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Federal workers say they increasingly distrust platforms like Facebook

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Re: Federal workers say they increasingly distrust platforms like Facebook

#61

Post by jader201 »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #23

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…

> 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.

Re: Federal workers say they increasingly distrust platforms like Facebook

#62

Post by rob74 »

rgbrenner wrote: post #52
_fat_santa wrote: post #24

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 a…

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…

> 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...

Re: Federal workers say they increasingly distrust platforms like Facebook

#63

Post by ben_w »

pjc50 wrote: post #51
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #23

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…

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 longst…

> 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:

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.

Re: Federal workers say they increasingly distrust platforms like Facebook

#64

Post by jader201 »

RandomBacon wrote: post #44
Molitor5901 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Facebook feed of just your friends' posts in chronological order: https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr

That link is still 90% garbage I didn’t ask for.

Re: Federal workers say they increasingly distrust platforms like Facebook

#65

Post by jhedwards »

walljm wrote: post #57
jhedwards wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 worker…

6% seems suspect. I would expect it to be higher... at least in the 20% to 30% range. Do you have a source?

Sure, here's two: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60235

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.

Re: Federal workers say they increasingly distrust platforms like Facebook

#66

Post by acomjean »

_fat_santa wrote: post #24

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 a…

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).

Re: Federal workers say they increasingly distrust platforms like Facebook

#67

Post by Jtsummers »

walljm wrote: post #57
jhedwards wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 worker…

6% seems suspect. I would expect it to be higher... at least in the 20% to 30% range. Do you have a source?

https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60235#:~:text=In%20fiscal%20...

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.

Re: Federal workers say they increasingly distrust platforms like Facebook

#68

Post by spiderfarmer »

lazide wrote: post #27
spiderfarmer wrote: post #12

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.

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.

That might be a cultural issue then. From what I see in the USA people don’t even trust their own family members.

Re: Federal workers say they increasingly distrust platforms like Facebook

#69

Post by RandomBacon »

jader201 wrote: post #64
RandomBacon wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook feed of just your friends' posts in chronological order: https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr

That link is still 90% garbage I didn’t ask for.

Weird, it works perfectly on my desktop and laptop (I don't check FB on my phone).

Re: Federal workers say they increasingly distrust platforms like Facebook

#70

Post by username332211 »

ben_w wrote: post #56
username332211 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

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