My Facebook feed is full of unhinged content from random pages I never followed or interacted with. I'd be fine with some edgy content, but there's limits to what I'd consider acceptable. Most recently I see these "memes" where it's literally just an image of Elon with a hand pointing a gun at him, and a caption saying suggesting he should be murdered. The most worrying part is that I don't know if this sentiment is actually widespread and a seriously held belief. It makes me worry that we might see a continued escalation of political violence this year.
jader201 30 days ago [-]
> The most worrying part is that I don't know if this sentiment is actually widespread and a seriously held belief. It makes me worry that we might see a continued escalation of political violence this year.
Maybe I’m just more aware of it now vs. 20-30 years ago, but I feel the division with our country just keeps growing more and more with each passing year/presidency.
And I feel like social media/FB play a big part in this. It seems the extremes on both sides just continue to grow more extreme. And I feel like if social media — and news media — would just go away, we’d see much less division/extremism.
But unfortunately extremism, shock, anger, and contempt for “the other side” is what gets clicks/views.
I don’t know what the solution is. Well, the solution is what I said: get rid of social & (extreme) news media. But there’s no way that will ever happen; extremism breeds extremism.
scarface_74 30 days ago [-]
> Maybe I’m just more aware of it now vs. 20-30 years ago, but I feel the division with our country just keeps growing more and more with each passing year/presidency.
I keep seeing this. Within my still living parents’ lifetime, people were literally and legally “divided” by Jim Crow laws and segregation. America wasn’t exactly a great egalitarian nation in the 60s.
Not to mention Vietnam and Kent State.
settsu 30 days ago [-]
I completely understand the frustration and the conclusion you arrived at. The problem is echo chambers existed before the advent of online social media. Safe to say they have existed since nearly the dawn of human consciousness.
The difference is that once algorithms could be optimized for "engagement", a company simply can't resist amping up the dopamine hits. Because the ultimate goal of those networks is persistent, unrelenting attention. They are for-profit businesses whose primary income is ads (upwards of 98% of Facebook/Meta revenue.)
So the more attention you can drum up, and the longer you can maintain it, the faster the money printer can go brrrr.
pjc50 30 days ago [-]
The norm of discouraging political violence has been eroded for quite some time. It's been common for US pro-gun politicians to use faces of their enemies as targets, and occasionally face-in-gunsight as political advertising. Then there's incidents like Kyle Rittenhouse and Luigi Mangione (naming individuals from both sides), and US states making it explicitly legal to hit protestors with cars. As well as the longstanding second amendment and mass shooting controversy.
Eventually an American will independently reinvent the car bomb, or someone on the left will decide to take a gun to a building containing political representatives.
SideburnsOfDoom 29 days ago [-]
> Eventually an American will independently reinvent the car bomb
Does Timothy McVeigh count?
ben_w 30 days ago [-]
> Eventually an American will independently reinvent the car bomb, or someone on the left will decide to take a gun to a building containing political representatives.
Personally, I'm surprised that the American right wing (including Trump himself!) didn't seem to stop being pro-gun even when two different people made an attempt at Trump:
If that didn't change their minds, I don't think anything can. Literal Jesus could descend from heaven on the wings of Biblically-accurate angels and tell them "When I said 'thou shalt not kill', I didn't give you any exceptions for self-defence, for stand-your-ground, or for the death penalty." and my expectation at this point is they'd not only ignore it, they'd call him 'woke' for suggesting it.
Molitor5901 30 days ago [-]
I loathe the AI and suggested content. I only want to see the content posted by people I have explicitly followed, I do not want to see what some random group or person posted. The inability to turn this off is the reason I stopped using Facebook. If I want to seek out groups and people I will do so on my own, I do not want a fire hose flooding my personal feed.
Yeah, but for non-partisan reasons. Are these people going to stick with Signal in 4 years if their preferred party is back in charge?
_fat_santa 30 days ago [-]
I find the reaction to DOGE quite fascinating and it's really exposed just how different some work cultures are.
In tech we face layoffs constantly, so much so that's not a huge shock when a FAANG lays off hundreds or even thousands. We might get a couple of stories if the layoff is particularly large but the general consensus is "this is the way of the world, go find another job". Contrast that with the stories we are seeing about DOGE and the general reaction to layoffs and contraction of several govt agencies.
