western european nations (call it the ‘ellis island program’) if they have ‘distant family’ matches ithw Americans in popular DNA databases, adopt a foreign policy built around getting European countries to change immigration policy with the stick if necessary, implement a mandatory ‘national college admissions test’ that must be the sole criterion for admission at any federally funded college, but also reserve 5% of places at elite colleges for the highest performing URM, and fire loud, midwit racists from DOGE and wider government since that kind of thing is just vulgar and racial hatred is cruel and wrong.

Have you heard of our lord and savior, bullet points?

  • Repeal birthright citizenship (through congress, or at least fight for it there, given its central importance to the entire future of the country)

  • repeal CRA (certain limited provisions of which can be replaced by much more limited, targeted laws)

  • begin preparations to hand Taiwan to China after domestic chip production scales up and use intimidation and force to relocate as much of what remains to the US

  • end all federal student loans and tuition support

  • force Ukraine into the most realistic peace deal (threaten to unilaterally revoke sanctions on Russia if they drag their heels)

  • begin realistic preparations to deport ALL 13+ million illegal migrants in the US (investing tens of billions in holding facilities, hire 300+ thousand temporary ICE staff, checkpoints in every city, raid every blue collar contracting business in any major city, mandatory nationwide E-verify enhanced with biometric security to get around existing loopholes as part of a national ID program - as discussed above the feds probably already have your biometrics)

  • abolish all postal voting (Americans abroad can vote at embassies)

  • end the carried interest loophole

  • tax childlessness heavily

  • jack up interest rates to unfathomable levels to force an asset price crash

  • abolish NASA (fold some defense programs into DOD, Elon can explore space on his own dime or for commercial interests)

  • breakup Google and Amazon

  • allow and encourage hospitals to refuse to treat homeless drug addicts

  • hand out free lethal dose fentanyl in certain urban centers and ban narcan for first responders in overdose hotspots

  • execute roughly 20-40x the number of criminals per year the US does now

  • mandate all office-based male federal government employees and their peers at all institutions that receive federal funding wear a suit, tie and black oxford shoes to work every day, NO exceptions

  • hand Ozempic out for free to every fat American at taxpayer expense

  • destroy much of the HFCS industry

  • grant unlimited 5 year work visas with pathway to citizenship to citizens of all western european nations (call it the ‘ellis island program’) if they have ‘distant family’ matches with Americans in popular DNA databases

  • adopt a foreign policy built around getting European countries to change immigration policy with the stick if necessary

  • implement a mandatory ‘national college admissions test’ that must be the sole criterion for admission at any federally funded college, but also reserve 5% of places at elite colleges for the highest performing URM

  • fire loud, midwit racists from DOGE and wider government since that kind of thing is just vulgar and racial hatred is cruel and wrong.

Aww, it was kind of meant to be a wall of text!

If you ever get under my skin, I will send you a badly formatted text when you're crossing a busy street.

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I suspect a lot of people would claim to have found the elusive Jewish Nazi if they read this, but if I were Congress and you were Elon, I would let you get away with this program.

I would also hire some kind of taxpayer funded cringe gamer art hoe active-on-AI-twitter escort to seduce Elon and distract him from public activity for 4 years.

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and black oxford shoes to work every day, NO exceptions,

Well now you've just lost me. Derby shoes are clearly the superior choice here because they fit a range of feet widths and sizes more appropriately. And are more appropriate to transition to a happy hour after work for that matter. Until the Ozempic has done its work forcing overweight people into Oxford shoes is I am sure against both the Geneva convention and general aesthetics! We should leave the torture for Guantanamo and/or whatever camp we have to open in Canada as the 51st state.

Plus you didn't specify the color of the suit and I will not be caught dead in black Oxford shoes with a navy blue suit! The youth of today are simply wrong on that front. And since pale skin looks better in a navy blue suit than a black suit, let us not discriminate against white people. Suit and tie is fine, allow either navy blue or black, perhaps even charcoal, but let's allow black or brown Oxford or Derby shoes. Let's at least leave some room for some sartorial elegance. We can leave the government Men in Black look behind behind us. No brogues though, I think we can agree on that.

More seriously black Oxfords with a black suit is very formal which means you have not much room (except a tuxedo) to dress up further for important meetings or events. So navy blue suits with a brown Derby shoe for day to day use, with a black suit and a black Oxford shoe for when you are meeting the President or pleading with DOGE or similar. Tuxedo with the Oxford (or perhaps even a wingtip if you are feeling like causing a scandal!) for when you make it to a White House gala. That gives you 3 specific "grades" of formality with distinct looks.

Luckily we do not need to consider what to wear to one of Diddy's White parties because a white suit is just gauche.

I will not be caught dead in black Oxford shoes with a navy blue suit!

No brown in town, sorry.

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More seriously black Oxfords with a black suit is very formal which means you have not much room (except a tuxedo) to dress up further for important meetings or events

Bring back morning dress. Seriously. It is just about hanging on in the UK, mostly at Royal Ascot and daytime weddings. It has died out in the US to the point where Americans wear black tie at formal daytime weddings.

So navy blue suits with a brown Derby shoe for day to day use

Watch out for @die_workwear and his crack team of Kingsman agents if you wear brown in town.

with a black suit and a black Oxford shoe for when you are meeting the President

Plain black is for mourning-with-a-u or evening. It doesn't look good in full daylight - the most formal business suits are charcoal grey. Morning-without-a-u coats are usually black, but the trousers are not.

Tuxedo with the Oxford (or perhaps even a wingtip if you are feeling like causing a scandal!) for when you make it to a White House gala.

If we are bringing back higher standards of dress, a formal evening event at the White House should surely be White Tie?

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I think I generally agree with most of this except the biometric ID, and abolishing NASA!!!! How could you even say that?! You don't think space is important?

And wait when you say free lethal dose, you mean kill addicts without their knowledge? I don't get it.

Also I'm curious how you got to a lot of these policies without being religious?

And wait when you say free lethal dose, you mean kill addicts without their knowledge? I don't get it.

I mean I believe in assisted suicide for those who live like they want to die.

Also I'm curious how you got to a lot of these policies without being religious?

I’m not religious or trad, I just want to live in a functioning society.

I would love to see a top-level comment laying out the arguments for all of these.

mandate all office-based male federal government employees (…) wear black oxford shoes to work every day, NO exceptions

No exceptions? What if the gentleman is missing both legs?

Irrelevant joke, but putting "NO exceptions" quite so emphatically just begged for some smart-aleck to find a loophole, and I'm that guy. Besides it adds a bit of levity to my more substantial reply which is to observe that "cruel and wrong", in my book, describes a great deal - though not all! - of your proposed suggestions; and also that trying to implement most of them, particularly the '300,000 temporary ICE agents' thing, would result in an actual literal civil war.

No exceptions? What if the gentleman is missing both legs?

