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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

#771

Post by rayiner »

dctoedt wrote: post #768
rayiner wrote: post #746

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "living constitution" angle doesn't get you anywhere. If we are going to "pragmatically reinterpret" the Constitution to allow the modern administrative state, that just makes it more exigent to "pragmatically reinterpret" the law to ensure effective presidential control over the administrative state. I'd start by reinterpreting the Hatch Act to allow prosecuting anyone in the government who "resists" policies su…

> The "living constitution" angle doesn't get you anywhere. Says who? The Constitution is in essence the basic operating manual for American national government. Conditions on the ground have changed — and we've learned more about the world — since 1787. It'd be unpragmatic (read: insane) to insist that the original modus operandi MUST stay the same forever and ever, just because that's how they did things in 1787, a…

> That's clearly one of your ideological priors

But the “living constitution” is nothing more than imposing one’s ideological priors onto the document. I happen to think the crisis of a permanent bureaucracy that is ideologically divergent from the population is far more “dangerous” than anything else the country faces. If we are going to “pragmatically reinterpret” the constitution, that’s the challenge that such interpretation needs to meet.

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

#772

Post by rayiner »

mindslight wrote: post #431
rayiner wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

A "disloyal" administrative state for trying to perform their boring congressionally-designated jobs in response to a pandemic, rather than falling in line with supporting the president's personal business interests by saying everything was fine and telling people to continue going to hotels? Uh-huh. The government is not a corporation and the president is not a unilateral dictator. You're right about other cultures…

> congressionally-designated jobs in response to a pandemic

But sanctioning riots because their ideology tells them “racism is a public health problem?”

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

#773

Post by pharrington »

vkou wrote: post #693
SauciestGNU wrote: post #389

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.

I'm jacked in to the left wing online political discourse, and your comment is the first time I've heard anything about Musk doing something with voting machines. Provide a link to where you heard that.

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

#774

Post by refurb »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #750
refurb wrote: post #742

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is absolutely true. The judiciary has no mechanism to _enforce_ laws. Enforcement belongs to the executive branch. A few issues with that statement. First, law enforcement can defy the President in order to follow the law or court orders (which they are required to do). Second, enforcement isn't always through law enforcement. If the courts decide that an agency can do X, then they can go ahead and do X. No FBI…

He wasn’t charged because SCOTUS ruled that acts committed while president were immune from prosecution and because the senate didn’t have the guts to impeach him and by the time he won the presidency he fired those working on the case against him. If you’re actually defending the events of Jan 6 as not an insurrection then you are part of the problem and we have nothing more to debate.

> He wasn’t charged because SCOTUS ruled that acts committed while president were immune from prosecution and because the senate didn’t have the guts to impeach him and by the time he won the presidency he fired those working on the case against him.

You're getting mixed up.

SCOTUS didn't rule on that until years after Jan 6th. And the SCOTUS ruling doesn't cover crimes committed outside the scope of the President, which an insurrection would most certainly fall under.

And "by the time he became president"? You mean "four years later". You're saying the insurrection case was so solid they couldn't bring him to trial within 4 years?

No.

The truth is that the prosecution knew they didn't have evidence to support convicting Trump of insurrection. As for impeachment, they tried and failed.

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

#775

Post by refurb »

alimw wrote: post #703
refurb wrote: post #694

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That included staff who are stationed at facilities where the weapons are built, according to CNN. This sentence in the article is referring to who was fired , not who the source was .

I am perfectly capable of making sense of the article. It's you that I struggle with. At the time this exchange began, that was the only reference to CNN in the article. As I recall most of the rest was attributed to NBC.

The actual source was CNN. Which is the focus of this discussion.

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

#776

Post by pharrington »

vkou wrote: post #729
llamaimperative wrote: post #725

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, thr…

My first google result searching for "2024 voter suppression lawsuit"[@] mentions a lawsuit challenging voter purges.

[@]https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/trumps-doj-volun...