I think the root of it lies in how both types of jobs are pitched. You get into tech knowing that you will most likely get laid off but you take the deal because compensation if very good in the field.
This is in stark contrast to how a government job is pitched, you won't make the best salaries there, but it's a safe steady job with loads of benefits and you can easily build a career inside just a single agency.
My personal feelings on this are mixed, on the one hand it always sucks to get laid off so I feel for the employees. But on the other hand, something like 40-50% of my paycheck goes out in taxes and I would prefer if my government actually spent it on things to improve my life versus dumb shit domestically or abroad.
Bhilai 30 days ago [-]
There will always be dumb shit in every kind of spending. Heck, my family and kids spend on dumb shit. I bet half of the Amazon orders going to people's places is dumb shit. Can there be cuts in spending and expenses of the government, the answer will always be yes but treating the federal government like a startup is the next level of dumb shit. Its specially being done by people who have no knowledge of government systems work. A lot of people and systems depend on smooth functioning of federal government. I guess fuck around and find out.
rob74 30 days ago [-]
Or rather, fuck around and others will find out. I'm not denying some of USAID spending may have been "dumb shit", but some of it was also very important. But you don't have to take my word for it, how about the words of a former UK prime minister: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/07/donald...
And, while the billions of dollars the US has spent per year on foreign aid until now sound impressive, if you compare the per capita amount with other rich countries, it's actually not that impressive (and these numbers include all foreign aid, not just USAID): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_foreign_aid#/med...
scott_w 30 days ago [-]
It’s not even good for the USA, long term. In today's The Rest is Politics, Rory Stewart highlighted that when the UK removed DFID and dropped its commitment to spending 0.7% of GDP on aid down to 0.5%, we went from being able to put in £100m to development projects to being able to commit £5m. He was, at an independent charity, able to put up £25m in comparison.
What kind of soft power can a nation wield when you’re being outspent 5-to-1 by a charity now?
pmg101 30 days ago [-]
Unfortunately the people doing the fucking around will not be the people finding out.
jhedwards 30 days ago [-]
> But on the other hand, something like 40-50% of my paycheck goes out in taxes and I would prefer if my government actually spent it on things to improve my life versus dumb shit domestically or abroad.
I agree here, but one thing that has come to light recently is that the federal work force is only ~6% of the federal budget. That means that most of those taxes are not going to pay the salaries of government workers.
Also, a lot of the money from our taxes goes to public health, safety, resource management, and infrastructure. I'm happy to pay for things like that. I don't doubt that there is significant waste as well, but there have been a lot of egregious lies lately about how much waste there is and _where_ that waste is located.
hackeraccount 29 days ago [-]
I agree a ton the budget is transfer payments. That said I live in the DC metro area and a ton of people are complaining to high heaven - and they aren't technically in the federal work force. They're contractors. People who's jobs depend in large part on federal grants.
walljm 30 days ago [-]
6% seems suspect. I would expect it to be higher... at least in the 20% to 30% range. Do you have a source?
FY 2022 spending was around $6.75 trillion, civilian pay was $271 billion, or around 4% of the spending for that year. You'll find the numbers have been hovering around 4-5% for quite a while.
walljm 29 days ago [-]
Ah, ok. Thank you. If you add in the 2.7% for military personel (which doesn't seem to be included here) then you get to about 6-7% of total spending.
toyg 30 days ago [-]
That actually looks par for the course in "western" governments. The only items going over 20% are typically related to pensions, social security, and health services. Everything else (in isolation) is basically a pittance.
Every publication I've looked at has the overall spending for federal employee salaries as around 280 billion. The total budget is around 6 trillion.
rgbrenner 30 days ago [-]
Except Congress decides what the government will spend money on. Impoundment of appropriated funds -- what DOGE is doing -- requires the consent of congress[0].
If the Impoundment Control Act is thrown out, no institution will be safe, including the military, social security and medicare. Every program will be at the whim of whatever administration is in power at the time. $50B effective military budget will finally be possible under the next democratic administration--no matter if congress disagrees.
And that's a very radical take on government. Even if that sounds good to you, the vast majority of americans do support at least some government programs. Social Security has significant support, for example.
