20k federal workers take "buyout" so far, official says • Hacker News Board

Re: 20k federal workers take "buyout" so far, official says

#371

Post by tharkun__ » Thu, Feb 06, 2025, 1:29 AM UTC

xeromal wrote: post #262

scottyah wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They churn through employees fast and they usually exit through burnout (no offloading) and the people wanting to work there skew towards young people who don't know what they're doing. A lot of work gets delayed, dropped, etc and some bad suppliers even take advantage of that ("the last person said they'd do X"). I know it's en-vogue to hate on Elon companies, and a lot of people would love to hear that the World's…

Yeah, I've always been trying to be objective as possible when it comes to the hate sent towards Tesla, SpaceX, etc from the heat Elon is getting but having lived near Hawthorne, I've met a couple of people who worked at SpaceX and it is insane. I had a really good friend who moved from the midwest with his wife to spacex and she became a favorite at spacex which meant she lived at spacex. He would see her like once…

The only thing surprising to me is how people don't know this.

The propaganda machine must be real good.

Re: 20k federal workers take "buyout" so far, official says

#372

Post by dpkirchner » Thu, Feb 06, 2025, 1:29 AM UTC

alberth wrote: post #360

Just some context: 2.9M federal employees 0.6% have taken buyout https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-people-work-for-the-f...

And something like 100k retire every year, so I'd bet a lot of these folks are people who were about to retire anyway.

https://www.opm.gov/retirement-center/retirement-statistics/

Re: 20k federal workers take "buyout" so far, official says

#373

Post by bangaladore » Thu, Feb 06, 2025, 1:32 AM UTC

n0rdy wrote: post #40

I've always found this approach of reducing the number of employees unwise from the company perspective (but pretty good for the employees, though). While the unsatisfied employees are the target, my observations indicate that a high percentage of active and skilled people are willing to take this offer, as they are sure that they will find a new place within a reasonable time, so it's basically, free money. And thos…

Part of two groups will leave, the actual skilled, hardworking people who know they can get another job. And the people who are retiring anyways.

Part of me thinks that just ends up with a higher percentage of worse workers.

Obviously many hard working people will stay, but you'd be pretty certain the people will little skill and value, ironically, are going to be the highest percentage that stay as they know its not going to be easy to get another job.

Re: 20k federal workers take "buyout" so far, official says

#374

Post by User23 » Thu, Feb 06, 2025, 1:34 AM UTC

Shank wrote: post #15

I think the main issue for anyone wanting to take the offer is simply: this was never authorized by congress, so the money to pay people to September is questionable if it exists at best. Meanwhile, there's a government funding deadline on March 14, 2025. So there's a very real chance at this deal offering something closer to ~1 month of pay before it suddenly gets dropped due to budget negotiations. It would be an i…

I think the reason it works is because it’s not technically a buyout. It’s 8 months of reduced duties.

Re: 20k federal workers take "buyout" so far, official says

#375

Post by starspangled » Thu, Feb 06, 2025, 1:36 AM UTC

johnrgrace wrote: post #190

rich_sasha wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it a given there would be a budget impasse, if all institutions of power are held by Republicans? Non-American here with only a Mickey Mouse understanding of US mechanics of power.

Republicans only hold the house by two seats so to pass something they need to have everyone on board. Any single republican member of congress that wants to hold the whole thing hostage for demands pretty much can.

At that point a Democrat could vote yes to ensure those demands are not met, if that is determined to be the best of bad choices.

Re: 20k federal workers take "buyout" so far, official says

#376

Post by shigawire » Thu, Feb 06, 2025, 1:39 AM UTC

pessimizer wrote: post #236

_qbxi wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do agree that citing specific laws is best. However, if the building is on fire, I want the alarm bells on immediately even if it's low specificity. What sort of assumptions have you been seeing?

> if the building is on fire If you're already allowing the question to be begged, there's really no need for specificity in the argument. Because if there was no law being broken, that means that the building was not on fire. People tell me that shouting "fire!" is supposed to be bad when there is no fire. I don't think they would accept it as being "low-specificity."

