Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

US government struggles to rehire nuclear safety staff it laid off days ago

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

521–530 of 839 posts

Re: US government struggles to rehire nuclear safety staff it laid off days ago

#521

Post by JumpCrisscross »

Hasu wrote: post #459
ty6853 wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mythos often presented is mass wealth inequality is incompatible with raising of living standards of the poor. The poor can gain something at least temporarily by taking it from the rich. Another less violent option is mutually beneficial voluntary interactions.

I'm talking about Emancipation. So no, this isn't temporarily taking something from the rich, or something that could have been solved through "mutually beneficial voluntary action". The government told a bunch of rich people that the incredibly valuable people they owned were no longer their property, and gave money and land to the people who previously had nothing because they hadn't been considered people. That's…

> I'm talking about Emancipation

Emancipation isn't Marxist, historically or conceptually.

> That's what kicked off your Gilded Age

Absolutely not. "Railroads were the major growth industry," with industrialisation and immigration being the era's economic drivers [1]. "The South remained economically devastated after the American Civil War" and remained a drag on the American economy throughout most of the Gilded Age.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_Age

Re: US government struggles to rehire nuclear safety staff it laid off days ago

#522

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

yeyeyeyeyeyeyee wrote: post #254

The US is busy making the biggest own-goal one could imagine. From a position of world-wide dominance and respect, it is being destroyed at a rate that is too quick for most to even start to comprehend what the outcome of these actions will be. I suspect the consequences of these actions will be carried for the rest of our lives, as they are not so easy to turn back. Lots of other countries are standing by watching w…

There have been a lot of times over the past couple weeks where I've thought "OK, is the US toast now??", and the thing that finally did it for me was Trump's prominent post "He who saves his Country does not violate any Law."

Trump announced the rule of law is dead and there has been basically no pushback. I mean, sure, it may have just been bluster, but the Republicans used to put the idea of the Constitution on a pedestal. Now the president is saying, loudly and prominently, that laws don't apply to him (or anyone who is "saving" the country), and it's crickets.

There is no way the US comes back from this in my opinion. I'm not saying something like "collapse" is imminent, but I think the decline is irreversible once the rule of law has been declared null and void.

Also, while I obviously have my opinions, I honestly would be genuinely interested in someone who has a different take (i.e. who thinks Trump's statement isn't as catastrophic as I think it is) to explain their rationale.

Re: US government struggles to rehire nuclear safety staff it laid off days ago

#523

Post by rzz3 »

ty6853 wrote: post #307
bbor wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

…youre saying that life was good from 1870-1910? Reconstruction and the gilded age?? I mean, there was technological and medical improvements, sure, and continued urbanization. But that’s… those are some of our nations most shameful, inequal, racist years in its entire history. The federal government as it exists now was just getting started after we realized we needed it thanks to the civil war, and many local democ…

>social security, Medicare, Medicaid, and defense spending. I doubt even the biggest libertarian on here could advocate cutting any those with a straight face Who says I don't advocate cutting those too, if you're asking? And I am grey haired, not sure about the ageism.

I think defense _spending_ could be cut dramatically without changing our defense _posture nor preparedness_, simply by modernizing inefficient systems, reducing waste, renegotiating contracts, etc. Our defense spending is relatively insane. We should look at Medicare and Medicaid in the same way. I wouldn’t want to see benefits reduced, but we certainly should be optimizing costs. I really hope the idea of reducing government waste hasn’t become a partisan thing just because the folks doing it right now are doing it very badly.

Re: US government struggles to rehire nuclear safety staff it laid off days ago

#524

Post by dragonwriter »

mschuster91 wrote: post #435
afavour wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> just look how fast Luigi Mangione got out of the news. What news would there be? He was arrested and locked up, his court case hasn’t started. Should we have “Luigi still in jail” headlines?

