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

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

#521

Post by psychlops »

edm0nd wrote: post #420
psychlops wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does your job security and pension compare?

I work in private industry (cybersec) and we have a pension + 401k w match. It's great. I dont think I would ever work for the state or federal gov. Their pay sucks.

Both!? That's unusual, congrats. My point is that the straight pay comparison to a gov employee doesn't count as people go there for the safety and pension. Pensions can really add up the total amount and the spouse collects money as well after the pensioner passes on.

To compare to a private job, the actual pay a public employee made per hour of work cannot be known until after the pensioner and spouse are deceased.

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

#522

Post by credit_guy »

kevmo314 wrote: post #4

> The buyout offer entitles federal employees to stop working more or less immediately and continue to be paid through Sept. 30. > The federal workforce's normal attrition rate is about 6% a year, meaning some of those who've taken the buyout may have been planning to leave government service anyway. Wow, talk about an amazing deal if you already happened to be planning on leaving...

> Wow, talk about an amazing deal if you already happened to be planning on leaving...

What does "planning on leaving" mean? I am personally planning on leaving this year, if a better opportunity shows up. As I was last year.

"Planning on leaving" means very little until you have a firm offer in hand. And when you do have that offer, then you are just leaving, not "planning on leaving".

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

#523

Post by kevmo314 »

credit_guy wrote: post #522
kevmo314 wrote: post #4

> The buyout offer entitles federal employees to stop working more or less immediately and continue to be paid through Sept. 30. > The federal workforce's normal attrition rate is about 6% a year, meaning some of those who've taken the buyout may have been planning to leave government service anyway. Wow, talk about an amazing deal if you already happened to be planning on leaving...

> Wow, talk about an amazing deal if you already happened to be planning on leaving... What does "planning on leaving" mean? I am personally planning on leaving this year, if a better opportunity shows up. As I was last year. "Planning on leaving" means very little until you have a firm offer in hand. And when you do have that offer, then you are just leaving, not "planning on leaving".

Retiring, for example.

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

#524

Post by jameshart »

protocolture wrote: post #476
staticman2 wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lan…

Very unclear to me that ‘do nothing and get paid for it with congressionally appropriated funds earmarked for doing something’ is legal.

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

#525

Post by verandaguy »

a_victorp wrote: post #460
verandaguy wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fortunately, the current US president has a long and storied history of going out of his way to pay people mutually agreed-upon sums from prior contracts.

/s

Sadly yep.

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

#526

Post by Spooky23 »

buu700 wrote: post #472
Spooky23 wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It’s about 180x earnings, just under $380/share today.

Elon dangles all sorts of bullshit to get you thinking about nerd nonsense. “OMG, a Tesla robot will do my laundry on Mars with my robot rocket ship!”

It’s all bullshit. They’ve been dangling the imminent $25k car for a decade. The Tesla roadster that people put huge deposits on is nowhere to be found.

People are figuring it out. My previous comment would have created a 100+ comment thread in HN 5 years ago.

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

#527

Post by infecto »

abduhl wrote: post #418
infecto wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>> Most large projects have some percentage of total project value in liens. I hate to be this guy but please provide a source for this. I’ve been involved in the construction industry for quite a while, almost exclusively on large and mega projects, and “most” of my jobs have not had any percentage of their total project value in liens. One company that refused to pay for work my (then) company performed is SpaceX.…

My experience with projects and AP in general. ~$2mm across 70 liens without any split between contractors vs spacex is not that interesting. Did not look like they even accounted for a chain of liens based on the same original unit of work. The report came out in 2024 and the count and $ sum was from 2019, so over 5 years including COVID years. During COVID liens jumped quite a bit and on projects that span multiple years I don't find $2mm over 5 years that shocking.

Now SpaceX could totally be stretching their NWC as far as it goes and always paying late on purpose. Really impossible to tell in this style of shock reporting.

I would be surprised in your experience that you have never had cases of a GC not paying on his end and those folks throwing a <$100k lien on the project. Or a dispute between the GC and payer.

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

#528

Post by verzali »

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…

I know a few people working at SpaceX. Most are good. But a few I wonder how they ever got hired there.

As a customer of SpaceX, though, I have to say their customer service is barebones. It is almost a relief when I work with another launch provider since they provide a much better service and support. I always compare it to a low cost airline in my head, like flying Spirit instead of Emirates kind of thing.

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

#529

Post by verzali »

adastra22 wrote: post #508
Aeolun wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 24-year-old flight controller for Apollo E.g. intern that knows nothing From the perspective of a crusty old man anyway.

The average age of everyone in the room at Mission Control during Apollo 11 was 28. The managers in the room were outliers (e.g. Gene Kranz was 36), which drew the average up. The median age was younger. The Manhattan Project was made possible by similarly young grad students. You can be as crusty as you like, but the reality is that young smart people can be extraordinarily effective under the right conditions.

Flight controllers execute the mission, but they also rely on the engineers who built the things and wrote the procedures. Flight controllers often are young, even today and even in control centres outside SpaceX. The engineers designing and building the systems tend to be a bit older.

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

#530

Post by verzali »

somenameforme wrote: post #480
ben_w wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ins…

Are they behind? China has a space station and they have done a sample return from the Moon. They've landed on Mars as well. If you stick to a narrow definition of rockets, there's a case to put SpaceX ahead. But overall, they are closing the gap with the US very quickly. I would not be surprised if they put humans on the Moon before Artemis or SpaceX.
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