There's a bunch of smoke so let's call the fire dept first and let them assess.

Re: 20k federal workers take "buyout" so far, official says

#377

Post by oh_my_goodness » Thu, Feb 06, 2025, 1:43 AM UTC

reverendsteveii wrote: post #235

ziddoap wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's only illegal if the law gets enforced. It is completely valid to say something is illegal and unenforced. Consider that non-enforcement doesn't suddenly make something legal. Enforcement can start at any time. (Will it? Who knows!)

But for purposes of debating what someone should do illegal and unenforced generates the same outcomes as legal and if we're only concerned about outcomes it's rational to treat them as equivalent.

That's amusing but irrelevant. Sometimes we may not only be concerned about what you call "outcomes." To cover those occasions, we use a variety of different words.

Re: 20k federal workers take "buyout" so far, official says

#378

Post by rchaud » Thu, Feb 06, 2025, 1:43 AM UTC

dehugger wrote: post #310

tencentshill wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What good is a lawsuit if He decides to ignore it and not pay? One side of that battle is ultimately backed up by the military.

Military members are government employees. I imagine they would be extremely circumspect of being deployed against other government employees who were cheated by a bad-faith deal.

There is no "they". The military adheres to the law for only as long as those laws are enforced. If the US military can commit war crimes abroad and be protected from outside prosecution, there is nothing stopping them from doing the same inside the US. All it takes is for one person in charge to ignore charges in a military court, or simply not comply with a legal summons in civilian court.

Look at how the US treats the International Criminal Court today, a legal body it itself helped create after WWII. Not a huge leap to think they will ignore state courts in the US. Who's going to arrest them?

Re: 20k federal workers take "buyout" so far, official says

#379

Post by oh_my_goodness » Thu, Feb 06, 2025, 1:45 AM UTC

Supermancho wrote: post #311

ziddoap wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what someone should do illegal and unenforced generates the same outcomes as legal Illegal + unenforced can generate the same outcome as legal. Or someone can get arrested later when the enforcement begins. There's a big difference.

> There's a big difference. There's no difference in the short term. Something being illegal, doesn't mean it will stop anytime soon in this political situation. Remaking the same obvious point is tedious and smacks of word games to try a to make a backdoor political statement. Yes, some act is odious and against a law. Not relevant to whether or not it will have the desired consequence, regardless of who is ever hel…

There is a simple dictionary difference between "legal" and "illegal." Using the actual meaning of a word is kinda the opposite of playing word games.

Re: 20k federal workers take "buyout" so far, official says

#380

Post by infecto » Thu, Feb 06, 2025, 1:48 AM UTC

dghlsakjg wrote: post #295

robocat wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article mentions $2.5MM liens which is drastically less than 1% of expenses of $1445MM ("[SpaceX] generated $55 million in profit on $1.5 billion in revenue during the first quarter of 2023") It don't appear to be because SpaceX is having trouble paying. I would guess SpaceX are delaying payment as much as possible because it is cheap lending and because it's run as an extremely mercenary company. Their costs of…

Who give a shit what their revenue is. It tells me nothing about how they pay their vendors. 2.5mm in liens is just how much they have proveably shorted construction workers in Texas. It doesn't count other vendors doing work that isn't elegible for a lien, or how many workers got shorted, but it just wasn't enough to worry about. If you were one of the 70+ businesses that held a lien against them, you would think di…

Sigh, these rage bait style of responses are as bad as the original article. Reuters was not even able to figure out what % was due to contractors as opposed to Tesla itself.

Everything you said says nothing of how they pay their vendors. $2.5mm is not exactly breaking news for construction projects. Most large projects have some percentage of total project value in liens.

I know we all want to get upset but its too hard to say either way, the dollar amount is far too small, it maybe involve a large portion of contractors and based on the cost of the development does not seem to be a rampant issue.