This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Some thoughts on the infamous OPM e-mail:
Whether the OPM e-mail asking federal employees to send a five bullet point list of what they achieved in the last week to a OPM e-mail address apparently controlled by Musk and/or @DOGE has turned into an even bigger scissor statement that is usual for US partisan politics. What is going on? (Well, it seems like it was an unconventional proof-of-liveness check on the federal employee base with no plan to read the responses, but I am more interested in the response)
First point - if this came from management, it would be a completely reasonable request. It would be odd if it came from senior management rather than your direct line manager (does a top executive have time to read all those replies?) but not necessarily irregular. It is the kind of thing I can absolutely imagine the CEO doing at a founder-mode startup with a few thousand employees. But it didn't come from management. It came from HR (literally, in the sense that the sender shows up as "HR" in Outlook, and in practice in that it came from OPM, which is effectively HR for the civilian federal government). Indeed, it came from an anonymous role account in HR. (Musk tweeted that the e-mails originated with him, but two courts have ruled, at Musk's request, that Musk is a notorious shitposter and it is legally unreasonable to take a Musk tweet seriously, so they are still legally anonymous)
If I received such an e-mail from HR in my day job at a bank (and I don't think any other large manager-mode organisation would be different), it would be unprofessional to do what the e-mail says and send a quick response cc my direct line manager. In a normal corporate (or, I assume, public sector) environment, you take at least some steps to make sure you don't accidentally become a patsy in someone else's political maneuver against your boss or department. So if I got such an e-mail, my immediate response would be to forward to my line manager* with a note saying something like "Not sure what is going on here - will hold off on replying until you are able to investigate" - and if I did eventually reply, I would agree the reponse with my manager. But the more likely outcome (unless senior management had been warned about the exercise beforehand) would be that the rapid large-scale escalation would lead to the head of the department sending an all-staff e-mail saying "Please don't respond until we have investigated what is going on here" and trying to get hold of someone in the CEO's office urgently. (And struggling to do so, because every senior manager in the organisation would be doing the same thing).
And this is just looking at the office politics perspective, From the infosec angle, this is worse. The e-mail said "don't send classified information", but if you work in a job where you are actually trying to keep secrets, there isn't a short, safe unclassified summary of what you did last week. I am not an expert on the US classification system, but I do know that producing an unclassified summary of classified information (including, for example, the classified information you worked on in the last week) is difficult work that only a few people in each department are qualified to do. The rule in corporate finance departments at banks (where almost all staff have access to market-moving non-public information such as upcoming mergers) and it is "Do not discuss live deals with anyone outside the department, even in general terms." For a corporate financier, sending a meaningful response to that e-mail would be a firing offence. The various department heads (including Trump's own political appointments like Kash Patel) in national security related departments who told their staff not to respond are doing the obviously correct thing.
tl;dr - the freakers-out are right - sending out an all-staff e-mail of this type from HR was irregular, and would have been massively disruptive to any large organisation other than a startup used to working around a hyperactive micromanaging founder-CEO.
* If the rumours are true that Musk is sending these e-mails from a jury-rigged server rather than an official secure US government system, then the e-mail would show up as external in Outlook, and my actual immediate response would be to report it to IT security as a possible phishing attack.
Public servants have the pleasure of serving outside of the strictures of capitalism. The park service guy whose job it is to tell tourists about the flowers every day has an absurd privilege that this is what his job gets to be.
The idea that these people are seething THIS much about simply being asked what they do is infuriating to me. The American taxpayers work as de facto indentured servants for almost a third of their working lives to pay the salaries of these people. The balls for them to freak out and do these petty protests (hang a flag from the top of El Capitan) is ridiculous and embarrassing.
You’re a public servant. If you don’t want to be accountable to the actual president of the United States, then go try your luck getting a job telling people about the flowers in the private sector. You might be surprised at how many jobs there are for that with a typical HR structure (my guess is: 0. The closest would be working as a grounds keeper for some oligarchs garden, maybe?)
This is flatly wrong. Less than half of federal spending goes on salaries, and among this by far the largest group of employees is the military.
