Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

US government struggles to rehire nuclear safety staff it laid off days ago

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 839 posts

Re: US government struggles to rehire nuclear safety staff it laid off days ago

#161

Post by bloomingkales »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #85
PaulRobinson wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Problem is, it’s not backfired - the example you cited “worked”, because it rapidly identified key personnel without weeks or months of subjective analysis and political posturing by workers and their supervisors. I think in federal government the risks are much higher, and Musk is being an idiot by exposing the America public to those risks, but the feedback loop for him on these previous experiments has been positi…

Getting bureaucrats to fire each other is met with every delay tactic possible. Might be able to put it off for two years which is all they need. Going in crazy like they are doing now, may serve the administration if they start having department do their own layoffs in a hurry, because they know otherwise it will be done for then.

[flagged]

Re: US government struggles to rehire nuclear safety staff it laid off days ago

#163

Post by somenameforme »

nobunaga wrote: post #112
baggy_trough wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Employees with zero to negative productivity should be on the chopping block because we want the employer to survive. The United States has an highly progressive tax system where the rich pay the vast majority of the taxes. Why isn't that already their "fair share" (a propaganda term)?

Do you really believe that your second sentence is true? wow. So what you are saying is that billionaires, while they do pay taxes, pay their fair share with no attempt to avoid taxes? No overseas accounts or shady businesses? Its all above board? But anyway, lets focus on the low productive people, because that really what is going to bring America out of the rut that it is in. Not the overly powerful rich that are…

The main way taxes are avoided is by a lot of their wealth being paper wealth. For Bezos that's Amazon stock, for Musk it's Tesla. So when the stock doubles in price, so does (nearly) their net worth. But they're not taxed on this until they convert it to cash. So they can see their wealth double or triple with 0 increase in paid taxes, unless they try to access that money.

Taxing unrealized capital gains is possible, but it's not clear how you'd do this without destroying the entire financial (as opposed to goods/services) economy, since taxing 'wins' without crediting 'losses' makes any margins-game like investing impossible, but billionaires receiving billions of dollars in refunds when the market crashes is probably not visually great. It also seems fairly certain you'd introduce investment hedge possibilities with this, which is also probably undesirable. Not an easy problem.

And of course on top of all of this there's the Norway Problem. [1] Norway decided to introduce a hugely unpopular increase to their wealth tax system. It was expected to increase government revenue by about $146 million per year. Instead it resulted in a loss of about $448 million per year. Make taxation sufficiently onerous and people will simply leave your country. We're not talking about a captive audience, especially in modern times.

[1] - https://www.brusselsreport.eu/2024/09/11/the-failure-of-norw...

Re: US government struggles to rehire nuclear safety staff it laid off days ago

#164

Post by belter »

sour-taste wrote: post #2

This is LITERALLY the twitter layoffs playing out again. They fired people who had credentials and other things they needed so had to hire them back. Everything else aside why repeat the same mistakes? Just go a little slower and give agencies time to compile accurate lists of necessary employees

Expect this story to be flagged soon...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43061481

Re: US government struggles to rehire nuclear safety staff it laid off days ago

#165

Post by anon7000 »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #99
sour-taste wrote: post #2

This is LITERALLY the twitter layoffs playing out again. They fired people who had credentials and other things they needed so had to hire them back. Everything else aside why repeat the same mistakes? Just go a little slower and give agencies time to compile accurate lists of necessary employees

Very similar to the story about the Supercharger network. Apparently the boss of the team was told to make layoffs, she did some but not enough to please Musk, so Musk in a face to face meeting demanded she make more. She said they couldn't without affecting delivery. Musk fired her. Then fired the team. Then hired the team back because she was correct. But not before lots of ongoing projects got stalled because cont…

Why people think it’s a good idea to put this wealthy dickwad in charge of one of the most (allegedly) important projects in the current admin is beyond me. Move fast and break things is a stupid policy to apply to public policy.

Re: US government struggles to rehire nuclear safety staff it laid off days ago

#166

Post by computerthings »

StefanBatory wrote: post #122
TZubiri wrote: post #19

What's the biggest difference between a startup and a country? Aside from the obvious distinction, Musk has no experience running existing corporations with lots on the line to lose, he comes from move fast break things, great for a social media app, who gives a shit, great for literal moonshots, go big or go home. However when you manage something big, any upside from improving is weighed against its risk of degrada…

"What I find confusing is that this is not typical of conservatism, it's like a progressive right of political outsiders whose express goal is to destroy the government, I don't think that's a controversial statement" I think it'd be fair to call them populist right? I think they couldn't be further from classical conservatism. Chesterton's Fence is a concept that seems foreign to them.