Didn't say where he has to wear them.

pathway to citizenship to citizens of all western european nations

Maybe citizens of all western european nations whose grandparents were citizens. To avoid the wrong sorts of citizens I think some sort of 'Ahnenpass' would be necessary.

grant unlimited 5 year work visas with pathway to citizenship to citizens of all western european nations (call it the ‘ellis island program’) if they have ‘distant family’ matches ithw Americans in popular DNA databases, adopt a foreign policy built around getting European countries to change immigration policy with the stick if necessary

If the first one actually worked to any appreciable degree, it would of course conflict against the goal of the second one (assuming that "change immigration policy" means "no third-world immigration to Europe"), considering how much of the latter is labor immigration to plug the workforce deficiencies caused by the birth rate crash.

People can pay more for vegetable and manual labor automation is already picking up with multimodal LLMs.

And yet China can build an entire metro systems in less time than it takes New York City to add 1 station.

Building into greenfield is, perhaps, easier than renovating entrenched systems with significant entrenched interests.

I don't think you realize just how fast China's metro has blossomed. Far from greenfields, these are some of the most densely populated places on Earth.

For example, consider Chengdu, a city of 20 million people. The first phase of their metro was approved in 2005. The metro opened in 2010. Today, just 15 years later, it has more stations than London.

Of the 20 largest metro systems on Earth, 13 of them are in China. 9 of those opened after the year 2000. 5 of those opened after 2010!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metro_systems

I've heard New Yorkers blame this on, at least partially, on the lack of green-field. Boring tunnels for the subway or really anything has to worry about hitting undocumented, unmapped utility lines that have been in-use for a century.

But also on unions (risk of a subway strike prevents real automation improvements for efficiency and safety), and your standard bureaucratic bloat. Political pressure could at least fix this side of things, and maybe even "whoops we hit a gas line and will have to shut down heating for a ten block area for two weeks".

I've heard New Yorkers blame this on, at least partially, on the lack of green-field. Boring tunnels for the subway or really anything has to worry about hitting undocumented, unmapped utility lines that have been in-use for a century.

Ooh, a century. I know Americans think that is a long time, but I'm currently catching up on a century's deferred maintenance on my perfectly normal terraced house in the London suburbs, and it really isn't when you are talking about buildings and urban infrastructure.

Rome and Istanbul can both build tunnels at less than 1/5 of the cost of NYC (Paris isn't best-in-class. Alon Levy, who is the leading expert on public transport construction costs, describes France as medium cost, whereas Turkey is low cost and Italy can be low or medium depending on how corrupt individual regions are). After allowing for additional costs due to archeological excavations. Into things that are thousands of years old.

Anyone who tries to defend NYC construction costs should be shamed out of public life.

Sure. But France builds at a cost 1/5 as NYC did with second Ave subway

Big if true. But I feel like almost every time something like this comes up, either with estimates of the illegals that vote, dead people voting, people voting multiple times, etc some expert chimes in with a just so story about how it might look bad on the face of it, but this is actually just how it works and only ignorant normies spreading misinformation could possibly be worried.

I mean, if you think about it, SS reuse makes sense. They only go up 999-99-9999, or 1B - 1. The US is supposed to have 333M people. If we weren't reusing SS numbers by now, we really should start soon.

That said, I still want someone to aggressively comb over the payments, instead of hand waving away that everything is totally normal and nothing at all to be concerned about what so ever. Check the names on accounts, send people to do in person interviews if need be. I'm sure the FBI could be put to more productive use than having 40% of their agents conducting no-knock paramilitary raids on grandmas who got waved through the capital by confused police.

That said, I still want someone to aggressively comb over the payments, instead of hand waving away that everything is totally normal and nothing at all to be concerned about what so ever. Check the names on accounts, send people to do in person interviews if need be. I'm sure the FBI could be put to more productive use than having 40% of their agents conducting no-knock paramilitary raids on grandmas who got waved through the capital by confused police.

I agree with this sentiment. I'll add as well that even if the gross amount of money saved isn't that huge, it sends an incredibly important signal to the rest of the government - if you commit fraud and/or waste money, we will find it, and you will be punished.

The chilling effects from this alone I'd imagine would save a ton of money. Plus it improves public sentiment towards the government, encourages people who just want to grift to stay away, etc etc. It's not just about saving money right off the bat, it's the entire mindset of the people who would go in and do something like these cost cutting measures.

I'll add as well that even if the gross amount of money saved isn't that huge

That this could even be an argument against it drives me up a wall. I know you aren't making that argument, the opposite in fact. But we both know that argument will be made. "Elon spent some billions of dollars to save some millions from Social Security Fraud! Who's wasting tax dollars now?!" But we don't apply that to the money spent catching murderers, auditing minimum wage workers, the FBI entrapped autistic kids in their mother's basements, etc, etc. The people likely to complain about the cost of catching fraud and waste in the government are never the same people worried about the cost to enforce censorship on the internet, anti-racist departments in every institution in America, etc. They won't complain about all the money spent on lawfare to get Trump the last 4 years. Money means nothing to them, but they know it means something to us, and so they will disingenuously complain that the things we want cost too much to get us to back down. God help us if the "reasonable centrist" gets talked into believing it.

I think it honestly depends. For example, if we thought the fraud catching systems were already quite strong and the likely fraud was 0.0001% then I wouldn’t advocate putting much in the way of more resources into auditing fraud.

But that doesn’t seem to be our facts. The systems seem a mess so there is no way to know ex ante how much fraud there is.

Money means nothing to them, but they know it means something to us, and so they will disingenuously complain that the things we want cost too much to get us to back down

A somewhat more charitable reading would be something more like "We don't care if fraudsters waste money and we don't care if DOGE wastes money; but if DOGE only exists to stop waste, and winds up wasting more money than it saves, then it fails on its own terms and has literally no reason to exist".

Justice is not a waste.

The argument about saving only millions in Social Security fraud seems like the opposite of the actual controversy. First, DOGE seems to not cost a lot of money. Second, that DOGE is not reducing fraud and waste in SS/Medi and is instead targetting programs that it ideologically opposes is the actual criticism of DOGE.

Of course, if you also are ideologicslly opposed to various DOGE targets, then you probably view these targets' existence as counterproductive and their removal to be an efficiency gain.

ideologically opposes

This is just who/whom. One person's "Why is USAID funding drag shows in the 3rd world?" is another person's "Yay! USAID is funding drag shows in the 3rd world!" Unambiguous fraud/waste to one seems like we're just getting rid of programs we "ideologically oppose" to another.

Yes, obviously! I think that what point out is already baked into my comment.

Then let's publicize "USAID is funding drag shows in the third world" and see how many people react in the first manner and how many react in the second.

In practice, USAID is probably not funding drag shows in the third world, it's funding brainstorming sessions for drag shows in the third world. I suspect the people very upset about it either way know this- did the transgender opera in Columbia like, actually happen?

did the transgender opera in Columbia like, actually happen?

It did, it was "As One" it was performed three times in Bogotá on march 16th, april 22nd and april 28th of 2022, in three different theaters. It was even announced on X (then twitter): https://x.com/OLA_opera/status/1501640790988275721

I'm not an expert on this area, and could use some help.

Was the Department of Ed created via statute, or was it created by the executive to enforce a law that didn't specifically call for its creation?

It was created by statute, but so was CFPB.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_Education_Organization_Act

All the good public education I've seen in my life was good because of local rather than national decisions, so I can't credit the ED for them, and although in theory they might prove their worth by overriding bad local decisions, I've never heard of that happening. Hopefully someone will drop in to explain why I'm wrong.