I think that federal contractors and weapons manufacturers should be under even MORE scrutiny than park rangers and USAID trans-musical directors, and I assume (hope) anybody taking a salary from the military is already under intense scrutiny all the time.
This argument doesn’t move my needle at all.
This is a total non-sequitur, I was merely responding to the characterisation from the above comment.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Even half is incredibly generous. The actual fraction of the federal budget that is employee expenditures is in the 5 to 6 percent range.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Actually gonna make an account just for this comment.
I highly doubt there's a guy whose only job is to sit around and talk about flowers all day. I've worked with state botanists and park rangers before and I can assure you that they're tracking and recording all sorts of information about plant health, species diversity and stuff like that too on top of the typical work of making sure that people are following the rules (one place for example called Rocky Face Mountain in NC has a lot of endangered and rare plants so people come trying to collect them which endangers the populations there).
Even if that's all they did was sit around and tell tourists about plants all day, that would still a job regardless because public education is a form of work. Again, it's not just what they do, they're expected to do all sorts of different things but "telling tourists about the flowers" requires a bunch of domain knowledge about the local flora, which is a lot more complex than you might think. Especially since we tend to set up a fair bit of these parks in areas where biodiversity is high like Yosemite or the aforementioned Rocky Face. Our parks are like museums, but of nature. People love museums, people love zoos, and people love the parks and they like hearing and seeing and learning about cool things on the parks. We have one mountain (I forget the name I only went twice) where they have a bunch of signs set up on the trails explaining the history of the mountain, various plants, etc and it's actually a pretty popular spot for school trips.
It does actually happen in the private sector. One of my biology professors had personally met and worked with Tim Sweeney when he bought up a lot of land in NC for preservation. I didn't hear too much details on what they did (after all it was just a side topic in class) but lots of people like nature and they like knowing about nature and preserving nature.
Their work helps to create awesome resources like this https://auth1.dpr.ncparks.gov/flora/index.php. I don't know the other states resources but we have entire databases around what plant species occur in what counties, their various different attributes and descriptions, etc. Natural plant diversity is an important part of the ecosystem, from the beetles/flies/bees that pollinate them to the herbivores that eat them, to the carnivores that eat those. Also good proof that they're not just "telling tourists about flowers"
Which leads back around to how they are under a lot of threat, even plants that are famous worldwide like the Venus fly trap exists almost entirely within a 50 mile radius of Wilmington NC, and despite how easy it is to get legal seeds and plants now they still have to monitor and track for poachers and illegal collectors threatening the local populations. Hey, that related back to part 1!
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/national-park-ranger-fired-dream-job-emotional-viral-letter/
Here's a quote from this person's letter:
You're right, it sounds like some of the other things they do other than talk about plants is talk about bird songs.
And this is abstractly valuable. Do you think this means they should be able to demand that people make sacrifices in their own lives to give money for this?
I'd say that they have a responsibility to recognize that demanding we all pay for this stuff is a privilege, and recognize that as much as they might not enjoy, they might have to do things like send 5 bullet points describing what they do every week. I think it would be reasonable to ask them to send an email every day detailing what they did. I've certainly had various slack bots and things that have asked that of me, and I didn't throw a protest or pen and melodramatic letters about it.
A random worker writing a letter trying to appeal to parents is not some full job description of everything they do. If that's genuinely what you got your idea of park service work from then you should reconsider how you source your information and beliefs going forward.
Another topic you don't seem to have any knowledge about. Maintaining a healthy ecosystem and biodiversity isn't some abstract value, it helps keeps the world we're living in stable. This is the system of our world and we are not yet an interstellar species. A nd it helps with things like pharmaceutical research. So much of the medicine we have right now comes from random plants. Famously aspirin came from Willow bark originally but we also have stuff like heart medications from Foxglove research. You can find tons of examples like this from random plants and animals. Likewise you can get from basic internet searches plenty of studies talking about this very thing https://aacrjournals.org/cancerdiscovery/article/14/3/392/734905/Biodiversity-Medicine-New-Horizon-and-New https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5735771/ etc etc etc you can look up for plenty of examples.
