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DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes

nytimes.com

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Re: DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes

#471

Post by thrance »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #469
thrance wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, that's basic class consciousness on Musk's part. The American people simply forgot that billionaires' interests are diametrically opposed to theirs, a fact they knew well in FDR's time. Hopefully this situation will act as a booster shot, and not slip into full-blow oligarchy.

He doesn't have "class consciousness." He has consciousness of his own interests. That is what pretty much everyone has.

Well no, why did the working class people vote for Trump then? Clearly they don't stand to benefit from any of this nonsense.

Re: DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes

#472

Post by taeric »

bamboozled wrote: post #287
christophilus wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent a few weeks working at a contractor who specialized in VA contracts. I put my two week notice in after the first few weeks. There’s no way I could “work” like that. They had teams and teams of people doing the job of a single person at a normal startup. I’ve never seen such bureaucratic waste anywhere in the private sector. It made my stint at Microsoft look like a lean startup by comparison. I talked to them…

I love the narrative that some how “startups are efficient”. I’ve worked at 6 startups, they basically all failed due to “inefficiency”, burned through money before they made money or were acquired. I’ve worked for one major success story, and that was the most inefficient startup of all, they just had some luck and the founder was a great salesman. We literally hired morons at scale to appear bigger and more success…

More people need to internalize that moral. Efficiency is an optimization after you are achieving a goal. It is not the goal. Unless you are not looking to do new things, maybe?

This can be seen in every resource consumption ever. We get far more out of any single input now than was ever achievable in the past.

Re: DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes

#473

Post by rayiner »

sroussey wrote: post #342
rayiner wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without looking it up, what do you think is the military budget in comparison to the whole budget.

Europe has a problem trying to spend a minimum 2% of GDP. We easily to 10x that.

We are at 3.37%.

Re: DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes

#474

Post by EarthMephit »

harry8 wrote: post #366
qgin wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Number 3 can’t be overstated. Healthcare costs for the exact same care are 2x-3x what they are in Europe. Global health insurance plans usually come in two flavors: 1. Global coverage 2. Global coverage excluding United States (for half the monthly premium of the first plan) The United States in an extreme outlier in terms of cost. This is separate from rationing care. This is separate from even population health (ex…

20 years ago I read a story about an obstetrician in the USA. His premiums at that time for professional negligence were $1m per year. He would have to keep paying those premiums for 18 years after his retirement. Same for every obstetrician. Professional fees then must be set to cover those insurance premiums. Has that changed for the better in the USA? Seems very unlikely to be the same in Europe. Obstetrics is obv…

Australians are more litigious than Americans, with similar insurance costs for doctors, yet our healthcare costs are still half of the USA's.

So insurance costs may be a factor, but its doubtful that its a large factor in healthcare costs, they largest factor is by far the public vs private system.

I experienced US healthcare when I went to visit a doctor in the US for a simple (obvious) ear infection. I was charged $600 USD for a five minute consult because the doctor wanted to milk as much $$$ from me as he could, giving me lots of unrelated/pointless blood tests (which were pointless because I was flying out the next day and wouldn't get the results).

In Australia it would have been a $65 fee paid by the government, and $10 for the antibiotics, around 1/10th of the US costs.

The problem in the US is that doctors and hospitals are incentivised to give patients unnecessary tests and medication, because it inflates their bills, and they make more profit.

I've noticed the same thing happening in Australia with private vets & vet hospitals because they are less regulated. They try and talk you into a lot of unnecessary procedures, test, and drugs because they make more profit, and the industry is not where near as well regulated as healthcare.

At least with a vet you can usually shop around, when you are sick often you cannot.

Re: DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes

#475

Post by pclmulqdq »

qgin wrote: post #277
sxyuan wrote: post #248

For those who want to have a substantive discussion on the federal budget and believe these cuts are justified, I have a few questions (putting aside questions of constitutionality for this thread): 1. There are claims that federal spending is out of control. How do you square that with the fact that spending as a percentage of GDP is only slightly elevated compared to the historical average going back to at least th…

Number 3 can’t be overstated. Healthcare costs for the exact same care are 2x-3x what they are in Europe. Global health insurance plans usually come in two flavors: 1. Global coverage 2. Global coverage excluding United States (for half the monthly premium of the first plan) The United States in an extreme outlier in terms of cost. This is separate from rationing care. This is separate from even population health (ex…

> The United States in an extreme outlier in terms of cost. This is separate from rationing care. This is separate from even population health (ex. higher obesity rates)

Are you sure? People comparing US healthcare costs to European costs don't realize that these are two very different products. The US population is much more unhealthy, yet it has about the same life expectancy as an average European country. This would suggest that Americans actually have access to significantly more healthcare services than Europeans do.

