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After 'coding error' triggers firings, top NIH scientists called back to work

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Re: After 'coding error' triggers firings, top NIH scientists called back to work

#241

Post by throwawaymaths »

autoexec wrote: post #224
fastball wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The comment I replied to was holding out the federal government as an especially stable employer, as compared to the private sector. Sure, you don't want a reputation for firing people a week after you hired them, but A. that is not what is happening here B. not doing that doesn't mean it is actually desireable for the federal government to be seen as a more stable alternative to the private sector. Said another way:…

Because most companies don't care about their employees. Many of America's largest private employers like Amazon and Walmart have extremely high turnover, so it's no wonder people are looking for a more stable employer. Government workers are far more likely to be unionized which means they can get better working conditions and actual pensions. Government workers can take far more pride in being public servants than…

> Government workers are far more likely to be unionized

Isn't this a problem? Government workers are supposed to be working for the people, involvement in a union is a conflict of interest -- this is why FDR banned unionization of federal workers (versus the private sector where there is no obligation and the relationship is generally adversarial).

> Governments are freed from having to prioritize maximizing profits at the cost of everything else

That's a huge problem. The legitimacy of government is predicated on the ability of the voter to yank the money from the government if it's ineffective -- otherwise the government can just vote itself more and more funds for whatever without accountability. Since we're all deficit spending, the burden to repay the debt falls on future generations who can't vote against spending that happened in the past! And spending by printing money hurts the poor the hardest, which I can't imagine you would be in favor of.

Re: After 'coding error' triggers firings, top NIH scientists called back to work

#242

Post by UncleMeat »

imgabe wrote: post #240
UncleMeat wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Don't worry, you've got six months of emergency fund and jobs come and go" and "good riddance I'm glad their careers are destroyed those lazy leeches" don't feel like they should be placed so close together. I personally believe that making mobile games is less valuable to the world than handing out TB meds, but that's just me.

Then you are free to spend your own money to hand out TB meds instead of buying mobile games. That’s your prerogative.

I have indeed started giving large amounts of money towards TB aid since Trump gutted things.

Re: After 'coding error' triggers firings, top NIH scientists called back to work

#243

Post by throwawaymaths »

autoexec wrote: post #232
fastball wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Government workers can take far more pride in being public servants than they would peeing in a bottle for amazon. It's no surprise there is less turnover. See, this is where you're losing me. One the one hand you are arguing that part of what makes working for the government desirable is the job itself / the work being done (which sounds good to me), but then you are immediately conflating that with a reputation f…

> but then you are immediately conflating that with a reputation for being a "stable employer" (read: not firing people when maybe you should), which is not how I want my tax dollars to be used. You're using an incorrect definition for "stable employer". Employers with low turnover rates are stable employers. The usual reason for low turnover rate is employee satisfaction with the job and their work environment, not…

> That happens much less than you'd think though

Hard disagree. My dad worked for the federal government and he was railroaded for pointing out where money just disappeared down some corners. In his case it was untracked doctor reimbursements.

This happens everywhere in government because the taxpayer just doesn't care and spending money itself is largely considered to be the metric of effectiveness -- goodhart's law. The public generally thinks that if we allocate funding to X or Y bleeding heart cause it's magically done and we don't have to think about it anymore; conversely if we delete funds nominally allocated to X or Y it means we don't care about X or Y. By the year 2025 the system of consuming funds without voter accountability has optimized itself to do as little as possible with as high a price as possible, as evidenced by 45 billion dollars for broadband.

Re: After 'coding error' triggers firings, top NIH scientists called back to work

#244

Post by throwawaymaths »

Larrikin wrote: post #33
throwawaymaths wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It already was, though. We lost about 2 decades of alzheimer's research and probably about 30 drug candidates, and that's just one subfield.

So what is your point?

My point is if you don't think the ship was already sinking you are hopelessly naive. Consider the possibility that scientific funding is net social negative (scary, I know, but possible, if the only people in the system are fraudsters at the top and good scientists forced to chase after or try to replicate or refute fraudulent results for careerist reasons). Then cutting all funds would be socially good.

Re: After 'coding error' triggers firings, top NIH scientists called back to work

#245

Post by imgabe »

autoexec wrote: post #220
imgabe wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t need to vote out the CEO of Wal-Mart. He can’t put you in jail or confiscate your income via taxes. You just go shop at target or somewhere else instead.

The most universally hated companies are also among the richest. Voting with your wallet is a myth. The entire point of a private company is to confiscate your income. They must charge you as much as they possibly can while providing you with as little as they can possibly get away with. Maybe you've even noticed prices going up while enshittification and shrinkflation increases.

