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Goredho

Certifiably Surly
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Everything posted by Goredho

  1. My hypothesis that scientists and scholars are just as susceptible to buzzword hype as executives and marketers has proven true.
  2. Surly shart poll... Do you try to salvage the underwear, throw it in the hamper for your wife to deal with or do you...
  3. While I totally agree, I don’t think Musk or Trump are the kind that explain themselves, provide transparency or feel the need to answer to anyone. There is a reason the founding fathers wanted a system of checks and balances. Because they were leaving a monarchy where power was consolidated into a single individual that answered to only themselves and whatever conscience they possessed.
  4. They also opened @NowThis in the 2020 Kobe death thread.
  5. I appreciate the data link. Thanks. Maybe adding a million out of work federal employees to the steady state of terminated employees in a year will be a blip for those employees and everyone else? Regardless, we will see soon enough. I was going by largest layoffs in the private sector for a single employer in a single year: IBM: Currently, the all-time record for the largest corporate job cut belongs to tech company IBM, which laid off 60,000 people in 1993, the same year it posted an $8 billion loss. Sears: Sears, Roebuck & Co. cut 50,000 jobs and closed 113 stores in 1993. Citigroup cut 50,000 jobs amid the 2008 financial crisis.
  6. This conversation is for everyone else.
  7. I have no problem with the TSA going away. Are they being targeted by DOGE? Most disagreements here seem to be over how federal government downsizing is carried out. I would like to see it done in a controlled and responsible fashion with A) empathy for people that are only guilty of accepting a job and doing what was asked of them in civil service and B) an eye on effects to the broader economy, jobs market and reliability of necessary government services. Those concerns seem to be an afterthought at best.
  8. I mean, for every $100 I made, the state was charged $150, so Utah was getting charged 150% of what I cost Thoughtworks. All of our contracts were for time and materials.
  9. Ok, I will defer to your expertise, but my margin was when I contracted through Thoughtworks to the state of Utah was 50%.
  10. The same people would get the jobs at 150-200% the cost to the government if their salary stays the same. The Deloittes and IBMs gotta eat, too.
  11. I honestly have no problem with the idea that the federal government needs a good trimming. It would be nice if this could be done in a throttled fashion, say over a couple years to "flatten the curve" of joblessness and all of its known and unknown effects and to provide for the ability to pause and pivot if/when damaging effects arise, but that runs into midterms. I imagine that is why this has been outsourced to our unelected modern-day Howard Hughes to execute. He need only answer to the President, not voters. The elected politicians can take credit for the good and avoid blame for the bad.
  12. Pay is treefiddy?
  13. Trump has already shown he will pause or backoff if he's given a reason to do it and a path that includes saving face. If a republican governor calls the White House and says this or that is going to harm too many people that vote the right way, Elon's efforts will be adjusted. Like, I seriously doubt Trump would allow the VA to be gutted and made worse. He wouldn't want to damage support among the military. So I doubt 75% of government employees are cut. Maybe it's 65%, maybe it's 30%. If it's 20 percent, it will be 600,000 people and an order of magnitude larger than the largest layoff in our nation's history. They don't have to get anywhere near 75% to create a massive amount of jobless Americans.
  14. Given that is Doge's stated goal, there is 0.0% chance that this will be anything other than the most massive layoff in our country's history. Will they wind up hitting the mark or exceeding it? Probably not, they are a government organization after all and we all know they can't do anything. But its still going to be disruptive to a lot of people's daily lives.
  15. There will absolutely be a butterfly effect.
  16. I don't disagree, but the "should we" and "how" debates are kind of pointless now. The gutting of the federal government and release of public sector workers into the market is happening, and it's not going to be a surgical procedure. It's gonna be a leg amputation with a sledge hammer and no painkillers. So... what are going to be the effects of that? Your previous post discussed that better.