Destroying government and rule of law and replacing it with a violent movement, giving people implicit permission to be brown shirts ("he who saves the country cannot violate the law") isn't just "populist right" in the same way "cancer" isn't an "inconvenience" -- yeah sure technically you could say that, but you probably wouldn't.

Re: US government struggles to rehire nuclear safety staff it laid off days ago

#167

Post by somenameforme »

namaria wrote: post #116
baggy_trough wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Employees with zero to negative productivity should be on the chopping block because we want the employer to survive. The United States has an highly progressive tax system where the rich pay the vast majority of the taxes. Why isn't that already their "fair share" (a propaganda term)?

Were it trivial to attribute the performance of complex systems to individuals, they would have no need to seek employment at firms and would be able to get the fair value for their labor in an efficient market.

And what if it turns out that let's say 70% of individuals have a zero to even slightly negative 'value', as seems increasingly possible as organizations shed mass numbers of employees but continue to function just fine? Or we can look at evidence in the other direction where you have companies taking on dramatically more employees yet not showing anywhere near proportional increases in 'productivity' (which I'm using as as a catch-all rather than as the precise term).

I really think this is the future many people behind evangelization of e.g. "AGI" futures are aiming for, with the assumption that well then we'd just have to create some sort of a basic income and everybody would live happily ever after. Of course that rather voluntarily chooses to ignore centuries of evidence to the fact that that's probably not quite what would happen. And even if it did, instead of everybody living happily every you'd instead create a dramatic stratification in society that would, over time, come to make Feudalism look like Communism. People that live only to consume will, over time, come to be marginalized with 100% certainty.

Re: US government struggles to rehire nuclear safety staff it laid off days ago

#168

Post by anon7000 »

kelnos wrote: post #144
eesmith wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The American left has also (always?) been anti-government overreach too. It's all a matter of who gets to define the "over" in "overreach". Laws which enforce racial segregation are overreach, for those in the American left who support equality. Federal laws which override state segregation are overreach, for those in the American right who support structural racism. Marijuana prohibition laws - overreach, or not? An…

Please stop with the false equivalencies. I'm incredibly tired of these types of bad-faith arguments.

It’s not a false equivalency. The right frequently claims the government over reaches, and then enact their own Christian policies which have a tendency to overreach. Heard of those book bans? That’s conservative Christian overreach into state policy, which takes away freedom.

What’s bad faith is claiming that more social restriction is not a form of overreach.

Edit: pollution is actually a very good example. In my view, polluting my property via air or water pollution is a violation of my property rights, and is therefore unconstitutional. Companies doing so are overreaching. I would like the government to reach out and stop that. Certain Conservatives somehow don’t share this view, and think businesses should have the freedom to pollute, and wish to abolish the EPA. The government would be overstepping, to them.

Re: US government struggles to rehire nuclear safety staff it laid off days ago

#169

Post by k3vinw »

alimw wrote: post #115
refurb wrote: post #84

[flagged]

You must be talking about this one claim? Your comment reads as if you are dismissing the whole article. > That included staff who are stationed at facilities where the weapons are built, according to CNN.

I didn’t get the impression that they were dismissing the entire article. They were just sharing their frustration with how thin on details the article was given the nature of the news grabbing headline. They might have also brought up the fact that the BBC, a news organization, is connected with USAID funding.

Re: US government struggles to rehire nuclear safety staff it laid off days ago

#170

Post by krapp »

computerthings wrote: post #166
StefanBatory wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"What I find confusing is that this is not typical of conservatism, it's like a progressive right of political outsiders whose express goal is to destroy the government, I don't think that's a controversial statement" I think it'd be fair to call them populist right? I think they couldn't be further from classical conservatism. Chesterton's Fence is a concept that seems foreign to them.

Destroying government and rule of law and replacing it with a violent movement, giving people implicit permission to be brown shirts ("he who saves the country cannot violate the law") isn't just "populist right" in the same way "cancer" isn't an "inconvenience" -- yeah sure technically you could say that, but you probably wouldn't.

But Trumpism is literally a right-wing populist movement. It's directly influenced by the alt-right/Tea Party and right-libertarianism, accelerationist white supremacy and the Christian right.

It would be incorrect to call it a "progressive" right movement, because it stands in direct opposition to what progressivism is commonly understood to be. Doing so would be the same kind of category error as calling the Nazis socialists because the word "socialist" is in their name, ignoring the fact that they hated socialists. The Nazis weren't socialist, and Trumpists aren't progressive.

Post reply on HN