You’re wrong about where I get my characterization of federal workers. Especially parkies.
Correct. The people who we hired to do it should take their job more seriously.
That was the source you gave for your information.
That was a reference I gave to a story that has been in the news, and the one that I alluded to.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I’m pretty much here. I don’t understand just why these people are so allergic to the idea of having to prove to representatives of the elected government that they did five productive things in a week. Like how out of touch are they, that they don’t think they need to answer a question that most people with private sector jobs have to answer — what is it you actually do here, any why should you continue to get a paycheck from us. Rest assured, for even the lowest employee of any private business, if they are only doing 5 things in an entire week, they would be laid off as soon as possible. It’s an absurdly low standard. I think in most jobs if you only did five things a day, you’d be out. That’s all the public wants— they want everyone in the public sector to actually be held to some standard of actual productive work. We’re paying for it, and its unreasonable that they don’t think they need to do anything.
I work for the government, I have no problem sending 5 bullets to my manager every week (I've been doing that every week since I joined in various ways). My team is small and we do quite a bit that sounds good in a bullet point. The issue is sending information about a whole lot of my work (unclassified but I work with private corporate data) is very restricted and some of those restrictions are on disclosing processes and operations outside of my agency. So it's trivial to write 5 bullet points to my boss or his boss or the director if I need to, but when they are going aoutside my agency it's much trickier. I have a bunch of laws I need to follow to make sure that nothing I summarize could be construed as a disclosure that violates on of the many laws meant to protect the information corporations trust us to use legally. If I report over 3 weeks that I met with the corporation to discuss a change and then that the resolution of that change have I disclosed enough of a business operation or process to violate the law? I'm not an attorney, I have no idea, but but if that resolution takes 10% of my week, and solved problems that a dozen people have been asking me to fix for the last month, I can be pretty proud of getting that fixed internally. And if there's a fuck up I face criminal penalties.
Further, OPM doesn't have an agreement with my agency to protect the information we share with them, so I also have to consider that if a competitor FOIAs something that includes the data in my bullet points, have I given away anything that could aggregate to being competitive information. We can laugh and deny the attempt but OPM doesn't have to.
There are a ton of things that have to be considered when sending information outside an agency because we're bound by various laws and legal agreements on what we can do but the other agency isn't. That's not a great result but the alternative is something where every agency is forced to play under the most restrictive rules of all agencies and that's much much worse.
I'm not bitching about this on /r/fednews I wouldn't post there or any of the other fed reddits, but it's not as simple a request as it seems like it should be.
More options
Context Copy link
I'm half convinced all of the indignant posts on /r/fednews from so-called federal employees are North Korean agitprop designed to repulse ordinary people and get them excited about firing them in service of destroying state capacity.
I mean you can have too much state capacity. In fact, I think we passed that point before my birth. There are very few aspects of modern life that aren’t touched on by the government. And globally, we give out a lot of cash with very little vetting of where the money goes and what it does once it gets there. I think the excitement is about finally clawing back a bit and making sure that we’re actually benefiting from the money spent, and that any aid money given out goes to something beneficial to both the country it’s given to and the interests of the USA.
More options
Context Copy link
North Korean secret base:
Kim jong-un: "How do we fight the Americans today, general?"
General: "We must destroy their very foundations, your excellency"
Kim: "And what is the foundation of a modern society?"
General: "Education, of course"
Kim: "Then we shall destroy their... Department of Education"
Both: "WAHAHAHAHAHA"
Yeah, no is going to miss these workers.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That heavily depends on your definitions. I've done a dozen things per day or one thing for an entire week depending on how you lump or split the tasks.
One example of a morning (today):
One example of a week (most of a year ago):
(The weeks before and after that were similar, but not quite as monotonous)
I've had weeks that could be accurately described as "tried to figure out why functionality X in project Y stops working on a seemingly random basis" (it turned out to be a cpu bug).