> whatever administration is in power at the time. $50B effective military budget will finally be possible under the next democratic administration
Do you think there will be a next Democratic administration? The way things are going, the Republicans seem to be determined not to lose another election ever again. Sure, there will be elections, but there are elections in Russia, Belarus, Cuba, China and even North Korea too...
salawat 30 days ago [-]
An ideal operated as a verifiable, legally sanctioned Ponzi snd Congressional slush fund.
Great idea, sadly co-opted by other interests.
steveBK123 30 days ago [-]
FAANG employees & Fed employees took a very different trade though.
FAANG - You can have sky high compensation with moderate job security and roll-your-own (401K+savings) retirement. Note you mention 40-50% taxes which would imply you are in the sky high compensation bucket. You can also job shop and switch to any of a dozen competitors doing similar stuff.
Fed - You can have moderate compensation with sky high job security and good retirement benefits. Some of these jobs cap out at what FANG pays new grads in cash comp. You can't go work for a competing government like China or Russia, legally.
Jtsummers 30 days ago [-]
> You can't go work for a competing government like China or Russia, legally.
Feds can also be limited on who they work for or the kind of work they do after they leave government in the US private sector.
beej71 30 days ago [-]
> In tech we face layoffs constantly, so much so that's not a huge shock when a FAANG lays off hundreds or even thousands.
One other difference is that in tech we watch companies get mismanaged into the dirt and shrug it off. There'll be another one to replace it soon enough.
But I want to take a little more care with the government. Yes, there's inefficiency, but that doesn't mean the best approach to optimization is to just start shotgunning holes in the machine.
Maybe that approach works (?) for Twitter, but that kind of upheaval in the government will have serious repercussions that I don't think I want to be on the receiving end of.
I work for a state government, but I'm on a contract. They choose every year whether or not to renew it. So I get to enjoy the lower pay and the lack of job security. I don't know how many government employees are contract, but it's something to consider.
scarface_74 30 days ago [-]
The contrast is that there are these things called “laws” and the “constitution” where Congress passed laws and budgets and the President is supposed to execute those laws. No one expected a President to behave in an unconstitutional manner nor did they expect an unelected official to get access to their accounts.
Also do you realize that only 1% of the federal budget is for government workers?
And there is no way that 50% of your income goes to the Federal government. Even if you did make over $609K, only the money you made over that would be taxed at the 37% rate and Social security would have stopped way before that at $165K (?).
Also, when I got my Amazoned, I was relatively sure that they could keep their promise of paying my 3.5 months severance + paid out PTO that gave me 4 months pay.
Musk can’t even promise the people who sign that they will get paid past March.
walljm 30 days ago [-]
1% ??? that can't be true. the DoD's personel budget, by itself is 2.7% of the total budget for the whole federal government.
If his goal is to cut 10% of the employees That 10% is less than 1% of the budget.
walljm 29 days ago [-]
Ah, thank you. That's helpful.
walljm 30 days ago [-]
this was pulled from the 2024 monthly budget report from the treasury.
acomjean 30 days ago [-]
When I was an undergrad I had an engineering internship with the army Corp of Enigineers every summer in the 1990s.
It was a very professional environment. I ended up going to the private sector after (they had a RIF (reduction in force)) the year I graduated. But the government employment pitch was more stability, less compensation, better work life balance.
Honestly the engineering process wasn’t too different. The government projects were strictly funded, and used these cost codes where you had to bill every hour to a project. This was a PITA. The quality of the engineering designs wasn’t different.
The government job had some inefficienies because of a lot of process. Eg we got a plotter running and wanted to try a few different pens, so we ordered a small sampling. It got held up while they looked for cheaper prices, a process that probably cost more than the pens my boss pointed out. but I can see why they would try that process for big ticket items. When I ended up at a big company it was frankly similar.
One of my first engineering jobs in the private sector was capping a landfill that went privately managed, then when the management left they found 5 drums on site. Any savings by having the government turn over that contract were wasted by having us deal with that (turned out the drums were all rusted out, the contents long gone).
jisnsm 30 days ago [-]
It could be worse. I live in southern Europe and not only are civil servants virtually unfirable, they also have much better salaries and benefits than they would have in the private sector.
steveBK123 30 days ago [-]
In the US civil servants are generally hard to fire, and get good benefits, but their salary is far lower than private sector in most cases.
arlongparker 30 days ago [-]
I think it’s very different in tech where we are compensated quite well and losing a job doesn’t mean falling off the face of capitalism. Most of us are able to have modest savings but most Americans are barely hanging on.
alecco 30 days ago [-]
Good luck going past 40 in tech.
scarface_74 30 days ago [-]
50 here going strong and still an IC and I got my first job in BigTech at 46. When I lost my job in late 2023 I had three offers within three weeks including one that would have paid more than I was making - in cash - at BigTech. I didn’t want the stress and I wanted to get back to smaller companies.