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

#777

Post by dctoedt »

rayiner wrote: post #771
dctoedt wrote: post #768

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The "living constitution" angle doesn't get you anywhere. Says who? The Constitution is in essence the basic operating manual for American national government. Conditions on the ground have changed — and we've learned more about the world — since 1787. It'd be unpragmatic (read: insane) to insist that the original modus operandi MUST stay the same forever and ever, just because that's how they did things in 1787, a…

> That's clearly one of your ideological priors But the “living constitution” is nothing more than imposing one’s ideological priors onto the document. I happen to think the crisis of a permanent bureaucracy that is ideologically divergent from the population is far more “dangerous” than anything else the country faces. If we are going to “pragmatically reinterpret” the constitution, that’s the challenge that such in…

> But the “living constitution” is nothing more than imposing one’s ideological priors onto the document.

That overlooks a key distinction: An "ideological prior" that's proved to be supported by real-world evidence (i.e., experience) is no longer an ideological prior.

Analogously: Special- and general relativity were just theories in 1905 and 1915 (their respective publication dates). Over decades, real-world evidence proved that they were, in the main, correct — but we still don't treat either as a sacred, immutable text.

The unitary-executive view is an untested theory, an ideological prior. In contrast, our existing administrative state is supported by close to a century of real-world experience.

That's not to say that modifications aren't needed in the modern state. We don't want to make a golden calf of the granular details of FDR's or the Warren Court's approaches, any more than we want to enshrine the unitary-executive model or the Alito-Thomas perspective.

But in a country with some 340 million people that's been the source of the reasonably-successful Pax Americana, it's incredibly risky to go unilaterally f*cking around — it's the equivalent of a teenaged driver insisting that he can refuel his car and change the oil while driving 75 mph on a crowded freeway.

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

#778

Post by kamaal »

akudha wrote: post #264
jeltz wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such a fragile ego. A mature manger should be able to handle a subordinate disobeying without throwing a temper tantrum and firing the whole team and damaging the whole company out of spite.

lol, there are “managers” making 40k a year (with 3 people reporting to them) that have huge egos. It isn’t surprising that world’s richest man child has the ego to match his wealth. Something wrong with society as a whole. People being cruel to each other for no reason, people can’t think/plan beyond the current quarter etc. Everywhere I look, people seem stressed, and they lash out in whatever way they can. Seems l…

>>lol, there are “managers” making 40k a year (with 3 people reporting to them) that have huge egos.

Power trip has its pitfalls. It convinces nobodies that they are special. Its one of the big reasons many times the middle managers end behind their reportees.

Once you taste power its easy to convince yourself that you are coasting along the path of a guaranteed victory, and winning is a given.

There was once this interview of a man I watched who would be around the head of a army, his staff pretty much treated him like a god. And he even got used to that sort of stuff over time. You can't expect good things to happen from there.

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

#779

Post by kamaal »

lumost wrote: post #709
someothherguyy wrote: post #201

If anything this whole DOGE scenario has illuminated is how confused and overconfident many in this country are. We are stumbling fools without systems and rules (organizations, institutions, laws, regulations, ...) to rely on. I wonder how much behavior like this stems from weak regulation in the US to begin with. It seems like it would reinforce the rise of agents that assume they can ask for forgiveness after acti…

Ultimately the system of checks and balances was designed to slow down change. The variety of term limits and actors meant that it would take a significant concentration of resources for a protracted period of time to consolidate power. The fact that the richest man in the world, acting with at least a visual approval of the next 10-100 richest people in the world has only managed some minor chaos is a testament to h…

>>Ultimately the system of checks and balances was designed to slow down change.

I think a good part of the world still doesn't get it. Progress is mostly a outcome of stability, not change, even less rapid change.

This whole concept might sound counter intuitive. But think about it seriously. Exponential growth, when you factor in small losses in between comes when you stick to one process(that generates small gains) for long. Not by making rapid changes to a process(in hopes of making one big gain) for a long time.

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

#780

Post by kamaal »

danpalmer wrote: post #622

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…

>>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.

Mao moved farm labor into factories using this logic, and then a apocalyptic famine followed. He tried to add back the people from factory back to the farms, and then discovered labor wasn't as elastic as he had thought.

Be careful before making big scary changes, especially before taking down carefully erected fences. You don't know why they were put up at the first place.

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