On the other hand, though, the right way to shut down a department that's created and funded by an act of Congress is to end it with an act of Congress. From a process point of view, Trump's team is going to get legal challenges regardless but they could at least try to make sure the challenges are invalid. From an outcomes point of view, the Republicans still have a 5 vote lead in the House and they're at a 6 vote lead in the Senate, so if a Republican president can't get a bill through that then maybe push something that is moderate enough for a moderate Republican instead.

Yeah they definitely seem to be trying to just change things by fiat and come up with legal justifications later. I’m not sure that the political reconciliation strategy would even work, though. Seems like any time people try to compromise the deed of cutting never actually gets done.

No, the headlines are just misleading. Example:

Trump order to dismantle the education department in the works, sources say

But the story actually says

The proposed order gutting the agency is expected to call for the education secretary to submit a proposal for dismantling the department and for Congress to pass legislation to get rid of it.

Truly the rule of 'if you can't guess how they are lying, you aren't trying hard enough' reigns again.

I see, yeah I got sniped by an MSNBC headline. You'd think I would know better by now. Thanks for correcting me.

I must admit Musk has really invigorated the news coming from the US. My wildest ideas of how Trump could gut DoE that I wrote on The Motte no longer look so far-fetched. Elon is driving a bulldozer through every Chesterton's fence he can find in D.C.

If he manages to roll out a biometric national ID card to digitize access to government benefits before the end of Trump's term I'll start a petition to make his position of the man behind the curtain permanent.

If he manages to roll out a biometric national ID card to digitize access to government benefits before the end of Trump's term I'll start a petition to make his position of the man behind the curtain permanent.

Hmmm I personally would hate this, why are you so for it?

And yes I agree, I appreciate that a politician who got elected on downsizing the system is ACTUALLY doing that for a change. It's incredibly refreshing.

Why would you hate it? The only downside I can conceive are trivial relative to benefits.

It's a step towards national ID for everything / internal passports. Not that we aren't precariously close to that already with REAL ID (I use a passport card, which is indeed a national document) and nowhere-near-the-border papers checks.

That scarcely seem to me like something to worry about. We already need IDs for many normal activities. Having those issued on federal level would not change much, and in fact would probably be an improvement for reasons like Voter ID.

First, that isn't something the federal government is allowed to do per the Constitution. So it's up to the states. Second, I don't want even the states accelerating the panopticon by incorporating all our biometrics into it. I don't know what benefits you have in mind, but I can't think of any which are not dwarfed by that massive cost.

The State already is a panopticon. The only fly in the ointment is that it's only a panopticon for members of society who are well-integrated into the economy, own assets, and generally "have something to lose."

This extends the panopticon to those who have nothing to lose. So we lose the anarcho part of anarchotyranny. Perhaps losing the tyranny part instead would be better, but throwing out the rulebook altogether seems a bigger lift than just ensuring it's applied universally.

It being an informal panopticon is still better than a formalized system, imo. It is about dignity and what our society is willing to do to its citizens in the light of day.

It is about dignity and what our society is willing to do to its citizens in the light of day.

If character is what you are in the dark, is government what everyone is in the dark?

Perhaps losing the tyranny part instead would be better, but throwing out the rulebook altogether seems a bigger lift than just ensuring it's applied universally.

This is undoubtedly true. But it seems to me that it's better to fight for that than to apply the tyranny to everyone (which is what you seem to be in favor of, correct me if I'm wrong).

I live in a city where the government will punish you more (up to putting a lien on your house and, if you don't pay the rapidly accumulating fines, appropriating it) if you change your windows to be double-paned without getting the appropriate permit than if you regularly go to elementary schools, expose yourself, and masturbate to the children. And god forbid if a taxpaying resident decides to perform any vigilante activism against the public masturbator. And, of course, the chronic masturbator can throw a rock through your window, and if you don't respond appropriately and request permission to fix it through the city channels, the same appropriation process begins.

This colors my views.

Is there some method for preventing you from wearing a mask and beating the vagrant senseless with a baseball bat? The police are unlikely to investigate this particularly beyond just declaring it a fight between bums, if he reports it at all. Is there 24/7 surveillance to stop you from just hiring a local Mexican to change the windows when the city isn't looking, and simply not telling anyone you did?

At a certain level, respectable and polite people make it easy to enforce laws unevenly against them.

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First, that isn't something the federal government is allowed to do per the Constitution.

As much as I sympathize with this point of view, Mr Filburn, given the legal developments over last 100 years, I can scarcely think that national ID cards is the most advantageous location to pick this battle.

Second, I don't want even the states accelerating the panopticon by incorporating all our biometrics into it.

What is meaningfully changed in your life by state learning your biometrics? What kind of realistic nightmare scenarios are prevented by preventing Feds from issuing national biometric IDs? I really cannot think of any.

I don't know what benefits you have in mind, but I can't think of any which are not dwarfed by that massive cost.

Improving elections integrity, for one thing.

Anyway, I really disagree that there is massive cost here, and I think you are not doing a good job articulating it. Consider, for example, other countries that do have national ID systems on top of very comprehensive census registries. This covers almost the entire Europe, for example. To the extent these countries are controlling panopticons (which, to be sure, they to a large extent are when compared to US), I cannot think of any aspects of that panopticon that would be meaningfully relaxed by making their population registries less comprehensive, or their ID systems less centralized. I’d be happy to hear concrete counterexamples, if you can think of any.

As much as I sympathize with this point of view, Mr Filburn, given the legal developments over last 100 years, I can scarcely think that national ID cards is the most advantageous location to pick this battle.

I am certainly aware that the federal government has been using the Constitution as so much toilet paper for the last 100 years. But I don't see why that means one should not raise the objection. We can't get back to following the Constitution by adding more violations to the pile

As far as the rest goes, I appreciate that I haven't said much to convince you. But unfortunately, I don't know what else I can say. The idea of having biometric IDs issued by the government (federal or state, for that matter) is something I find to be deeply disturbing and corrosive to freedom. By comparison, having less election fraud doesn't really register as a meaningful benefit. I like election security well enough, but I like not giving powers to the government far more. I can definitely imagine that the situation is reversed for you, which means... we simply prioritize different things, and I don't know that one can resolve that with debate. Certainly I'm not anywhere near a talented enough writer for that, though I wish I were.

What would help is if you actually articulated how exactly national ID cards give government more power over you, relative to status quo. You claim this, but this is far from obvious to me.

Easy! First, let's inroduce a national artifact that everyone "should" have. Next, let's add penalty modifiers to civilian life for not carrying said artifact. Finally, since this isn't legally mandated (nor guaranteed), start imposing conditions for revokation.

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Improving elections integrity, for one thing.

Disparate impact doctrine would like a word. How would this be anything other than a bludgeon against the outgroup in either direction, depending on who has the billy club in hand?

First, disparate impact doctrine has nothing to do with it. At best you could argue that it’s related to equal protection.

More importantly, this is a fully general arguments against any laws. Why prohibit theft if it’s just a bludgeon when the your political opponents are the ones controlling law enforcement?

It's a fully general argument that usually only gets deployed in one direction. I'm happy to see how the gander likes it.

