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

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

#471

Post by amscanne » Thu, Feb 06, 2025, 5:28 AM UTC

gpm wrote: post #322

Larrikin wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't Twitter workers still trying to get their severances and they took the offer when Twitter actually had the money to pay.

The senior executives still are. Case: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/68307087/agrawal-v-musk... The only substantive order in the case to date appears to be one denying Elon Musk et al.'s motion to dismiss one of the claims: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.42...

That would be a separate issue, those are not the terms of a buy-out package initiated after the acquisition, but rather wanting to enforce the terms of their original agreements (because Musk terminated them).

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

#472

Post by buu700 » Thu, Feb 06, 2025, 5:28 AM UTC

Spooky23 wrote: post #429

casenmgreen wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it possible Mr. Musk's companies are actually in deep trouble financially, and this political stuff is actually a means to an end?

Tesla is a fraud just short of Enron. (Enron was a complete fabrication. Tesla is a real company with fabricated valuation.) The valuation is based on hand wavey gibberish. The company has repeatedly sold consumers products that don’t exist. The concepts of duty of care, loyalty, and obedience are foreign concepts to the owner of the company. JP Morgan’s analyst position on the company really says it all: https://fin…

I don't know offhand what TSLA's stock price is, but I think it's fair to say that the speculative value is at least very high if you believe that Tesla Optimus is at all a viable competitor to Boston Dynamics Atlas. I see much more long-term potential value in that than the car business.

Robotaxi is also a pretty interesting bet. I'm skeptical that it'll pan out, or at least that it will ever reach the same level of safety as Waymo without lidar, but on the other hand AI has obviously significantly advanced and been significantly democratized compared to when Tesla first launched Autopilot over a decade ago. More significantly, I see the decentralized rollout strategy as a potentially viable path to beat Waymo to the punch of a full-scale deployment. Waymo might still get there first based on its headstart and massive warchest, but Tesla's strategy is essentially crowdfunding it while using the market to optimize geographic distribution. The downside is that allowing the Robotaxi to be used in arbitrary/novel locations might be significantly less safe and/or more computationally expensive than Waymo's approach, so it's a more uncertain bet than Waymo.

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

#473

Post by casey2 » Thu, Feb 06, 2025, 5:40 AM UTC

Xelynega wrote: post #445

robomartin wrote: post #91

The idea that government workers cannot be hired and fired at will is wrong. Government workers should have no more rights than the single mother working at a restaurant or business, or anyone working at any normal business in the US. I other words, they should not have more rights or protections than the people who pay the taxes that pay for their salaries and benefits. One of the most fundamental problems in variou…

Maybe instead of punching down("everyone should have to live as bad as I do/did") you should be raising people up("everyone should live as good as they do/did")? Why not ask yourself what is stopping yourself from having those protections in the private industry(hint: some people do have those protections in private industry) instead of focusing on taking them away from others?

Reality. Plain and simple. As reality changes the "protected groups" that we thought were essential to society become a drain on it. Teachers are an excellent example as they have been deprecated for my (and most living persons') lifetime.

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

#474

Post by jonahbenton » Thu, Feb 06, 2025, 5:43 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…

Trump has never not been, and will never not be, the apocryphal version of PT Barnum.

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

#475

Post by zerocrates » Thu, Feb 06, 2025, 5:51 AM UTC

umeshunni wrote: post #425

s3r3nity wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These tend to work through in stages: fastest ones to accept were already looking, and next up are those that are on the fence, and so on... The 8-month buyout offer is significantly better than the one-time offer from Clinton in the 90's [1], even adjusting for inflation, so I'd expect that there's a large group of individuals & families that are just taking the time to evaluate the decision. [ https://www.presidenc…

Amazing. That offer (and website in general) look and sound identical to what the current administration is proposing.

Well, except that Clinton went to Congress for authorization to make those offers and got a law passed, and didn't do a blanket offer to every employee they could blast out an email to, and did them as actual buyouts rather than extended no-work leave.

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

#476

Post by protocolture » Thu, Feb 06, 2025, 5:52 AM UTC

staticman2 wrote: post #444

protocolture wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have a lawful direction to stop working and keep getting paid coming from their management. If they were terminated for following a lawful direction they would have pretty easy recourse.

It's not a "lawful direction" if the order is illegal.

You would have to go pretty far to prove to a standard I would accept that "Go work from home, and do nothing, we will keep paying you" is an illegal order.

Firstly: Its telling these people to work from their principle place of work, their home. Something thats been commonplace since covid.

Secondly, "Do Nothing" seems like a very legal thing for these people to be doing.

I suspect that theres not a court in the land that would convict a government employee for doing nothing.

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

#477

Post by lend000 » Thu, Feb 06, 2025, 5:54 AM UTC

The quality of the comments is really disappointing. I'll add an optimistic one -- this is the first time in my lifetime that I've felt like the federal government was actually making serious progress on an important problem without being forced to by some emergency. I'm very curious to see what things look like a year from now.

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

#478

Post by Aeolun » Thu, Feb 06, 2025, 5:56 AM UTC

adastra22 wrote: post #456

djohnston wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's remarkable that, for a bunch of young people who don't know what they're doing, they've completely decimated any competitors - both public and private.

I don't know what the person you are replying to is talking about. They clearly don't know anyone who works at SpaceX. The age there does trend young, but think 24-year-old flight controller for Apollo, not intern that doesn't know anything. I have friends who work at SpaceX and gripe about how difficult it is to hire people. But not for lack of applicants--their standards are just so high. Nearly everyone working at…

> 24-year-old flight controller for Apollo

E.g. intern that knows nothing

From the perspective of a crusty old man anyway.

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

#479

Post by tsimionescu » Thu, Feb 06, 2025, 6:02 AM UTC

nyokodo wrote: post #469

riahi wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man Elon himself said his plan is to crash the economy. When people tell you who they are, listen! https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-polit...

> to crash the economy The quote is “markets will tumble” by which he clarifies that it will be a temporary market overreaction not “crash the economy” like it’s 1929. Those are qualitatively different things.

He intends to make the market crash (or at least is taking actions that will almost certainly crash it), but he thinks it will recover afterwards. The first part is pretty certain with what they're doing. The second part is almost impossible to predict, because no one can really say what the break points are (i.e. how much it can crash and still quickly recover afterwards). See the mortgage crisis of 2008 for what an unexpected runaway effect looks like.

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

#480

Post by somenameforme » Thu, Feb 06, 2025, 6:03 AM UTC

ben_w wrote: post #299

renewiltord wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These guys are idiots, fucking morons, and can’t get anything right. Somehow they’re also outcompeting us on everything. It isn’t clear why, but it must be because we are smarter.

China very effective at copying all the stuff SpaceX is doing despite this being deliberately made difficult by ITAR, suggests there's a lot of room for the American (and ESA) competitors to be structurally inept without needing Musk's staff to be demonstrating an unusual (as opposed to industry standard) degree of genius.

China is the world's largest economy by large (in terms of their internal costs - PPP), have 1.4 billion people meaning a proportionally larger share of extremely capable outliers, a highly capable technocratic orientated leadership with defacto authoritarian powers to get things done, and they are highly motivated to demonstrate successes in space. And a lot of SpaceX's 'secret sauce' isn't really secretive. For instance that Starship is made out of stainless steel is a big deal, but now provably correct. And rapid reuse/landing is again now obviously viable and a very good idea, which was not at all apparent for many years.

In spite of all of this they are still a very distant 2nd place behind SpaceX. If anything ITAR hurts more than helps SpaceX since it means their talent pool is strictly limited to strictly domestic talent. They seriously have something "special" going on.