When I was looking again last year it all took 3 weeks to get the offer I have now. It only took that long to get scheduled for all of the interviews from an internal recruiter reaching out to me.
localghost3000 30 days ago [-]
I'm almost 50 and doing fine. Maybe that wouldn't be the case if I was less experienced though.
settsu 30 days ago [-]
The fact that you see corporate layoffs and what Elon Musk is doing in the U.S. government as in any way remotely comparable is... troubling.
pjc50 30 days ago [-]
The government, and especially places like USAID, CDC, NIH and so on, tends also to have a sense of mission that's very different from the Silicon Valley one. People often accept the lower salaries and bureaucracy of the public sector because they want to make a positive difference in the world.
The UK civil service "fast stream" graduate training programme actually requires people to change roles every six months. I believe there are similar rules with a longer timeframe that cycle people through job roles later on in their career. These play a similar role to bank rules which require people to take two weeks contiguous holiday every year: it tends to expose any fraud that requires continuous coverup.
The libertarian anti-government position denies the possibility of these roles improving anything, which is why this conflict arises.
spiderfarmer 30 days ago [-]
It's never a good thing when the people who take on jobs in the public sector have to fear their own government. Especially when that government wilfully installs under-qualified and downright untrustworthy leadership.
lazide 30 days ago [-]
I’ve known a lot of gov’t workers over my not-super-short life. You will never find a group of people more distrusting of the gov’t, if not outright calling for it’s destruction.
Honestly, similar to software engineers and software.
spiderfarmer 30 days ago [-]
That might be a cultural issue then. From what I see in the USA people don’t even trust their own family members.
lazide 29 days ago [-]
it could also just be experience.
spiderfarmer 29 days ago [-]
The USA seems like a hellscape.
lazide 29 days ago [-]
most places are in their own ways, and wonderful and beautiful in others.
America seems to have flipped from exporting the ‘American Dream’ to the ‘American Nightmare’, so it’s a lot more in people’s face right now, but frankly every country has significant issues right now.
one of those ‘hard to see the mote in one’s own eye’ type of situations usually. except in some third world countries, it’s often pretty obvious then hah.
username332211 30 days ago [-]
Is it? Qin did conquer the 7 states. After the French revolution, France resisted the combined might of the rest of Europe by being unafraid to murder it's generals when they underperformed. The Soviet union is said to have reached it's apogee under Stalin.
If anything, history shows that ruling government officials by means of fear is very good sign for the nation, but tends to be harmful to the rulers.
ben_w 30 days ago [-]
You can't reach that conclusion by limiting to only examples where fear worked, as I can also point to Pol Pot, Mugabe, and the Kim dynasty of North Korea ruling by fear, and it being bad for those countries.
username332211 30 days ago [-]
This discussion isn't about generalized terror, it's about a policy of fear directed at people who work for the government. None of the people you listed directed their campaign of murders towards civil servants.
Pol Pot confined his cruelty towards the intelligent, Mugabe, North Korea mostly terrorizes the peasantry, Mugabe's victims were a revolving door of ethnic enemies.
It's quite a different thing to shoot an admiral to encourage the rest.
woooooo 30 days ago [-]
Counterpoint there would be Mao. Lots of fear and starvation, less impressive results until Deng started fixing things.
paganel 30 days ago [-]
[flagged]
regularjack 30 days ago [-]
Why would that be a good thing? Sounds like a bad thing to me
paganel 30 days ago [-]
It may sound like a bad thing for the American citizens that cherish imperialism and for the compradors here in Eastern Europe who directly profit from said American imperialism, but for the rest of us, normal people (both in the US and in Eastern Europe and other such parts of the American Empire) seeing USAID and NED gone is a gift from Heaven.
regularjack 29 days ago [-]
You still didn't explain why you think that.