First, that isn't something the federal government is allowed to do per the Constitution.

It also isn't allowed to regulate the drinking age, but it does. It just has to extend the REAL ID provisions so one must have a compliant ID from the moment of birth till death. Or say maintaining a database of IDs is required for regulating interstate commerce.

Yes, I am aware that the federal government regularly and flagrantly violates the Constitution. That doesn't mean I'm going to simply accept more violations. We should both refuse to allow new violations and roll back the ones which exist.

The federal government can do anything necessary and proper to enforcing the immigration laws (as long is it doesn't violate the Bill of Rights).

Since universal ID is, in fact, required for effective in-country enforcement of immigration laws, this seems like an easily winnable legal argument.

Since universal ID is, in fact, required for effective in-country enforcement of immigration laws...

That's an opinion, not a fact. Not saying we should digress into debating that point, but it's definitely not a factual one.

this seems like an easily winnable legal argument.

Yeah probably. The federal government has been winning far worse legal arguments to expand its power since Wickard v Filburn. But that doesn't change my opinion that these things are a blatantly unconstitutional use of power, and that the government shouldn't have it.

The state already has all your biometric data if they want it and if you’re a remotely well-travelled person (or if Apple’s security is less watertight than it implies). The current system is a form of anarcho tyranny, in that the only people without biometrics in the system are the scum at the bottom of society.

The current system is a form of anarcho tyranny, in that the only people without biometrics in the system are the scum at the bottom of society.

Android users?

If you travel to much of the world your biometrics are stored by US “allies” who (as part of Five Eyes or other intelligence alliances) will gladly hand your data over to US intelligence.

Lots of people don't travel that much, though. Your average republican in particular goes to Europe/Australia perhaps once in their lives, if that- wealthy conservatives buy lakehouses and cabins to which they drive(not fly), and have destination travel to places like the grand canyon or Yellowstone, and middle class ones take cruises which start and end at US ports, or go to Mexico or an in-US vacation, or get an RV.

Legibility, first and foremost.

If he manages to roll out a biometric national ID card to digitize access to government benefits

The opposition to this would come from republicans, because republican voters expect expanded state capacity to be used against us first, and provide its promised benefits never. AKA Trump will not do this.

a) you can't eat your cake and have it, too. If you want stricter enforcement of immigration laws, you need a surefire way to tell if someone is an illegal immigrant or a citizen. ICE building a case against every single person they want to apprehend and deport will never scale. ICE deporting every single person that cannot produce a valid ID card will.

b) Who cares about these Republican voters? I assume you mean red tribesmen of the "don't tread on me" sort. How many of them are in the swing states? Will they even outnumber the "law and order" types that will support this policy because it cuts down on voter fraud and lets them renew their driver's license online?

In addition to the "no step on snek" crowd, many evangelicals consider a federal ID to be the biblically prophesied "mark of the beast." There has been a strong consensus among the republican voting base for a long time that a federal ID would be one of the worst things that could possibly happen, and I don't see that changing soon.

Most republicans in Texas(can't speak to further north than Oklahoma, or east of the Mississippi) would be perfectly happy with cleaning out the jails(including very low level offenders, like DUI- which is not a particularly serious crime in the USA), and getting the constitutional right to cut undocumented immigrants off from things like public school tuition. The minority which literally wants to get rid of everyone expects to need self-deportation to do it, and usually has plans to encourage this.

And the don't tread on me crowd is not the only one opposed to this. The median republican voter is deeply cynical about the government doing anything to benefit stable, law abiding, well adjusted people. Republican-leaning independents in particular will probably interpret it as 'oh, ok, so I have an annoying bureaucracy dedicated to catching me on three felonies a day, but actual criminals and illegals will get a constitutional right made up to be exempt'. Republican-leaning independents not voting is a real risk to GOP electoral prospects.

Free citizens don't carry IDs in their own country. I'm aware that there are countries where this is required, and I'll leave the modus tollens as an exercise for the reader.

Seems to me that ICE can make good progress focusing on jails and employers.

Free citizens don't carry IDs in their own country.

You have to prove this claim first before you ask me to make logical inferences.

Free citizens don't carry IDs in their own country.

Then free citizens don't drive cars. The ID row in the US is stupid because the US (entirely reasonably, given the risks) requires ID for drivers, and is a society where driving is effectively compulsory.

FWIW, I think the right-wing noise machine has ginned up enough anger about non-citizens allegedly voting in large numbers that the MAGA base would now support national ID. According to establishment conventional wisdom (which may or may not be correct), the group who would actually oppose national ID from the right are evangelicals who think that mandatory ID is the Biblical Mark of the Beast.

Driving a car is an activity that requires a license. Is the implication that existence itself also requires a license?

I don't think the existence of a national id implies that people must carry it around all the time. It seems perfectly legitimate for a national ID to be required when you use government services or vote, but having to carry around papers every time you walk out the door lest a commissar stop you is a bridge too far.

Is the implication that existence itself also requires a license?

"Deport all illegals now" implies that existence within the bounds of a country requires a license. If you don't have some form of constitutional birthright citizenship, it is a license that can be withdrawn by ordinary legislation.

I mean the real coup would just be to make the federal government no longer involved in access to government benefits (besides e.g. retirement and healthcare for direct employees).

Non-American here: what did the federal department of education do?

Schools/Colleges are done by the states?

In the US system, there are a number of programs where the Federal government collects money then gives it to the states to spend. Highways and higher education are two good examples. So States spend the money and run the universities but the financing has a significant federal portion. The Department of Education administrates the Federal portion of the spending as well as providing rules and guidelines for institutions that recieve that money.

Seems like a great way for the Federal to take over control of something they were not meant to be in control of.

Ever since the Great Depression that's been a key tool of increased federal control over more and more things. You can see it in all sorts of things like the 55 mph speed limit (Montana's $5 enforcement was hilarious) to the dear colleague letter are just some examples of this.

Indeed, this is an argument that small-c conservatives and libertarians have been making for decades, but they lacked the backing from congress or the executive to press the issue.

Even worse, the funding is contingent on abiding the federal government’s whims.

Under Biden schools risked losing their funding for not accommodating transgender kids in bathrooms and on sports teams.

Now it’s probably going to be the opposite.

The DoE was made in the fires of Congress. Only there can it be unmade.

But seriously though, it’s one thing for the President to fire anyone who serves at his pleasure, to leave the office of a cabinet secretary vacant indefinitely, or even to axe entire orgs that were created under executive authority. However, constitutionally, how can a federal department—or any other entity created by Congress—be legally dismantled, except by legislation to that effect? Seems like a blatant violation of Article 2, Section 2

I am aware that Musk is likely exaggerating for effect—in fact, he might not even be exaggerating, but describing the truth on the ground rather than as a legal fiction: if the DoE exists on paper but has no personnel, no money, no responsibilities, and no authority, then (when restricted to 280 characters) it’s quite fair to say it “doesn’t exist”. But my question is precisely about the legal fiction of the matter, the collective delusion if you will: to truly end the DoE in the eyes of the law, doesn’t Congress need to do something?