I'd have expected a debate about healthcare cost and actual reforms resulting out of it because the momentum clearly was there, but hey, here we are... For a while, until he was caught, there was a debate beginning to form what drives someone to execute a healthcare executive on the street - but the day he got caught, the debate got suppressed and no one is talking about it anymore.

> I'd have expected a debate about healthcare cost and actual reforms resulting out of it because the momentum clearly was there

No, it wasn't; if the momentum was there, the debate would have been self-sustaining and not dependent on new news events relating to Mangione to sustain it.

> but the day he got caught, the debate got suppressed and no one is talking about it anymore.

The debate didn't get suppressed and didn't need to be; the “debate” in the major media wasn't a real debate, it was just a way to stretch attention to Mangione news for a few more commercial breaks, and once there were no more news events for it to leverage for that purpose, it was abandoned by the same people who had been driving it. And, to the extent that there were people engaging in social media and elsewhere who saw the debate as genuine, they didn't need to be suppressed, as they never had momentum, they just mistook cynical commercial manipulation for opportunity.

Re: US government struggles to rehire nuclear safety staff it laid off days ago

#525

Post by lwhi »

Jensson wrote: post #408
SauciestGNU wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conspiracy theories? Can you elaborate?

There are a lot of conspiracy theories around Trump and Musk etc. Just remember that not all conspiracy theories are wrong, but there being so many popular ones from the left now is not a good sign regardless if they are right or wrong.

Trump and Musk are working according to their own fickle natures and whims.

All anyone can do is guess and imagine, because of this.

Everyone has to be a theory. Reason is extinct.

Re: US government struggles to rehire nuclear safety staff it laid off days ago

#527

Post by vharuck »

PaulRobinson wrote: post #7
sour-taste wrote: post #2

This is LITERALLY the twitter layoffs playing out again. They fired people who had credentials and other things they needed so had to hire them back. Everything else aside why repeat the same mistakes? Just go a little slower and give agencies time to compile accurate lists of necessary employees

Problem is, it’s not backfired - the example you cited “worked”, because it rapidly identified key personnel without weeks or months of subjective analysis and political posturing by workers and their supervisors. I think in federal government the risks are much higher, and Musk is being an idiot by exposing the America public to those risks, but the feedback loop for him on these previous experiments has been positi…

>Rapidly identified key personnel without weeks or months of subjective analysis and political posturing by workers and their supervisors.

This doesn't make sense to me. The federal government isn't a company making Widget X, where you can gut, tweak, and repair it until you minimize the cost per widget and maximize the number of widgets sold. The government does a lot of things, often in the hopes of results in one or more decades, and there's rarely an easy and immediate way to measure success.

For example, the Surgeon General announced tobacco's link with cancer in 1964. It wasn't until the 1990s that smoking rates really started to fall in any significant way. The federal and state governments have spent decades and billions of dollars to reduce smoking rates, and they've been wildly successful. The tax revenue generated by any person-years alive which were won through that effort will never make up for the billions spent. But those people will contribute more to the economic and social life of the US, and the tobacco settlement deterred other companies from causing so much harm.

Re: US government struggles to rehire nuclear safety staff it laid off days ago

#528

Post by lgdiva »

grandempire wrote: post #298
suzzer99 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because we are a profoundly stupid nation.

“They are my enemies because they are evil and stupid” is why we are here a second time.

If you can explain how firing the nuclear experts isn't utterly stupid, I'm all ears, bucko.

Re: US government struggles to rehire nuclear safety staff it laid off days ago

#530

Post by lgdiva »

dannersy wrote: post #135

Here we go again, let's watch HN users bend over backwards to tell everyone how this is a good thing, or clever, or a master stroke of finding inefficiencies.

I mean, yeah, this place invented Elon Musk and Sam Altman and every last Silicon Valley grifter. It's not all JavaScript and cute GitHub projects. I really do hope HN is at least a footnote in the history books that talk about the collapse of the United States.
Post reply on HN