nine_zeros 30 days ago [-]
Delete facebook and instagram. Use anything else. Much like moving away from twitter - nobody will really miss it.
chasing 30 days ago [-]
Americans in general need to get very used to having conversations only on secure channels.
taurknaut 30 days ago [-]
While I like many people have been doing this for years, it's not clear what this will actually solve. What will strategically benefit us is banding together in public, not talking in hushed tones in private.
ceejayoz 30 days ago [-]
Organizing publicly tends to require safe, advanced preparation in private.
pjc50 30 days ago [-]
Do not plan crimes over the internet. Your opsec is not good enough, and is only as good as the leakiest person in the group chat. Who may be an FBI agent.
As Sam Bankman-Fried learned, only certain people have political cover to commit crimes.
ceejayoz 30 days ago [-]
Who said anything about crimes?
Protests are legal; they still require organizing, and keeping bad-faith folks out of that planning process.
9rx 30 days ago [-]
A democracy is already organized.
But I suppose that's the problem. People stopped believing in democracy.
Vaslo 30 days ago [-]
What do you recommend?
i80and 30 days ago [-]
Signal is the gold standard. Eschew the desktop app if you're particularly security-sensitive
WolfeReader 30 days ago [-]
What's wrong with the desktop app?
throwpoaster 30 days ago [-]
Good for them. Being just 15 years late on tech adoption seems pretty quick for government.
_aleph2c_ 30 days ago [-]
I guess these federal workers haven't heard of Edward Snowden.
neuroelectron 30 days ago [-]
The idea that Federal workers should be accountable and their communications recorded and managed by their bosses is very old fashioned. Federal workers need to be able to engage with their interests no matter who the president is.
hsuduebc2 30 days ago [-]
Well they never should. There was some bizzare impression that corporations have some principle's. They don't and they never will that's not their purpose.
TriangleEdge 30 days ago [-]
Doesn't Facebook feed the beast with delicious personal data?
bhaney 30 days ago [-]
Better late than never
mupuff1234 30 days ago [-]
Just left WhatsApp in favor of Signal.
jhaddow 30 days ago [-]
Now I’m worried about what kind of conversations they were having on Facebook
ARandomerDude 30 days ago [-]
This whole situation is absolutely stunning to watch.
Sleazy government officials illegally order sleazy Facebook employees to censor people. Predictably, the government was caught because large groups of people conspiring to do something nefarious for extended periods of time ("conspiracies") are difficult to hide. When the government is caught illegally and unconstitutionally censoring its own people, the people get mad. And after all that, the sleazy media reports this as "poor, pitiful government workers just can't trust Facebook as a paragon of virtue anymore."
lesuorac 30 days ago [-]
> This whole situation is absolutely stunning to watch.
It is but not for the reason you think it is.
The twitter files are about a period of time where _Donald Trump was president_!
People go on-and-on about how twitter shadow bans people and lies about it. They never did any of that! "Shadowban" has a specific meaning and by that meaning they weren't shadowbanning. It'd be like saying a missed field goal is a "roughing the receiver penalty". It's just not what the words mean. When Twitter was asked, by Congress, if they artificially lowered the rankings of posts Twitter said yes. There is nothing hidden about this besides that fact that nobody watches congressional testimony and your hivemind doesn't surface any highlights opposing the hivemind's view.
Maybe I’m just more aware of it now vs. 20-30 years ago, but I feel the division with our country just keeps growing more and more with each passing year/presidency.
And I feel like social media/FB play a big part in this. It seems the extremes on both sides just continue to grow more extreme. And I feel like if social media — and news media — would just go away, we’d see much less division/extremism.
But unfortunately extremism, shock, anger, and contempt for “the other side” is what gets clicks/views.
I don’t know what the solution is. Well, the solution is what I said: get rid of social & (extreme) news media. But there’s no way that will ever happen; extremism breeds extremism.
I keep seeing this. Within my still living parents’ lifetime, people were literally and legally “divided” by Jim Crow laws and segregation. America wasn’t exactly a great egalitarian nation in the 60s.
Not to mention Vietnam and Kent State.
The difference is that once algorithms could be optimized for "engagement", a company simply can't resist amping up the dopamine hits. Because the ultimate goal of those networks is persistent, unrelenting attention. They are for-profit businesses whose primary income is ads (upwards of 98% of Facebook/Meta revenue.)