The richest companies do the most business. If you have a billion transactions a year and 0.1% of the time something goes wrong and a customer is pissed off, that's a million pissed off people writing angry reviews online. That makes it seem like they are "universally hated", but you don't hear anything from the 99.9% of people who had perfectly fine, unremarkable experiences.

In my lifetime I've gone from paying a few cents to dollars per minute for phone calls (on the high end for international calls), to being able to have a video call with anyone, anywhere in the world for essentially free.

TVs have gotten bigger, lighter, and cheaper. Cars are more powerful, have better gas mileage, and are much safer. Air travel quality has declined, but so have prices. New video games have consistently been around $50-$60 since the 1980s. If they kept pace with inflation, they should cost $140 to $150 now. The phone in my pocket is about 1000x more powerful than the top of the line desktop I couldn't afford in the 90s and even before inflation it's about 1/3 the price.

Food has more variety and is cheaper. Craft beer was not a thing 30 years ago. Coffee was Maxwell House freeze dried garbage from a can, not fresh roasted beans.

I'm sure there's more. The government is responsible for basically none of that.

Re: After 'coding error' triggers firings, top NIH scientists called back to work

#246

Post by shadowgovt »

mulmen wrote: post #137
shadowgovt wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While not owed a job for life, the arrangement of government as stable employer was a beneficial arrangement for the public: it let the government hold onto employees they might have otherwise had to pay more for their skillset because "If you're competent we won't fire you; our pockets are infinitely deep and we don't need to save money" was a perk. Take that perk away, and now they have to compete on other things t…

> “If you're competent we won't fire you; our pockets are infinitely deep and we don't need to save money" I don’t believe this is an accurate description of how the government operates. It’s commonly repeated but it doesn’t align with personal experience or any evidence I have seen.

Clarification: doesn't align on the lack of pocket depth or on the ease of firing?

My understanding for most of the bureaucracy was that there are some very solid policy guardrails set up around termination of bureaucrats; once you're in and have some time under your belt, only gross malfeasance gets you removed.

Re: After 'coding error' triggers firings, top NIH scientists called back to work

#247

Post by ModernMech »

fastball wrote: post #226
mulmen wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered that government employees accept less pay because they are passionate?

So this begs the question why we need "stable employment" as a hallmark of the government sector in order to attract talent.

Hard to be passionate about a job that might not be there tomorrow.

Re: After 'coding error' triggers firings, top NIH scientists called back to work

#248

Post by strogonoff »

arkh wrote: post #153
strogonoff wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A slightly less obvious problem with trimming fat is that an amount of fat within any system is good to have if you think long-term. 1. Fat is useful leeway. In critical times, it can be trimmed without otherwise disrupting the operation. Once you have eliminated fat during the good times, you can’t do it in the bad times. 2. A lean system without any fat by definition is tailored to just the current situation. It ha…

In military term you'd call this "fat" the reserve: an unused percentage of your capacity which you can deploy to exploit an opportunity or to plug a hole. Now, the difference between those reserves and what you usually get in most administrations is that you're keeping your reserve sharp and not just letting them socialize at the water cooler and on Facebook.

In this case it’s top scientists and people who do the grunt work for them, presumably.

Regarding not letting employees socialize… I cannot speak to any presumed dysfunction in US government, but to clarify my point—employees spending every hour working at 100% efficiency on the exact thing that needs to be done right now is not indicative of a fat system (more like the opposite). Being able to spend a day pondering or exploring or maybe even indeed socializing is.

Re: After 'coding error' triggers firings, top NIH scientists called back to work

#249

Post by ModernMech »

DLoupe wrote: post #54
BLKNSLVR wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's either an actual 'coding error' because DOGE doesn't actually understand WTF they're doing or it's what you're suggesting. So it's Incompetence or Malice. Pick your poison.

Its's Evil (Evil = Incompetence + Power)

Evil = Incompetence + Power - Empathy

I think there needs to be one more element like agency? Because under this definition of evil, a sponge elected as president is evil although it wouldn't do anything at all in any situation. Maybe that's still evil?

Re: After 'coding error' triggers firings, top NIH scientists called back to work

#250

Post by ndsipa_pomu »

arkh wrote: post #217
autoexec wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more governments and corporations try to shove AI into everything the worse this problem is going to get. Blindly trusting computers was always a terrible idea, and now computers are getting even less reliable.

The main problem is the lack of responsibility all along the chain. 25 years and people who shifted blame and were OK with people going to prison so their bonus would not be impacted are still enjoying life out of jail. Seeing this lack of consequence how can you expect people to behave ethically?

I still can't believe that no-one in the Post Office leadership has been prosecuted for perverting the course of justice or fraud. They "reclaimed" lots of money from the falsely accused postmasters, so I don't see why that isn't treated as fraud.
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