I mean, I often wondered these things when the Biden admin turned border patrol into a concierge service for illegals. But nothing happened. I think I remember a bunch of states suing, especially all the fights between Texas and and the Biden Admin, but broadly every court deferred to Federal discretion on the matter. There were no emergency stays, no ex-parte hearings, no random judge in Alabama declaring the entire program illegal giving Border Patrol the pretense they needed to go rogue and ignore the lawful orders of the duly elected President of the Unites States. They tried to impeach Mayorkas for dereliction of duty, but that went nowhere.

So at this point, I'm pretty much OK with Trump doing whatever the fuck he wants, and telling the courts "You've made your ruling, now enforce it."

So at this point, I'm pretty much OK with Trump doing whatever the fuck he wants, and telling the courts "You've made your ruling, now enforce it."

Reminds me of the Russian MoD uniform regulation that was ruled unconstitutional. Some officer was caught wearing his tracksuit when using the jungle gym at a military base. He insisted he was off duty, so uniform regulations didn't apply to him, but was still reprimanded by the base commander because the regulation said uniforms were mandatory on military bases. He sued, reached the Constitutional Court, it struck down the whole document as violating the officer's right to something. The MoD didn't even bother to release a new regulation without the offending clause, just went on as if nothing had happened.

I can’t wait for my student loans to be sold off to private companies who will try to eat me alive because, in my opinion, some people got bamboozled into thinking the Department of Education affects curricula when under the 10th Amendment the federal government and Department of Education are not involved in determining curricula or educational standards or establishing schools or colleges.

On the other hand, student loans could easily be sold off for pennies on the dollar to collections agencies who'll happily settle for massive discounts. It's not like they're mostly good debt.

A story I heard about 10th amendment: in test prep for legal school they tell that if there is a multiple choice question about which amendment causes or prevents something 10th amendment is never the right asnwer.

DoE can't change what states do, but it can make federal funding conditional on them doing what DoE wants them to do which, practically, in most cases amounts to the same thing.

My understanding is that the DoEd has three main jobs- administering student loans, money helicoptering grants to local school districts, and pushing different kinds of stupidity on the several states. We’re probably better off without the last one but the other two jobs are kind of how the education system is built.

Completely dismantling the education system as it is currently built? I like this plan, lets do it.

You do, on some level, need public schools, and student loans. While both could easily be... trimmed back, you can't just get rid of them.

But these don't have to be handled federally. Honestly, student loans don't need to be government-granted at all.. why can't the market take care of that?

Public schools can be funded locally/state level. Though I'd rather just a federally-issued voucher for everyone and let schools compete for students.

Honestly, student loans don't need to be government-granted at all.. why can't the market take care of that?

Because the government and the rah-rah education crowd wouldn't like the way the loans were underwritten or allocated, either by race or subject matter. Maybe by sex too. If they became dischargable in bankruptcy you'd also have to solve the strategic bankruptcy issue.

You can get private student loans right now, if you want to. If they were a mainstream part of how normal people funded their undergrad the government would put too many regulations on them to stay solvent along the lines of lending equally to women and minorities.

you can't just get rid of them.

Why not?

Basic literacy and numerancy are things that can be readily addressed at tbe state/municipal level. And the proliferation of "free money" in the form of federally backed student loans is arguably one of the major drivers of cost disease in education.

At first I was horrified, but then I read up on what the department of education actually does (allocate funding per the whims of beurecrats and congress critters, in that order) and now I am horrified it existed at all.

Wait until you learn about the Federal Reserve!

Eh, my opinion on the Fed softened a lot when I realized they are actually just a (significant) part of the national security apparatus. Like, at least 50% of what keeps the CCPs bullshit in check is the Fed holding a big club labeled "monetary policy" and grinning. Sure, a lot of what they do sucks for the common person, but thats the nature of Great Power struggles.

The DoEd just appears to be a transfer station for money that congress already allocated and could arguably be replaced by a spreadsheet. Oh, and sending "dear colleague" memos that replaced due process in colleges and universities with unaccountable kangaroo courts. What little they do I feel should be Purged With Fire.

Yes Minister is relevant as ever: https://youtube.com/watch?v=En4lu_1bcsI

Noah Smith thinks DOGE's purpose is to drive liberals out of the civil service, to make room for conservative hires. Three paragraphs from below the paywall of today's post:

It seems clear that defeating the “woke mind virus” is high on DOGE’s list of priorities — my guess is that it’s actually the #1 priority. Trump’s first action with regards to the civil service was to fire all the DEI staff. But woke attitudes are far more widespread than just the few people who are officially hired to work on DEI, and Trump and Musk are probably united on the need to root out as many as possible.

This is probably why Elon loudly made a big deal out of rehiring a DOGE staffer who was fired for racist tweets, despite having himself gone to war on X against people making similar tweets. Federal civil service workers are a lot harder to fire than workers at Twitter; many are on contract, and there’s a limit to how long they can be placed on administrative leave. Musk tried the gambit of offering a buyout to all federal employees, but very few took it. One relatively easy way of getting the government’s wokest staffers to quit is to make it clear that the culture of their workplace has changed, and an easy way to do that is to have guys who write stuff like “Normalize Indian hate”.

This also explains many of the programs that Elon is going after. Actual examples of fraud are few and far between, but a decent number of federal grants and other programs have either been outsourced to progressive NGOs, repurposed for “justice”-related goals, or had DEI programs attached to them. When the DOGE people talk about “waste” and “fraud”, it’s usually just progressive stuff like this (which, to be fair, they do consider wasteful).

This seems to fit the available evidence, but what would prove or disprove it? I'd be more convinced if there had been a clear effort to recruit conservatives, prior to this - driving out progressives by purposely making civil service jobs generally less appealing doesn't make me want a civil service job.

I'd be more convinced if there had been a clear effort to recruit conservatives, prior to this - driving out progressives by purposely making civil service jobs generally less appealing doesn't make me want a civil service job.

In his companies, Musk has recruited peerless employees despite being awful to them, sometimes even awful in an unfair way.

There's a paradox here, which I think is best illustrated by this comparison. Which advertisement will result in the most effective military?

  1. Come join the military. It's not that hard and we'll give you lots of free stuff!

  2. The military will be the hardest experience of your life. You might even die. Only the toughest will make it.

Recruiting people who are doing it for the money or for cushy work conditions gets you exactly the civil service we have now.

This is the difference between marine corps ads and army ads.

Recruiting people who are doing it for the money or for cushy work conditions gets you exactly the civil service we have now.

Singapore attracts high quality talent to its government bureaucracy by offering salaries comparable to the private sector. They avoid the same institutional ennui as the States by demanding that government officials perform accordingly.

"I offer neither pay, nor quarters, nor provisions; I offer hunger, thirst, forced marches, battles and death. Let him who loves his country in his heart, and not with his lips only, follow me."

Both models work, that's why the US has both the Air Force AND the Marines.

There are only two branches of service, the Army and the Navy. The Corps is a cult and the Air Force is a corporation.

There's also the Space Force, but they're just nerds. They only exist so the other branches have someone whose lunch money they can steal. Might as well be Coast Guard.

Hahahahahahahahaha

Elon if you're reading this: the Air Force could be dissolved and folded into the Army and Navy and the result would be a net positive (golf courses everywhere hardest hit).