I think a lot of people assume that some of this stuff is linear when it actually seems to be exponential (or super-exponential) in cost. The median American spends half of their lifetime medical bills in their last year of life. That's a lot of money for not a lot of time. Incidentally, American doctors also tend to spend a lot less in this period, indicating that they have a much more healthy relationship with at least one of health or death.

I haven't been particularly convinced, looking at the healthcare systems across the pond, that they are providing anywhere near the same level of service that you get from the ultra-expensive US healthcare system. They are somewhat more optimized for efficiency and the US healthcare system is much more optimized for outcomes - partly because Americans are so litigious and IMO partly because the patient is the customer. That doesn't lead to low costs.

Re: DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes

#476

Post by cwalv »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #453
cwalv wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you square that with the fact that spending as a percentage of GDP is only slightly elevated compared to the historical average...? Why should it scale linearly with GDP? I can see an argument that it should scale linearly with population (maybe), but if GDP per capita increases, you could also expect better tech/productivity to allow gov spending per capita to decrease. > What do you think should be cut, an…

> Why should it scale linearly with GDP? It doesn't have to. But GDP is a good proxy for the tax base. If the problem is deficits and spending isn't increasing linearly with GDP, that suggests the problem is with taxation. Not spending.

Another factor is cost of debt. In a decreasing interest rate environment it's possible to run with increasing deficits without any major issues, but once you bounce off zero, even if thos deficits are not currently a problem, projections show that they will be.

Re: DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes

#477

Post by bink »

cuuupid wrote: post #106
chillingeffect wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great info thanks! Frustrating that we don't see anyone declaring victory by cutting off Palantir contracts.

It’s probably a lot of things causing that: - new age defense tech companies band together pretty tightly - you can cut 10 Palantir contracts and save $200M but then you’re stuck with the existing tools (Sharepoint+PowerBI or Salesforce+Accenture) that are usually super shitty and 1-2B$ contracts vehicles for SI - Palantir actually has really low revenue, as recent as 4 years ago they would have often qualified as a…

> So if you raise the GS payscale to be competitive with the market, you can attract better talent that is willing to actually work. Then it is easy after a year to layoff 90% of the old bureaucracy with 0 risk as everything is appropriately staffed.

Why on Earth would anyone go work for an organization that thinks it's ok to "layoff 90%" under the assumption that they're all under-performing? And you're making a huge assumption by saying there's zero risk. Laying off 90% of the original air traffic controllers presents zero risk? The intelligence services? Law enforcement? The military? Payroll accounts for around 3% of the Federal budget. Layoffs aren't going to fix our spending problem.

And this completely ignores the fact that's it's illegal to fire most of these people without cause. They're going to sue and they're going to win. And we'll end up paying them salaries to have not worked for however long those lawsuits take.

Re: DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes

#478

Post by throwawaymaths »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #453
cwalv wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you square that with the fact that spending as a percentage of GDP is only slightly elevated compared to the historical average...? Why should it scale linearly with GDP? I can see an argument that it should scale linearly with population (maybe), but if GDP per capita increases, you could also expect better tech/productivity to allow gov spending per capita to decrease. > What do you think should be cut, an…

> Why should it scale linearly with GDP? It doesn't have to. But GDP is a good proxy for the tax base. If the problem is deficits and spending isn't increasing linearly with GDP, that suggests the problem is with taxation. Not spending.

spending doesn't take into account debt payments though, and those snowball.

Re: DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes

#479

Post by ty6853 »

ncallaway wrote: post #421
int_19h wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW many people who believe that federal spending is out of control would say the same about 1970s.

Can someone who says federal spending has been out of control for the last 50 years point to a time period when it was _in_ control?

Non war times pre 1913, federal spending was such a low percent of gdp as to barely be noticeable, generally far below 5%. The 15%+ I pay now is painful, 2% would barely be noticed. Especially in the context I have to pay (state) taxes on all the new federally required stuff like air bags and emissions controls.

Re: DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes

#480

Post by crooked-v »

ty6853 wrote: post #479
ncallaway wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can someone who says federal spending has been out of control for the last 50 years point to a time period when it was _in_ control?

Non war times pre 1913, federal spending was such a low percent of gdp as to barely be noticeable, generally far below 5%. The 15%+ I pay now is painful, 2% would barely be noticed. Especially in the context I have to pay (state) taxes on all the new federally required stuff like air bags and emissions controls.

Sure, and to return to that the first thing we would need to do is shut down Medicare and Social Security and also sell off most US military equipment for scrap.
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