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

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

#721

Musk will see this as working as intended. There’s a segment in one of his many Starship interviews with Tim Dodd the Everyday Astronaut, where he talks about simplifying the machine. He says you’ve got to cut and cut and cut some more until it’s radically simple. His rule of thumb is that if you’re not adding back 10% of the stuff you got rid of, you didn’t get rid of enough in the first place. This might be fine fo…

I don't think you can claim Elon's ignorance or stupidity is the source of his actions.

He knows what he's doing and has a plan. He's a very smart person.

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

#722
post #704

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it’s not? “Arbitrary” would be if he were, like, picking names out of a hat, or the first one that he sees on Twitter in the morning. He’s attacking agencies for extremely personal and ideological reasons. Literally the opposite of arbitrary. > Although this financial features on Twitter sounds like a pretty good idea and I'd like to see it in the wild. Kind of a jaw-dropping reaction to the fact that he’s dismant…

> Honestly, I really struggle to understand the mindset that’s not merely okay with but excited by this sort of egregious corruption. Seems like it should be easy to do. We're looking at this big corrupt blob thing of questionable competence that is the US political class, and then one polyp of the mass does something that probably makes the world a little better. Yay. Well done blob thing. It'd be better if people c…

Is the "one polyp of mass that does something that probably makes the world a little better"… supposed to be DOGE? The single most nakedly corrupt government body in probably the past century?

Like, are we not commenting on an article about how we recklessly fired dozens to hundreds of people who were overseeing our nuclear weapons stockpile? And it turned out they're actually really important, but we're having trouble contacting them to hire them back? And the group that's responsible for all this… is somehow not the questionably competent one?

I don't really know what to say, man. It's pretty clear this isn't going to go anywhere productive. Have a nice night.

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

#724

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The community is and has discussed this days old news. Lots of comments, upvotes and eyeballs. Over there. Not all of those stories is flagged. This is a dupe.

I think the marketplace of ideas is showing that the HN community has not had enough of the discussion, because when these get reposted after being flagged, there is yet more discussion! You are free to not participate if you prefer. Let those of us who wish to, continue. Free speech absolutism, right? Right? ?

Just a dupe. There's an ongoing, open, unflagged discussion.

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

#725
post #693

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conspiracy theories? Can you elaborate?

The current one is "Musk stole the election by something something voting machines". Which is, of course, just as stupid as the 2020 MAGA conspiracies. His money sure as shit bought the election, but it wasn't by fucking with the votes.

No no, it would be "just as stupid as the 2020 conspiracies" if Joe Biden had said "Mark Cuban went to Pennsylvania and boy, he really knows those voting computers... anyway we won in a landslide"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9gCyRkpPe8

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

#726
post #685

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are told endlessly in the UK that "institutions are strong". This is about as foolishly optimistic a statement as I can recall hearing, from ostensibly serious people. Institutions are not strong. Institutions are made of people. People are weak, corrupt, lazy, stupid, and endlessly self-serving. Institutions are weak.

The problem with MBA’s is that they don’t value what decent men and women bring to the table. I’d rather pay double for an honest mechanic. Asymmetric information requires a ton of resources to protect against, or you can just know the person you’re dealing with is honest.

The problem with MBAs is that they rightfully recognize that most people can’t identify if a mechanic is honest or not, so they make recommendations that assume nobody is 100% honest — which is true, but elides all of the value of hiring honest people.

The dishonest mechanic is incentivized to make you think they are honest. The honest mechanic appears honest. Knights and knaves problem.

The problem with government institutions in the USA isn’t MBAs. It’s that sources of corruption / bias were identified and counteracted with rules. And rules. And rules. And rules. And many of those rules appear to counter the common sense of the average person. So the average person believes the institutions don’t hold value. That and politics meant that lots of the laws that govern those institutions assume that no citizen is an honest mechanic and they all need to constantly prove to Vogons that they aren’t dishonest.

A great dive into the last park was done by Jen Pahlka in _Recoding America_.

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

#727
post #371
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Move fast and break the nuclear weapons arsenal. edit: OK, so parent edited to match what I wrote and now I'm being downvoted because I look like I copied parent?

I am being downvoted too if that’s any consolation

Well, now I upvoted you because now I feel sorry for you for some reason!

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

#728
post #4

The headline shown here is: “US government struggles to rehire nuclear safety staff it laid off days ago”

When I was posting, `document.title ` said "US goverment seeks to rehire recently fired nuclear workers". I didn't want to introduce my editorialization.

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

#729
post #693

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The current one is "Musk stole the election by something something voting machines". Which is, of course, just as stupid as the 2020 MAGA conspiracies. His money sure as shit bought the election, but it wasn't by fucking with the votes.

No no, it would be "just as stupid as the 2020 conspiracies" if Joe Biden had said "Mark Cuban went to Pennsylvania and boy, he really knows those voting computers... anyway we won in a landslide" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9gCyRkpPe8

It wouldn't matter. Elections are closely monitored by observers from both parties. If there is credible evidence of fraud across multiple election sites in multiple states, including states with blue legislatures, those observers should probably stop sitting on it.

Assuming any evidence exists, why did none of the people who could actually gather any file injuctions, lawsuits, etc? They had four months to do it, three of them while the incumbent still controlled the executive.

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

#730
post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mind you that not even a quarter of Americans voted for Trump.

Sure, and not even a quarter of Americans voted for Harris. But if you really want to be pedantic: there are around 75M non-citizens living in the US, so that means there are only 265M Americans in the US. A quick search suggests that the number of American citizens living outside the US is under 5M. 77M out of 270M is 28%, so Trump did get more than a quarter of Americans to vote for him. (For the record, I said "of…

> Sure, and not even a quarter of Americans voted for Harris.

So if Harris and her goons did this shit, the correct response would be the same.

> if you really want to be pedantic

Why would I want to be? Saying "the people are fine with this so it's fine" would be BS even if 99% of Americans voted for it. That's the "dumb numbers game", I didn't start with that and I attribute zero value to it.

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