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4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program

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Re: 4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program

#411

Post by Aurornis »

marcosdumay wrote: post #404
Aurornis wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know what you’re trying to imply, but it’s no mystery why certain institutions start functioning this poorly. It’s because there are no consequences for slow or poor performance. The people who want to do a good job get fed up and leave. The people who just want paychecks and no consequences stay. It’s not a mystery.

Ok, I'll have to call bullshit on every level of that rationale. - Those people are not doing teamwork. People (competent or not) don't leave good jobs just because some random coworker is lazy. - Even if they were doing teamwork, hardworking incompetent team members are the ones that make life hard for everybody else, not lazy ones. - Those people are not reaping any concrete benefit from being lazy. Being forced to…

> Being forced to sit in a chair the entire day with nothing to do is torture; if they are picking that instead of doing their work there's a real problem somewhere.

I don’t know what you’re arguing at this point. I’m not talk about people sitting in a chair doing nothing.

> - I really doubt the people in question actually face "no consequences" and are not threatened all the time. That almost never happens in practice.

Are you just rejecting the existence of this situation because you don’t believe it?

I really don’t understand what you’re trying to even imply. I have anecdotes about different offices that accomplish the same exact task, but one was run very well and the other was not the slightest bit interested in running well. If you’re just choosing not to believe that a DMV office could be run poorly then I don’t know what to say, other than this conversation is going nowhere.

Re: 4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program

#413

Post by singron »

eagerpace wrote: post #125

I’m trying to think how I feel about this. I’ve been obsessed with space for a long time, remember traveling to see my first rocket launch of the shuttle in 2006. Follow the commercial development closely since then. Their science missions are inspiring, but not as inspiring as they ought to be. NASA needs an overhaul. This isn’t how I would do it, but that’s not how things work in the real world. SLS is the elephant…

Are NASA employees even a significant part of SLS? Doesn't the bulk of the money go to Boeing and Northrup Grumman?

Re: 4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program

#414

Post by lostlogin »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #155
justin66 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> NASA needs an overhaul. This isn’t how I would do it, but that’s not how things work in the real world. SLS is the elephant in the room and is a complete disaster. It’s a jobs program limping along decades old technology when the commercial options are better. It’s more accurate to say that Congress needs an overhaul. Over the years NASA administrators have pushed back on SLS to the fullest extent you’d expect, but…

It’s going to kill institutional knowledge and be so expensive to repair after regime change.

> regime change.

And the normalisation of the language of totalitarianism continues.

I don’t disagree, but it’s grim.

Re: 4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program

#415

Post by pseudo0 »

derriz wrote: post #99
pseudo0 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with those stats for Ireland is that the Gini coefficient measured by the World Bank just looks at household income, not wealth. Much of the inequality in Ireland in the last few decades has been driven by the explosion in property prices and rents. This has created a great deal of inequality between people who benefited from the rapid increase in price of those assets, and the people stuck paying much hi…

Household wealth inequality has also fallen significantly in Ireland. Longer term statistics are more difficult to find compared to income inequality but see Chart 3 here - https://www.centralbank.ie/statistics/statistical-publicatio... - provides a 12 year time series which proves this. Irish property prices are and have risen considerably - but "600%", I think, is a somewhat dramatic way to present the increases -…

The source I linked shows the Ireland housing index going from around 33 in 1995 to over 180 in 2025. That's an over 6x real return, which equates to a rate of return of over 6.5% after inflation.

Looking at the CEIC data you linked, which is not inflation-adjusted, it shows household income increasing from just under $20k in 2003 to around $40k in 2023. Plugging that into the CAGR formula you get a 3.5% nominal annual return.

So house prices have increased at over 6.5% annually after inflation, while household incomes have increased at 3.5% before inflation.

And your other link makes it clear that the change in wealth distribution is really just a side effect of the housing bubble:

> The Gini coefficient fell from 0.78 in Q2 2013 to 0.70 as of Q4 2020, before declining sharply since 2021 (Chart 3). This steeper decline in 2021 is driven by increasing net wealth for the Bottom 50%, accounted for by a combination of a decline in this groups mortgage liabilities and, to a lesser extent, an upward appreciation in the value of housing assets. As a consequence, by Q1 2022 the Gini coefficient for Ireland stood at 0.68.

Re: 4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program

#416

Post by exe34 »

krainboltgreene wrote: post #373
exe34 wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm British, but sadly we're heading the same way.

Just to be clear I think what you said is extremely shortsighted and self-defeating.

That does sound very British at this point, tbh...

Re: 4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program

#417

Post by Pfhortune »

lupusreal wrote: post #363
Pfhortune wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you propose to replace those institutions? The needs thereof do not go away. For-profits in the private sector? Are they going to be feeding Gazans? You don’t fix a house’s plumbing by detonating a bomb under the foundation.

Privatizing government institutions won't do anything to help, but it is nonetheless the case that the American government has a large amount of responsibility for what's going on. The reason why American companies cannot simply sell food to Gaza is because the government of Israel controls access to Gaza and the government of America supports them in this. Without the American government's various anti-BDS laws, it…

…sell food to Gaza? The people of Gaza have little way to buy food right now. Gaza does not possess a hoard of wealth to trade to private companies for food et al, just lying in wait for Israel’s violence to cease.

I agree that the American government is complicit but private industry is no less complicit.

Capital wants to remove the population of Gaza and turn it into beachside real estate. This much has been said out loud by the very people who are acting to hollow out the government.

Re: 4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program

#418

Post by Pfhortune »

unnamed76ri wrote: post #376
ceejayoz wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I won’t cry if it is dismantled. You will if the private replacement is much worse.

The federal government is 36 trillion in debt. How do you run things worse than that? No private company or citizen would survive blowing up their finances as bad as what the federal government has been doing for decades.

The government is not a company. It is ludicrous to expect it to operate like one.

Re: 4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program

#419

Post by robertlagrant »

jebarker wrote: post #175
eagerpace wrote: post #125

I’m trying to think how I feel about this. I’ve been obsessed with space for a long time, remember traveling to see my first rocket launch of the shuttle in 2006. Follow the commercial development closely since then. Their science missions are inspiring, but not as inspiring as they ought to be. NASA needs an overhaul. This isn’t how I would do it, but that’s not how things work in the real world. SLS is the elephant…

> Their science missions are inspiring, but not as inspiring as they ought to be Are they 1% as inspiring as what the DoD does with their budget? I don't mean to be snarky, but level of inspiration is pretty subjective and difficult to put a price tag on. Honestly, I feel like the NASA budget needs to be considered in context relative to the DoD budget and then these cuts look much less convincing as being necessary.

> Are they 1% as inspiring as what the DoD does with their budget?

People aren't inspired by safe shipping lanes. But quite a few are alive because of what global shipping enables.

Re: 4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program

#420

Post by notahacker »

WalterBright wrote: post #344
notahacker wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And long before Elon took a turn for the political, taking a job with a company focused on launch and then satcomms constellations wasn't necessarily progression for someone wanting to scientific research into the composition of the asteroid belt or distant nebulae or design telescopes or Jupiter flybys or carry out longitudinal studies into astronaut health or climate change.

The launch capability is necessary and enabling for people who want to do such scientific research.

Nobody said it wasn't.

That doesn't mean there are vacancies for NASA scientists studying other galaxies or asteroid petrology or the effects of orbit on bone health at SpaceX, or that moving to do comms links at SpaceX would necessarily represent career progression for the telescope designer.

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