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

bbc.com

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

#731

Post by casey2 »

llamaimperative wrote: post #557
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> many in this country are It's exposing the intellectual bankruptcy of the Silicon Valley elite. Between the stupidity and kowtowing it has revealed a startling amount of groupthink and cowardice, even among people I once held as independent thinkers.

I highly recommend everyone read the Curtis Yarvin NYTimes interview [linked below] to see the full extent of the intellectual bankruptcy. This guy is apparently seen as some meaningful thinker by the Silicon Valley elite (Vance and Andreesen have quoted him), but in literally his 3rd sentence just straight up lies. Yarvin's claim: "[In] F.D.R.’s first inaugural address,... he essentially says, Hey, Congress, give me…

>Congress:"no" >FDR:"well I tried." You are very clearly being intellectually dishonest here. The only way anybody could think otherwise is if they where on your political team. Congress said yes to FDR and they are saying yes to Trump. Who cares if you don't like it, it's literally none of your business. Obsessing over other people's actions like this isn't healthy behavior at all.

You are talking about the guy who sent American citizens of Japanese descent to interment/forced labor camps and got hundreds of thousands of Americans killed in WW2, a war we should have never joined. He committed much more evil than anything Trump has done and will ever do.

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

#732

Post by computerthings »

grandempire wrote: post #296
computerthings wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is normal in every election so you can use the same logic to dismiss any president. Do you only respect 100% sampling rates in other statistical situations? At a certain point this line of thinking is just saying you don’t think elections work, or that there should be some non-democratic supervisor to undo bad ones. There is also an older idea that getting people out to vote is part of the game. An election is w…

[flagged]

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

#733

Post by casey2 »

enraged_camel wrote: post #293
grandempire wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the catastrophic things that were predicted form Brexit didn’t really happen though

Yes they did? Is this a joke? Or have you not been following the UK’s descent into poverty and irrelevance?

if THIS comment isn't satirical then truly and honestly you should lay off the propaganda pipe.

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

#734

Post by somenameforme »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #674
somenameforme wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "federal budget" is something people often mention, but it's quite misleading. At least in terms of what we think of. The reason is that the overwhelming majority of the budget is spent automatically - pensions, medicare, social security, and all of these expenses are unavoidable and in a mandatory expenses category. The remainder of the budget, including military, is considered discretionary. That discretionary…

>The reason is that the overwhelming majority of the budget is spent automatically - pensions, medicare, social security, and all of these expenses are unavoidable and in a mandatory expenses category. Don't worry, they want to cut that too: https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/finance/gop-targets-88... March is going to be a bloodbath. For who, I can only wait and see.

As is typical for media on this issue, that article is highly misleading. That's the House, not DOGE, asking a committee to cut an average of $88 billion per year over the next decade. That committee in particular also has oversight over a stupidly large number of things from commerce to energy (as per their name) and everything inside which somehow even includes healthcare as well.

But it's impossible to cut mandatory programs' spending directly without a law passed which would require a super-majority in the Senate due to filibusters. On that note, consider now how critical the filibuster is. It wasn't long ago that Democrats wanted to end the filibuster to try to roughshod some voting law changes. Had that succeeded then now the Republican party on a super-narrow majority in the Senate would similarly be able to pass literally any law they want. Checks and balances are important because tomorrow will not be like today - a truth that will remain forever.

So in any case, they're going to need to carry out cuts not related to mandatory spending, or indirectly cut mandatory spending which can be done by things like reducing administrative costs, not spending millions of dollars on Politico subscriptions, and so on. But healthcare (or any other mandatory spending) cuts themselves will be impossible unless the DNC is also on board with it.