And if you're still listening to me, ask yourself if the Army really needs to be quite so large in a Pacific Pivot model...

Any good info on post-Musk twitter recruiting?

Not sure. Tech is kinda easy right now because of all the layoffs in 2022/23. Twitter is doing really well with the employees they do have. The site functions better than it did before.

On a business level, Twitter is crushing it. It's profitable and, with the advertiser boycott broken, it's about to start absolutely gushing cash.

In 2021, Twitter's revenue was $5.1 billion, with expenses of $5.3 billion. Let's assume that expenses are closer to $1-2 billion now, and that revenue is starting to crawl back up towards 2021 levels. This thing is going to throw off billions in profit per year.

In 2021, Twitter's revenue was $5.1 billion, with expenses of $5.3 billion.

As the resident Musk critic, I do have to sometimes chuckle at my own side and sigh in disappointment. Believe it or not, I've seen people say things like "Elon Musk's Twitter can barely break even!"

On a business level, Twitter is crushing it.

Which is why the banks who financed the deal just offloaded more debt at a discount (something extraordinarily rare for a buyout of this size absent a major market crash, which didn’t happen)…

You have to think in relative terms, the only reason they held it on their balance sheet in the first place is because it was originally too bad to offload.

Rates went up significantly since the buyout happened. Banks off loading at a very small discount isn’t indicative of anything.

Interest rates have increased by just a tad since then. For comparison, TLT (20 year US bonds) are down by more than 25% since Elon bought Twitter.

The extraordinary amount of time taken to offload the debt is the point.

Care to expound on the implications for the less financially literate?

(I'm fairly sure I know what you mean, but it's also not something that was covered much in the coverage of the Twitter takeover deal, since much of the media coverage at the time was jeering Musk.)

When Musk bought Twitter, one of the ways he reduced the amount of his own money he had to put up was to borrow a large sum (roughly $13 billion) from a syndicate of banks. The deal is structured so that Twitter is the borrower, not Musk - if Twitter can't pay then Musk has the option to put more of his money in, but the standard result is that Twitter files Chapter 11, the banks end up owning it, and Musk is not on the hook for any more money than what he has already put in. The crucial point is that if Twitter goes bust, the lenders lose $13 billion less whatever they can get for Twitter in a fire sale.

The interest rates on these loans are floating - calculated as SOFR (the rate at which US banks make secured overnight loans to each other, considered a risk-free rate, and which tracks the official Fed Funds rate set by the Federal Reserve very closely) plus a spread. Typically these deals are structured in layers with senior debt (which gets paid first in a bankruptcy) paying a lower spread than the subordinated debt. In the case of Twitter, there is $7 billion at SOFR+4.75%, 3 billion at SOFR+6.5% and 3 billion at SOFR+10%. These are high interest rates, reflecting the risky nature of the deal (even with a relatively low loan-to-value ratio for a leveraged buyout). SOFR+2% would be more usual for the senior paper in this kind of deal. The floating rate means that the value of the loans isn't particularly sensitive to interest rates - if they are worth less than par, it is because Twitter is less creditworthy than when the deal was done.

The business model of syndicated lending is that the banks in the syndicate are hoping to sell the loan to investors. But if something bad happens in the gap between the deal being agreed and the deal closing (in this case, it becoming clear that Musk had drastically overpaid for Twitter, and was going to make things worse by making a high-risk change to the business model) then they can't sell the loans for face value. In this case banks often hold onto the loans rather than selling at a loss.

It looks like the banks have finally been able to sell a big slice of the loans for 97 cents on the dollar. (Which could be enough to break even - the normal arrangement fee on these deals is 2%, but Musk might have paid 3%.) But the fact that they are still selling at a small discount suggests that Twitter is less creditworthy than it was at the time the purchase was announced. Whereas if Musk had successfully executed a turnround, Twitter would be more creditworthy than it was, and the debt would trade at a premium reflecting the high interest rate.

SOFR

(a replacement for LIBOR, if any readers remember that scandal from a zillion years ago and understand what LIBOR was from reading the news articles of the time)

My compliments for your elaboration, and a sincerely deserved AAQC.

It's profitable and, with the advertiser boycott broken,

Was it?

This is a sincere question- I wasn't tracking any particular industry movement, and last I'd heard was of a lawsuit against boycotters, rather than a breakdown and return of advertisers.

I think a few companies cracked and returned to buying ads on Twitter after Trump won, but I don't know if that's going to help much, Twitter always had pretty bad conversion rates. I wouldn't be surprised if the pre-Musk adspend was a subsidy, like those Raytheon ads on MSM.

I'm a little under the impression that Twitter was effectively never profitable, and was only sustained financially by backers entranced by Dorsey's personal charisma.

Many such cases. Reddit also never made profit, from what I recall.

I get scams, car dealerships, fast food, and pot- about 50/50 English/Spanish. Not exactly high status, but probably a decent sample of very heavy advertising industries.

All of the ads I ever see are tiny companies I’ve never heard of. Actually, “companies” might be a bit generous. Most of them seem like outright scams.

On a business level, Twitter is crushing it. It's profitable and, with the advertiser boycott broken, it's about to start absolutely gushing cash.

How would you know? They're private and don't report financials right?

I don't think expenses will be down that much. Staffing costs in 2022 was about a billion. So assume that dropped by 80%, R and D was 1.5 billion lets say he cut that by 80% as well, and then sales and marketing was about another billion.

Even if he was as ruthless with all those he's cut maybe 2.5 billion. Which is a lot! But it doesn't look like most of the other fixed expenses could drop much. So it's more likely expenses are around 2.5 billion still at a minimum. And possibly with R and D particularly he might not have been able to cut so deeply but for sake of argument lets say he did.

Revenue was 3.5 billion in 2023. Looks to be about 2.9 - 3.1 billion for 2024 according to Twitter's own figures submitted as part of their applications for licensing for money transmission. But debt servicing costs are about 1.2 billion per year. So predicted loss of ~0.5-0.8 billion for the year would be more likely. It's going to take some growth before it is making multiple billions per year, just looking at the figures. Not impossible, but the debt servicing costs are off setting at least some of the savings Elon made, and self-reported revenue still has dropped from 2023 to 2024 so I can't see a way it is making multiple billions right now.

He has to find a way to arrest the decline in revenue if he wants to be making such a profit I should think.

A couple investors have come out and said that it pivoted to profit in Q4 last year. Can't vouch for accuracy.

Amazon and Apple have also resumed or increased (can't remember which) their advertising on the platform.

Yeah if everything went perfectly they might just be in profit. More importantly will be revenue through 2025 which unless they have to reveal figures when applying for more licenses we may or may not find out about.

#2 jogged my memory of some insane ads for the Marines I remember from when I was a kid. They leaned hard into the challenge but with a fantasy element as well. To a teenage boy, it made being a Marine the coolest-looking occupation imaginable.

Chess is one I remember vividly, and especially the one with the lava monster in the battle arena, which today I learned is called Contest of Honor. Even as a kid I knew it was ridiculous but it still stirred something visceral in my naive little heart.