  17. I don't know, but someone I know who works for the state of Colorado is on a project that is paid for in part by federal funding. He's slightly concerned. Colorado should have the money to foot the bill without federal assistance (revenue from legal weed surpassed revenue from alcohol long ago). I wonder if some states where "government" isn't a dirty word will look to expand their state services and wind up subsuming some of these workers.
  18. So with all the federal hard and/or soft layoffs coming, the private sector workforce is going to be getting flooded with public sector workers looking for a paycheck. This thread is to discuss the effects of that free from the political (or even moral/ethical) right or wrong of it. According to this article, the federal government is the nation's single largest employer and it employs about 3 million civilians. 92% of those are white collar jobs. DOGE has goals to cut 75% of them loose. If that happens, 2.25 million white collar workers will be out of a job and looking for work. So what's going to happen with the glut of workers and a vacuum of jobs? Certain fields will be affected more than others. Certain states will be more affected than others. Discuss.
  19. So since WHo has been tracking this, there have been 954 global cases, of which 464 were fatal or a 49% case fatality rate. But in the US, there have been 67 cases and only 1 death for a 1.4% CFR. I get that wealthy, developed countries with good health care systems would have a much lower CFR than average, but this still seems lower than what could be explained solely by that. Anyone seen any discussions as to why?
  20. Sounds like the kind of guy to hire illegals to put in a patio for him. https://www.ice.gov/webform/ice-tip-form
  21. Yeah, it's not easy, or any old democrat would have done it already. But ultimately, if the establishment wants to stay established, they have to successfully connect to more voters than those who are voting to tear it down. And the pool of voters participating in elections now includes a whole lot of previously apolitical poor white folks that Trump mobilized to vote to tear down the establishment. They've got very little to lose with Trump taking a hatchet to the federal government. People who don't like the MAGA/project 2025 agenda can either embrace the challenge of figuring out how to connect to these now active voters (and it may take white male faces to communicate to them), or they can expect to live in Trump's America for the foreseeable future. I think it's naive to think otherwise.
  22. Yeah, we’ll see. The kind of person Trump is selling hope to is not a person with the means to travel abroad.
  23. And Charlie Strong was given a rotting roster of entitled pussies that found ways to lose to awful teams. It does not matter if he was not responsible for it. It was his job to fix it, and when he proved he couldn't, he was gone. Democrats are the Charlie Strong of politics. Nice people, but completely unequipped to deal with what is happening in this country. The time to nuke party leadership and start with a fresh approach from a fresh set of faces was after Hilary got run by DJT. Now, I'm not sure the party can recover. As a brand, it's toxic. Want evidence? In a warning for Colorado Democrats, a new poll shows their popularity slipping. Now what? Survey reveals problems for state’s dominant party and is another sign of conflict over its direction Here's a link, but it's behind a paywall: https://www.denverpost.com/2025/02/02/colorado-democrats-republicans-one-main-street-poll-shifts-voters/ Donald Trump built a base by acknowledging a lot of people had shitty lives, putting the blame on political opponents and promising to fix it. He did that first to the Republican Party, then to the Democrats. Now he's started similar positioning with Canada. There is a pattern here. A working class rural white guy I know who voted for Trump put his decision this way: "Donald Trump represents hope for a whole lot of people like me." Unsaid in that is what his life seems like without DJT acknowledging the worth of people like him: hopeless. He's a handyman. Lives in a trailer. He never voted before 2016. Donald Trump is the product of both parties and the government they ran having ignored these people for decades. They were a-political, because no one from either party made them feel worthy of consideration in our governance. Many of them were accurately described by Hilary as "deplorable". But they are humans, citizens and voters and writing them off as unimportant was a huge mistake that created the context where someone like DJT could do what he is doing. It doesn't matter if Trump is full of shit. If he's going to make those people's lives worse. If he's more about enriching the rich and the common folk were just pawns in his game. It doesn't matter if they are cut off from reality by the conservative info sphere. It's the oppositions job to overcome all of that. The people who will stop this will be the people that can figure out how to connect with that working class base and give them a different form of hope than what DJT has given them. That is obviously not the Democratic Party, at least as we have known it the last decade.
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