I've burnt more weeks of my life than I care to admit on building throwaway prototype proof-of-concepts that showed that said concept did not, in fact, work.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I don't know about your workplace, but I've never had a job where I had to prove that to HR (the rough private sector equivalent of OPM here) or shareholders (the rough private sector equivalent of the "public" here) directly. That's always been strictly between me and my direct management.
Not in a formal sense, but managers are held to justifying every employee, and yes, employees do have to sometimes write up their own job descriptions to send to HR. Other times, your direct supervisor informs HR of what tasks you are doing. The only really unusual thing is that the employee is asked to send that information directly to DOGE, and that there aren’t these kinds of job audits happening regularly (which is why DOGE is necessary). The interesting bit is that not only are the employees shocked by the demand that they show some form of actual productivity, but their immediate supervisors are telling them not to comply. If there’s a giant red flag of “these people know their employees do shit all all day” it’s them saying “don’t you dare tell DOGE what you do all day.”
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
yeah, but the upside is limited. no 'exits' or huge bonusses with park job. most of the waste is not from these jobs; it's medical costs when people get sick and cannot pay, for example. that is a big one.
That applies to a vanishingly small % of the private workforce, though.
That's what people are missing here. A 100k remote job with minimal requirements and a generous pension? Where you can't be fired? That is a dream job for 90% of the population, even if it pales in comparison to what FAANG employees get.
You don't get exits or huge bonuses by managing a Panda Express either. In fact, almost no one gets exits or huge bonuses. Imagine thinking that is normal.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I wouldn't call that a 'waste', per se, if the medical services billed for are needed by the patient and actually provided to them. (If doctors are getting paid for procedures that were never performed, on patients who never existed, throw the Physicians' Desk Reference at them.)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
You're welcome to apply if it's such a good deal. Well, you aren't, because land management is in a hiring freeze, but you would have been before Jan 20.
Actually, I did, and they didn't take me because I'm not a DEI-favored category or a disabled veteran. When I worked government HR I noticed that disabled veterans took up the majority of our white male hiring quota. I only got that HR job because I can speak Spanish, which put me in a different hiring pool with fewer disabled veterans in it.
More options
Context Copy link
Securing federal employment is, in fact, incredibly competitive exactly because the job is such a good deal. For large swathes of educational backgrounds it is not just a competitive compensation package, but top 5% or so. What this means, in practice, is the federal workforce is highly credentialed. Lots of people with obscure masters and Ph.D degrees who some computer software and some generic HR person found to pattern match to a long winded job description.
Do you have a specific example in mind? Within land management, it's been my experience that if you know how to jump through the hoops on USAJobs (which takes a little Googling but is hardly a special qualification) and are willing to apply to multiple remote duty locations, entry-level jobs are pretty much there for the taking. There are some competitive positions (climbing rangers in Denali NP, hazard tree removal in Yosemite, smokejumpers and most hotshot crews) but they're competitive for a reason and nobody starts out there. There are a lot of remote duty locations that would like to hire more people than the number of minimally-qualified applicants they receive.
I'll also note that if there is, say, a GS-5/6/7 ladder biology tech position in a hypothetical DOI pipevine swallowtail conservation program for which a Ph.D. on the pipevine swallowtail is a de facto requirement (and I emphasize I don't know of such a thing), 1) that seems like a fairly reasonable meritoratic outcome and 2) it's not actually all that great of a deal, is it now.
My experience is with engineers and lawyers. Outside of the prestige positions like DOJ which are a revolving door between biglaw and the feds (and even then, the career prosecutors tend to be unimpressive compared to the shortlived people who leave), these agencies generally serve as landing spots for people who have washed out or are tired of actually working.
And even your hypothetical doesn't seem like a bad deal for this person. What good is a swallowtail Ph.D in the world? Its actually a great example of the problem with federal hiring. That person is unlikely to be qualified to do any real work at all. They have a silly degree indicating a silly personality.