Do they actually need to hire conservatives? Just kicking our a lot of liberals would achieve the objectives. DOGE's prime objective is to deplatform leftists and they are doing so at an incredible rate. If the left lost its armies of professional activists they would be heavily undermined. Killing USAID doesn't just hit wokeness in America, it hits wokeness globally. The issue with building a right wing bureaucracy is that bureaucracies naturally tend toward the left.

DOGE just needs to turn thousands of full time activists away from their activist career and give them new careers selling real estate, managing paperwork at a hospital or SEO-blogging.

For those on the fringe right, imaging what the right could achieve with tens of thousands of full time activists with billions in funding and top tier connections. Now imagine losing that.

My prediction is that we are going to find that a lot of people aren't actually as woke as we thought. They just played around with it. The people who wanted to defund the police would never walk through the ghetto at night alone with no police. The middle class posers talk about body positivity and trans rights while being skinny and living hetronormatively. They love diversity on twitter but live in an all white neighbourhood.

My prediction is that we are going to find that a lot of people aren't actually as woke as we thought. They just played around with it. The people who wanted to defund the police would never walk through the ghetto at night alone with no police. The middle class posers talk about body positivity and trans rights while being skinny and living hetronormatively. They love diversity on twitter but live in an all white neighbourhood.

Yeah. This is the luxury beliefs hypothesis.

One startling stat I saw recently from Rob Henderson: Among Yale graduates in their forties, 90% of men are employed but only 50% of women are.

The true elite still live the 1950s lifestyle. They've merely denied this luxury to everyone else by imposing a degenerate belief system on those who don't have the resources to overcome it.

I think there are a lot of the true believers in government posts, because the person most likely to take a job in government is the one with the least realistic outlook on most issues mostly for lack of experience. They’ve never been to a ghetto at all with or without police, they don’t know anything about people who live there.

Second, excluding the very top tiers of government, the job is one that you take as a middle class job of last resort. Thus those in the government are likely to be uncritical of anything popular that they’ve been told. They went from their communications degree at some middling university to answering emails on behalf of the government because the6 honestly cannot get a middle class position in the private sector.

Put those together, and you end up with isolated mandarins who believe exactly what the cathedral has told them about the world and who know that not toeing the line is dangerous anyway.

They’ve never been to a ghetto at all with or without police, they don’t know anything about people who live there.

Maybe at the federal level, but some of the most experienced at the local level are certainly civil servants. The police are mostly responding to calls in the bad parts of town, as are the paramedics and fire fighters. Even the health inspectors are boots-on-the-ground visiting all the establishments in the city on a regular basis. Much more so than your corporate desk jockeys or even service workers. Maybe your plumbers and electricians make it out to those areas too, though.

The police are mostly responding to calls in the bad parts of town,

I'm pretty sure that rank-and-file police are more sympathetic to the Republicans than the average person.

I just did a bunch of googling and Google absolutely refused to give me the stats. I smell the stink of filtered search results.

Anyways, duckduckgo.com gave me this interesting 2016 article.

A total of 3,652 working officers responded.

Out of that population of working officers who plan to vote in the November election, 84% say they support Donald Trump. Hillary was supported by 8%, Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson received 5%, and "other" received 3%.

But that's just subscribers to this cop website clicking an option, not a rigorous polling method. On the other hand, geeze that's lopsided. Hillary barely beating out Gary Johnson with single-digit percentage support.

For another datapoint, the NYPD union went hard for Trump.

Tradesmen and certain service workers make it into... interesting areas. Corporate workers don't.

Just by numbers most people in government posts are people who deal with the public and just want a job. Your description really only applies at management layers and above. Remember only a third of federal employees even have a degree let alone one in communications or similar, and many of those are in the Medical field as part of the VA and the like. Entertainingly USAID is the best counter-example with two thirds of its workforce having an advanced degree or higher! But that is not the norm across the Federal bureaucracy.

Your social security local office people are dealing with being yelled at by people losing their welfare and the like, they are VERY familiar with the lower/underclass and all their foibles and are probably not true believers in ideology as much as they are average workers worrying about making ends meet. Their direct managers will be as well. The local DMV is staffed by people from or close to the ghetto in fact here, so that wouldn't apply even for a lot of local government jobs. Remember most government jobs just by numbers are front facing. It wasn't until I moved to the higher echelons in the Civil Service I found all the politics and classics degree types.

From the point of view of the Federal government that would probably be the Senior Executive Service, of which there are about 9,000. If I were wanting to re-organize the Federal bureaucracy I would start with those 9,000 because they manage large projects and departments (basically the steps below political appointees) But of the sheer scale of the government in the US the vast majority do not appear to match your description.

In other words, the person most likely to take a government post is a non-degree having, neo-customer service worker, who (if you have never worked a customer facing job like that) will be very clear about how the rubber meets the road. Your Ivory Tower idea really only applies to a small minority in the upper ends of the government (but they are of course much more influential.)

Most civil servants, numerically, have perfectly intelligible job titles like 'VA nurse', 'mail carrier', and 'border patrol agent'. None of these things require a degree in communications and all of them are things normal working class people take as a job, on the same terms and for the same reasons as they would take a job doing the equivalent for someone else. You're really only talking about senior managers of bureaucrats.

Second, excluding the very top tiers of government, the job is one that you take as a middle class job of last resort.

In addition to what @SSCReader said, this is simply incorrect. And kind of ironic, because when people complain about the "generous salaries and great benefits" that feds get, that is only kind of true with respect to feds doing blue collar or very light white collar work. Admin assistants, HR people (hate them all you want but someone has to actually process paperwork for new hires, retirees, pay issues, etc.), installation and logistics, motor pool and janitorial services, etc., as well as many specialized government functions like IRS auditors and accountants - these are jobs where a GS employee might make more that his or her private sector counterpart. The job stability is a further bonus, which means many people do not see a government job as a "middle class job of last resort."

Now if you look at tech workers- software developers, engineers, research scientists, etc. - they are usually making considerably less than their private sector counterpart. They might take the government job because they want the stability and to get out of the contractor look-for-a-new-job-every-two-years rat race, they might take it because they want the work-life balance (government workers are almost never required to work more than a standard 40 hour week), they might genuinely believe in the mission of the agency they are with or find it to be interesting work. But they are generally speaking not losers who couldn't get a job anywhere else either.

Your "isolated mandarins" mostly applies to the folks at the top who do nothing but attend meetings all day in DC, or a certain tier of low-level workers who got an in early (maybe with a "useless communications degree" but often with no degree at all) and have never known anything but government work.

These people mostly don't live in ghettos (though many do live in working class neighborhoods in Baltimore or DC), but they mostly aren't living in those McMansions in NOVA either (those aren't government workers, those are lobbyists, contractors, lawyers, and other politician-adjacent people). They know plenty about the area and have plenty of contact with "the real world." I don't know where you get this fantasy that all government workers are "true believers" living in some rarefied academic bubble, and as for the idea that they just "uncritically believe anything popular that they've been told" - well, speaking of generalizations based on anecdata, have you ever actually met a FAANG employee? (Yeah, we have some here - and my point stands. Everyone, especially here, thinks they are an independent critical thinker unswayed by what moves the herd.)

The true elite still live the 1950s lifestyle. They've merely denied this luxury to everyone else by imposing a degenerate belief system on those who don't have the resources to overcome it.