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

#735

Post by llamaimperative »

casey2 wrote: post #731
llamaimperative wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I highly recommend everyone read the Curtis Yarvin NYTimes interview [linked below] to see the full extent of the intellectual bankruptcy. This guy is apparently seen as some meaningful thinker by the Silicon Valley elite (Vance and Andreesen have quoted him), but in literally his 3rd sentence just straight up lies. Yarvin's claim: "[In] F.D.R.’s first inaugural address,... he essentially says, Hey, Congress, give me…

>Congress:"no" >FDR:"well I tried." You are very clearly being intellectually dishonest here. The only way anybody could think otherwise is if they where on your political team. Congress said yes to FDR and they are saying yes to Trump. Who cares if you don't like it, it's literally none of your business. Obsessing over other people's actions like this isn't healthy behavior at all. You are talking about the guy who…

1) Not sure where you think I’m defending FDR, I’m saying Yarvin lies about what FDR said

2) I truly don’t understand the “none of your business?” Whose behavior am I obsessing over? Only candidates I can think of are POTUS and his inner circle which… is absolutely my business…?

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

#736

Post by somenameforme »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #675
derangedHorse wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most mandatory spending is on healthcare, social security, interest payments on debt. For anyone who values anything other than those things, every penny should be accounted for. The percentage of the total budget now becomes irrelevant.

>For anyone who values anything other than those things Nah, we'll cut those too: https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/finance/gop-targets-88...

As mentioned elsewhere, this is literally impossible. Directly cutting mandatory spending would require new laws which, in turn, would require a supermajority in the Senate due to the filibuster, meaning the DNC would also need to be all-in on it. On the note, keep this in mind the next time some party, which can't see past tomorrow, tries to eliminate the filibuster.

Checks and balances are very important and I'm very happy to see the GOP making 0 effort to end the filibuster in spite of it currently being rather liberally used by the DNC.

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

#737

Post by insane_dreamer »

refurb wrote: post #697
insane_dreamer wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> stems from weak regulation in the US to begin with I don't know about that, but certainly it has exposed a significant weakness in the US democratic structure: it is based on the supposition that everyone will follow the rules (i.e., accepting the results of an election, following the laws passed by congress, etc.) A president who defies both conventions and laws is hard to stop. The only mechanism is impeachment,…

> I don't know about that, but certainly it has exposed a significant weakness in the US democratic structure: it is based on the supposition that everyone will follow the rules (i.e., accepting the results of an election, following the laws passed by congress, etc.) A president who defies both conventions and laws is hard to stop. This isn't true at all. The main way the President is stopped is through the courts, w…

Trump can ignore the courts, and is already doing so by saying Federal judges are partisan and have no nationwide authority over EOs.

Impeachment by the house isn’t a high bar since Clinton; the senate is much harder.

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

#738

Post by roenxi »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #722
roenxi wrote: post #704

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 troub…

> The single most nakedly corrupt government body in probably the past century?

The last president was forced to issue multiple preemptive pardons for his own family after being dogged for years by serious corruption allegations. That probably counts as worse and it isn't even particularly outrageous by the standards of the US Congress, it seemed to be pretty routine stuff. I'd expect most members of the US congress to struggle if real scrutiny was bought to bear since their financial circumstances often don't appear to make sense.

Then beyond the personal corruption there is the lobbying network that constantly tries and succeeds in writing law for various unsavoury interest groups. Realistically if Musk is doing something corrupt - TBD in my opinion - his major mistake is being directly associated with the changes, he should have learned from the experts and done it discretely like everyone else does.

> And the group that's responsible for all this… is somehow not the questionably competent one?

You seem to have tapped into the mindset with this one. Say it again seriously and you've made it there.

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

#739

Post by [deleted] »

roenxi wrote: post #738
jakelazaroff wrote: post #722

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 troub…

> The single most nakedly corrupt government body in probably the past century? The last president was forced to issue multiple preemptive pardons for his own family after being dogged for years by serious corruption allegations. That probably counts as worse and it isn't even particularly outrageous by the standards of the US Congress, it seemed to be pretty routine stuff. I'd expect most members of the US congress…

[deleted]

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

#740

Post by science4sail »

slicktux wrote: post #10

Nuclear workers go where the work is…they are not going to wait around when there’s plenty of jobs out there needing their skills.

What other jobs? I guess that they could pull a fall-of-the-Soviet-Union scenario and sell their skills to foreign countries? Surely there must be a lot of countries interested in starting their own nuclear weapons programs in the aftermath of the Russia-Ukraine war.
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