And yet they're competitive for the top 5% compensation packages for their educational background? My guess is that it's probably a smaller paycheck but with shorter hours and better job stability, which isn't necessarily off the market average seller's indifference curve. In the other direction, it's worth noting that sometime in the last decade OPM spun up special non-GS pay scales for doctors and IT guys because even with benefits and job stability the GS compensation packages weren't attracting enough new hires.
That's market heterogeneity for you. Grinding billable hours at biglaw isn't a bad deal for the right kind of person, spending a month at a time at sea in the Alaskan fishing fleet isn't a bad deal for the right kind of person, cutting firewood for cash sale when you feel like it and living cheap isn't etc. But none of it, in expectation, is a free lunch. You could argue, of course, that the government shouldn't be in the pipevine swallowtail business at all, but that seems to me like an entirely separate matter.
It isn't though. That is a major issue with federal employment, that there is no similar market based job, because there is no market for the "skills" for huge swathes of the workforce. They'd have to take large pay decreases going into the private sector because they are, typically, extremely over-credentialed but also not very good at doing things that produce value. Much of the government is full of pipevine swallowtails. Large numbers of people who's job is to give out free money for various projects.
If your definition of "real value" implies a market outcome, sure, that follows. I still think this is separate from the question of whether Federal employment is a good deal for the employee, but at this point I'm content to let anyone still reading make up their own mind on a) the object-level goodness of the deal and b) whether these are, in fact, separate questions.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If you are a non-minority non-veteran, those jobs are all but closed to you.
I've definitely met enough white guys with no military service working those jobs to say this is false.
He's directionally correct. I was an HR manager for a federal agency for a couple years. I was the only white male who wasn't a disabled veteran, I got the job by having the highest test score of anybody fluent in Spanish in our district. (so essentially I got the job for being Hispanic)
You get 5 bonus points on the exam for minority status and 5 points for disabled veteran status. People assume this is 5% but it's actually 5 questions on a 35 question test. If a black disabled veteran gets a 26/35 on the exam, they get an adjusted score of 36/35 and hired over a non-disabled veteran white male who got a 35/35. The test is really quite easy and most applicants get close to a perfect score, making it nearly impossible to get in without qualifying for "bonus points". This is why the postal service has so many black employees.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Somebody forgot to tell me or damn near everyone I work with, I guess. (Quite a few Mexicans, but there are a lot of Mexicans living around here in general and working outside around here specifically.).
I won't say affirmative action in government land management hiring has never happened, but it's massively overblown in online discussions by people who think it's called the National Forest Service, don't know the difference between district rangers, LEO rangers, interp rangers, and backcountry rangers, have never submitted an application or visited a potential duty station or Googled "how to write a resume for USAjobs", etc. etc.
Mexicans are one of our DEI-favored groups so you're agreeing while pretending that you're not agreeing. Mexicans get the bonus points for being brown and Cubans don't (unless they're black). How many Cubans did you meet?
Approximately 100% of the Cubans in the surrounding three counties, so one guy. And he wasn't from there, he came there for the job.
I believe your observations, but I also believe my observations: it's been fairly easy for me to get land management jobs without any special status, I've worked with a bunch of guys who had the same experience, and minorities aren't overrepresented relative to their presence in the recruiting pool (local high school and junior college sports, general private sector blue-collar labor.). Were you working for a land management agency? Entry-level fire, at least, has been mostly direct hiring authority since 2020 or so, with no obvious change in the composition or quality of new hires, so I don't think the points system is even applicable--the postings would specifically say no vet pref. Before that, they asked for racial self-ID on USAJobs but not in the agency questionnaire where they ask about vet status, displaced Fed status, and how much of an expert you are with a shovel--which is not to say they weren't using the race data, but it does seem like further evidence against it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm glad to see the Space Force has begun recruitment, and avoided the accusations of ripping off 40k's Space Marines in favor of poaching Airborne infantry.
(I presume this isn't as exciting as it sounds haha)
Law enforcement officer, not low Earth orbit. (Yet.).
I suppose "officer" is redundant, I've generally heard them referred to as LEOs and I think the USAJobs postings usually say "ranger (law enforcement)".
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link