So the more attention you can drum up, and the longer you can maintain it, the faster the money printer can go brrrr.
Eventually an American will independently reinvent the car bomb, or someone on the left will decide to take a gun to a building containing political representatives.
Does Timothy McVeigh count?
Personally, I'm surprised that the American right wing (including Trump himself!) didn't seem to stop being pro-gun even when two different people made an attempt at Trump:
https://www.nrahlf.org/articles/2025/2/10/nra-issues-stateme...
If that didn't change their minds, I don't think anything can. Literal Jesus could descend from heaven on the wings of Biblically-accurate angels and tell them "When I said 'thou shalt not kill', I didn't give you any exceptions for self-defence, for stand-your-ground, or for the death penalty." and my expectation at this point is they'd not only ignore it, they'd call him 'woke' for suggesting it.
edit: added quotation marks
https://www.theregister.com/2010/05/14/facebook_trust_dumb/
In tech we face layoffs constantly, so much so that's not a huge shock when a FAANG lays off hundreds or even thousands. We might get a couple of stories if the layoff is particularly large but the general consensus is "this is the way of the world, go find another job". Contrast that with the stories we are seeing about DOGE and the general reaction to layoffs and contraction of several govt agencies.
I think the root of it lies in how both types of jobs are pitched. You get into tech knowing that you will most likely get laid off but you take the deal because compensation if very good in the field.
This is in stark contrast to how a government job is pitched, you won't make the best salaries there, but it's a safe steady job with loads of benefits and you can easily build a career inside just a single agency.
My personal feelings on this are mixed, on the one hand it always sucks to get laid off so I feel for the employees. But on the other hand, something like 40-50% of my paycheck goes out in taxes and I would prefer if my government actually spent it on things to improve my life versus dumb shit domestically or abroad.
And, while the billions of dollars the US has spent per year on foreign aid until now sound impressive, if you compare the per capita amount with other rich countries, it's actually not that impressive (and these numbers include all foreign aid, not just USAID): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_foreign_aid#/med...
What kind of soft power can a nation wield when you’re being outspent 5-to-1 by a charity now?
I agree here, but one thing that has come to light recently is that the federal work force is only ~6% of the federal budget. That means that most of those taxes are not going to pay the salaries of government workers.
Also, a lot of the money from our taxes goes to public health, safety, resource management, and infrastructure. I'm happy to pay for things like that. I don't doubt that there is significant waste as well, but there have been a lot of egregious lies lately about how much waste there is and _where_ that waste is located.
FY 2022 spending was around $6.75 trillion, civilian pay was $271 billion, or around 4% of the spending for that year. You'll find the numbers have been hovering around 4-5% for quite a while.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/is-government-too-big-ref...
Every publication I've looked at has the overall spending for federal employee salaries as around 280 billion. The total budget is around 6 trillion.
If the Impoundment Control Act is thrown out, no institution will be safe, including the military, social security and medicare. Every program will be at the whim of whatever administration is in power at the time. $50B effective military budget will finally be possible under the next democratic administration--no matter if congress disagrees.
And that's a very radical take on government. Even if that sounds good to you, the vast majority of americans do support at least some government programs. Social Security has significant support, for example.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impoundment_of_appropriated_fu...
Do you think there will be a next Democratic administration? The way things are going, the Republicans seem to be determined not to lose another election ever again. Sure, there will be elections, but there are elections in Russia, Belarus, Cuba, China and even North Korea too...
Great idea, sadly co-opted by other interests.
FAANG - You can have sky high compensation with moderate job security and roll-your-own (401K+savings) retirement. Note you mention 40-50% taxes which would imply you are in the sky high compensation bucket. You can also job shop and switch to any of a dozen competitors doing similar stuff.
Fed - You can have moderate compensation with sky high job security and good retirement benefits. Some of these jobs cap out at what FANG pays new grads in cash comp. You can't go work for a competing government like China or Russia, legally.
https://dodsoco.ogc.osd.mil/DoD-Personnel/Ethics-Topics-for-...
Feds can also be limited on who they work for or the kind of work they do after they leave government in the US private sector.
One other difference is that in tech we watch companies get mismanaged into the dirt and shrug it off. There'll be another one to replace it soon enough.