What's the degenerate belief system, how was it imposed, and what resources are needed to overcome it?

The sexual revolution; no fault divorce combined with welfare for single mothers; more than two times the average income.

What's the degenerate belief system?

Promiscuity, atheism, drug use, moral relativism, transsexuality, etc..

How was it imposed

Perhaps imposed is the wrong word. Merely "pushed". Elites promoted the degenerate belief system in, i.e., universities and media, while not actually practicing it themselves. Single motherhood is common in the working class but rare in the upper class.

And it's possible for elites to be atheist drug users and be just fine. But it doesn't work for the lower classes.

What resources are needed to overcome it

Strong social ties. Money.

Here's another example of a luxury belief. Climate change. Do elites really believe in near-term climate change? Not really. After all, they keeping bidding up the prices of luxury real estate in West Palm Beach and Nantucket. But they are happy to suggest that others pay higher taxes to prevent it or, worse, that they must let "climate refugees" into their communities.

None of these thoughts are new or original to me. I'm kind of surprised you've never heard this if you visit this forum regularly.

Perhaps imposed is the wrong word. Merely "pushed". Elites promoted the degenerate belief system in, i.e., universities and media, while not actually practicing it themselves.

Do you draw a distinction between "Elites promoted the degenerate belief system" and "Elites questioned the assumption that the belief system was degenerate?" Is it normal to practice all things one thinks should be less stigmatized than they presently are?

I'm kind of surprised you've never heard this if you visit this forum regularly.

Motters throw around phrases like "degenerate belief system" too much to infer what belief system they're referring to.

I hesitate to accept the term "deplatform" for people whose political beliefs affect how they do their jobs.

It matches the denotation perfectly: they had a platform (government-funded contracts/publications/activities), and now they don't. The connotation got all screwed up because of cancellation campaigns, so I share your hesitation.

Taking my tax dollars to fund a transgender opera in Columbia is fraud to me. I'm pretty sure that whatever congress appropriated didn't say "transgender opera in Columbia" and stealing those appropriations for woke activism fits neatly into the definition of fraud.

A big thing on comment sections I’m seeing is something like ‘ just because you don’t like it doesn’t make it wasteful spending / fraud ‘

But transgender opera in a foreign country is one of hundreds of such things I think 90% of the country would say that their tax dollars shouldn’t fund.

I’m pretty happy calling it fraud as well.

America isn't a direct democracy. The people elect representatives, and then the representatives decide what to do. If the people don't like what the representatives do, their only recourse is to elect different representatives next time; they don't get to simply overrule the representatives' decisions while in office through a majority vote. There would then be no point in having representatives in the first place.

It's not fraud. It's stupid and wasteful, but the money was probably allotted for bringing feminism and gender education to Latin America.

Unironically, this is why we need to bring back earmarks. Congress needs to go back on the record and be more prescriptive in specifying where and how appropriated funds should be spent. Congress did away with ‘pork barrel spending’ over a decade ago and the result hasn’t been a decrease in federal spending. Rather, it just relieves Congress of accountability and permits the kind of opaque ‘fraud’ exemplified here to take root.

Isn't there a time limit on DOGE? I guess for Noah's hypothesis to be true, there would need to be a plan to set up a Federalist Society-type body within the civil service after DOGE has finished up.

I guess we'll need to see what happens later on to test it. It wouldn't shock me to see JD Vance go on a spree of political appointing over the next few years to put these conservative civil servants in place, but right now it all looks a bit too chaotic to be that well planned.

Of course it is ideologically motivated. is this a surprise?

I'd be more convinced if there had been a clear effort to recruit conservatives, prior to this

Isn't that what Project 2025 actually was? Not just the think-tank collection of essays that everyone was mad about - a large component was to have people apply over the last four years to be vetted. https://www.project2025.org/personnel/ and https://www.project2025.org/training/presidential-administration-academy/ for example.

Given how low-level the P25 training videos I watched were, I didn't take them seriously.

I think thats talking about the higher-level positions, where such vetting has happened by ~every administration except Trump I.

They had hours and hours of high school-level training videos on government functions, so hopefully they didn't think they could find enough conservatives with a basic understanding of government to staff the entire administrative state (even after cuts), because the alternative is that they didn't think they could find enough conservatives with a basic level of government for just the "higher-level positions, where such vetting has happened by ~every administration except Trump I." (On the other hand, Rick Perry didn't know what the Department of Energy did, both when he ran on eliminating it or when he was asked to be its Secretary, so the latter is possible...)

Well, because it was Noah who reached the conclusion, I am actually disinclined to believe it is correct.

I think that there will be some featherbedding where Conservative allies are given some cushy positions after the departments have been razed or cleared of Prog staffers, but I doubt they do 1:1 replacement and keep running the various orgs as if nothing changed.

Elon didn't take over twitter, fire 80+% of the staff, and then refill the positions with his buddies/ideological allies, did he?

Even if Elon took over Twitter, fired 100% of the staff, and refilled 20% of the staff with buddies/ideological allies, that's downsizing, not merely landing your buddies spots. If your goal is to land your buddies spots you fire 20% of the staff and replace them with your buddies.

It seems plausible to me that stocking the bureaucracy with allies is a goal but frankly that codes more to me as Trump (or any politician, each turnover election they replace the political appointees for a reason!) than it does Elon. I think Elon actually cares a lot about competency and meritocracy.

The difference is that Musk pays the twitter staff (as a part owner), not the taxpayers, so incentives are a little bit different. Hiring bunch of loyalists as patronage would hurt his bottom line.

One problem with this is it helps those who want us to conflate wokeness with basic decency.

...despite having himself gone to war on X against people making similar tweets.

Was there a link here that didn't copy over?

When I asked about DOGE's supposed hypocrisy last week, I got a deeply unsatisfying response that relied on hypotheticals and vibes. I suspect this is more of the same, but I'd like to be proven wrong.

Has Elon Musk fired or pushed for the firing of any left-winger for offences similar to that DOGE employee? While we're at it I'll repeat the question from last week: has any left-winger in the American public sector been fired for similar conduct?

The closest recent example I can think of is that FEMA worker who was fired for giving instructions not to go to Trump supporting houses during hurricane Helene disaster relief. It's not exactly the same though, because what that person did was in an official capacity I think? Though being charitable maybe it was really said in jest.

Also, it was not done in a vacuum with the Democrats in full control, it was done after the election, when it was made abundantly clear a large part of the american electorate had beef with the administration, so making a few public sacrifices probably seemed wise. So it's not the same as the Republicans handing over scalps of their own when they have a trifecta, the SC and >50% public approval (at least for the WH).

The closest recent example I can think of...

Granted, I can't think of a closer one either.

There's a huge gap between pseudonymous shitposts and a government agent directing their subordinates. The raw content of their statements is similar enough (not actually that similar, but I can't be picky), but context is everything.

I think they confirmed that it was both serious and not actually her fault, because she was just passing down orders from FEMA HQ. But they threw her under the bus and pretended she was a rogue agent, with no further investigation.

Wouldn't conservatives get want what they want just by driving out anyone? The "replacement" part seems like a superflous second order effect when the goal is "shrink the gov't"


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