I start thinking that Trump and Elon are Russian assets whose task is to destroy the US from the inside. Both were heavily involved with Russians before, travelled to Russia as private citizens, and they both could be compromised long ago. If Russia and China tried to think about ways to ruin the US, they couldn't come up with a better plan than what Trump and Musk do to the US as to both home and foreign policies.
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
#832Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the idea that the Republicans are willing to continue an actual overthrow of law and order in the US is...close to a fantasy No, imagining them continuing to do what they have been doing in the open is not fantasy. Imagining them somehow "snapping back" to supporting constitutional order is much more fantastical. Especially in the face of the anti-judiciary salvos of JD Vance -- a leading candidate for the next nom…
Yeah, TBH I find throaway89's comment a little baffling. I'm not that concerned that Trump said what he said. I'm concerned that he said that and there was no pushback from Republicans or probably about half the country (and I'm guessing that at least a third of the country vehemently, enthusiastically supported the idea). I saw a good post recently that described what is happening as essentially a "'cold' civil war"…
I'm saying the reason there isn't any pushback is because the whole system is working as "winner-take-all," hence pushing back on ANYTHING that Donald Trump does, when there is no other Republican who can challenge him for leadership, is like scoring on your own net. It's a bad strategy if you're trying to win the game!
Adolfo Franco (interesting name for a right-wing strategist..) said it best on Al Jazeera. "How can he be a spokesperson for a man like Donald Trump?" He was asked. his answer was that he's a spokesperson for the REPUBLICAN PARTY, and in 4 years, there will be a new nominee. Simple as that. Time will tell what happens.
Polarization has reached "existential threat levels." It will eventually go back. Vance may find that moderation is in his party's interest after all the chaos of Trump. They are very different personalities.
Re: US government struggles to rehire nuclear safety staff it laid off days ago
#833Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we fired 25% of the federal govt workforce, it would save 1% from the federal budget. This has nothing to do with trimming waste and everything to do with replacing the government with loyalists from top to bottom. What comes after that isn't going to be pretty.
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…
Those expenses are only unavoidable if you don't consider cutting fraudulent claims, which may have been enabled by people who are incompetent and/or working inefficiently. If you're able to cut a small but significant portion of fraudulent "pensions, medicare, social security, and all of these expenses are unavoidable and in a mandatory expenses category" by proxy from cutting the people, that represents a larger proportion of the total budget.
Re: US government struggles to rehire nuclear safety staff it laid off days ago
#834You voted for this. Yes, you did. Of course they don't headline their campaign with the stuff they're _really_ going to do.
All democracies need to switch to policy based voting and hide political parties behind them until after election results, humans are too tribal for anything else.
Re: US government struggles to rehire nuclear safety staff it laid off days ago
#835Earlier quoted context omitted.
Data centers will pretty much absorb any person with military nuclear power experience, even cases of people who completely washed out of the program. As for nuclear missile programs in this case, I'm pretty positive that field will still have similar desirable high points. Reliability, understanding procedures, actually understanding procedures to know when/how/why scripts are broken in some cases, and having such s…
> Data centers will pretty much absorb any person with military nuclear power experience Could you elaborate why is that? They seem to be unrelated areas.
At least one the Navy Nuke side, they need to survive what colleges count as 50 to 92 credits in a year and a half. So considerable levels of training.
Anything govt. Nuclear is also going to have "interesting" relationships with procedures. Essentially planning them out, proving them as functional, and being pretrained think about current conditions compared what the procedure thinks is correct. Also trained to analyze when to step into a casualty or recovery procedure properly.
Re: US government struggles to rehire nuclear safety staff it laid off days ago
#836Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because these things aren’t rigorously defined it is helpful to follow the convention rather than to go to the dictionary definition of a similar word. I mean surely you wouldn’t say something along the lines of “I often see socialists who aren’t invited to many parties, so are they really social?”
While "Socialist" has a relatively specific meaning, "progressive" has a much wider variety of similar meanings, which definitely include the usage I indicated, without any need for recourse to the related word "progress". Attempting to now restrict the word "progressive" to just one of its meanings in a politically biased way reeks of newspeak style attempts to control what people can express.
Well, I’m fine with definitions-as-description, but it doesn’t really leave me any room to call you wrong. All I can say is that I’ve never encountered anybody else who uses your definition.
Re: US government struggles to rehire nuclear safety staff it laid off days ago
#837The 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…
As someone who has studied the American constitution and been actively engaged in much civil discourse locally, I firmly believe and comprehend the logic of an unmanageably large “government” being a very bad thing on many levels. Please explain to me your obsession with a massive tax funded “government” and your thinking behind a comment such as the one you made. Why do you think this way? Nothing could be more in line with the American forefathers vision than what trump and Elon are doing by dismantling a grossly overweight, fraud ridden, and useless system that the US calls much of its government. I’m eager for a cogent argument, that blends constitutionality and logic, for such a broken system. Hoping you’re the one to make this argument
Re: US government struggles to rehire nuclear safety staff it laid off days ago
#838The 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…
As someone who has studied the American constitution and been actively engaged in much civil discourse locally, I firmly believe and comprehend the logic of an unmanageably large “government” being a very bad thing on many levels. Please explain to me your obsession with a massive tax funded “government” and your thinking behind a comment such as the one you made. Why do you think this way? Nothing could be more in l…
Nothing could be more in line with the American forefathers vision than what trump and Elon are doing
the problem with people like you (I sincerely do not mean this in ANY derogatory way, just generalising people that make these arguments) is that you are using “American forefathers” as you see fit. American forefathers would be ROLLING IN THEIR GRAVES seeing and hearing what Trump and Elon are doing. They literally fought against people like the two of them.
If I have too choose between bloated federal government and having a President who thinks he is above the law and his Supreme Court cronies saying so in so many words and having a fucking african immigrant with god access to government computer systems I choose bloated government any day of the week and twice on sunday
Re: US government struggles to rehire nuclear safety staff it laid off days ago
#839https://www.npr.org/2025/02/14/nx-s1-5298190/nuclear-agency-... If even half of NPR's report is true, the way in which it was conducted was grossly cruel and with complete ignorance. DOGE and it's supporters are quiet literally playing like a child with the levers that decide if you wake up tomorrow.
There's an old expression from the first Trump presidency, "the cruelty is the point."