But I want to take a little more care with the government. Yes, there's inefficiency, but that doesn't mean the best approach to optimization is to just start shotgunning holes in the machine.
Maybe that approach works (?) for Twitter, but that kind of upheaval in the government will have serious repercussions that I don't think I want to be on the receiving end of.
I work for a state government, but I'm on a contract. They choose every year whether or not to renew it. So I get to enjoy the lower pay and the lack of job security. I don't know how many government employees are contract, but it's something to consider.
Also do you realize that only 1% of the federal budget is for government workers?
And there is no way that 50% of your income goes to the Federal government. Even if you did make over $609K, only the money you made over that would be taxed at the 37% rate and Social security would have stopped way before that at $165K (?).
Also, when I got my Amazoned, I was relatively sure that they could keep their promise of paying my 3.5 months severance + paid out PTO that gave me 4 months pay.
Musk can’t even promise the people who sign that they will get paid past March.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/is-government-too-big-ref...
If his goal is to cut 10% of the employees That 10% is less than 1% of the budget.
It was a very professional environment. I ended up going to the private sector after (they had a RIF (reduction in force)) the year I graduated. But the government employment pitch was more stability, less compensation, better work life balance.
Honestly the engineering process wasn’t too different. The government projects were strictly funded, and used these cost codes where you had to bill every hour to a project. This was a PITA. The quality of the engineering designs wasn’t different.
The government job had some inefficienies because of a lot of process. Eg we got a plotter running and wanted to try a few different pens, so we ordered a small sampling. It got held up while they looked for cheaper prices, a process that probably cost more than the pens my boss pointed out. but I can see why they would try that process for big ticket items. When I ended up at a big company it was frankly similar.
One of my first engineering jobs in the private sector was capping a landfill that went privately managed, then when the management left they found 5 drums on site. Any savings by having the government turn over that contract were wasted by having us deal with that (turned out the drums were all rusted out, the contents long gone).
When I was looking again last year it all took 3 weeks to get the offer I have now. It only took that long to get scheduled for all of the interviews from an internal recruiter reaching out to me.
The UK civil service "fast stream" graduate training programme actually requires people to change roles every six months. I believe there are similar rules with a longer timeframe that cycle people through job roles later on in their career. These play a similar role to bank rules which require people to take two weeks contiguous holiday every year: it tends to expose any fraud that requires continuous coverup.
The libertarian anti-government position denies the possibility of these roles improving anything, which is why this conflict arises.
Honestly, similar to software engineers and software.
America seems to have flipped from exporting the ‘American Dream’ to the ‘American Nightmare’, so it’s a lot more in people’s face right now, but frankly every country has significant issues right now.
one of those ‘hard to see the mote in one’s own eye’ type of situations usually. except in some third world countries, it’s often pretty obvious then hah.
If anything, history shows that ruling government officials by means of fear is very good sign for the nation, but tends to be harmful to the rulers.
Pol Pot confined his cruelty towards the intelligent, Mugabe, North Korea mostly terrorizes the peasantry, Mugabe's victims were a revolving door of ethnic enemies.
It's quite a different thing to shoot an admiral to encourage the rest.
As Sam Bankman-Fried learned, only certain people have political cover to commit crimes.
Protests are legal; they still require organizing, and keeping bad-faith folks out of that planning process.
But I suppose that's the problem. People stopped believing in democracy.
Sleazy government officials illegally order sleazy Facebook employees to censor people. Predictably, the government was caught because large groups of people conspiring to do something nefarious for extended periods of time ("conspiracies") are difficult to hide. When the government is caught illegally and unconstitutionally censoring its own people, the people get mad. And after all that, the sleazy media reports this as "poor, pitiful government workers just can't trust Facebook as a paragon of virtue anymore."
It is but not for the reason you think it is.
The twitter files are about a period of time where _Donald Trump was president_!
People go on-and-on about how twitter shadow bans people and lies about it. They never did any of that! "Shadowban" has a specific meaning and by that meaning they weren't shadowbanning. It'd be like saying a missed field goal is a "roughing the receiver penalty". It's just not what the words mean. When Twitter was asked, by Congress, if they artificially lowered the rankings of posts Twitter said yes. There is nothing hidden about this besides that fact that nobody watches congressional testimony and your hivemind doesn't surface any highlights opposing the hivemind's view.