@Phil This graph is all the years FRED has. I didn't cherry pick anything. Here's Federal employment to labor force. Also no editing of dates, just what FRED has.
Graph of Federal employment to civilian labor force. Just over 3% in 1948, rises to 4% in the early 1950s, well below 2% now.
@Phil I can't imagine a statement more obviously and foolishly wrong than this one.
I hope you don't get proven wrong and can continue to enjoy these luxury resentments, because I don't want to have to live in the reality that disproves you.
@Phil I'd love to see the methodology behind these "stats" that enrage you. Of course there are cases of Federal workers hitting porn sites. You'll find cases of any class of desktop workers hitting porn sites, unless employer surveillance is known to be very strict and punishment known to be severe.
You are succumbing to pure propaganda that reinforces your prejudices. I'm sure all those postal workers are masturbating to their phones while walking to your doorstep with your mail.
Graph of Federal employees to population, plummeting from 1.6% in 1952 to less than 0.9% now.
@Phil Federal workers outside the military is less than 2% of the workforce. Almost every new development in pharma and medicine begins with NIH/NSF funded research. Even very neoliberal economists like Benjamin Jones who study this stuff acknowledge that basic research funding is very high return, mistargeting is an issue but the unexhausted benefits of basic research overwhelm that drag, the main constraint is quantitative. 1/
@Phil You should be careful what you wish for. You do have allies in government now. You may get the collapse you think you want. You won’t like it. Failed states are shithole countries. Sure, you’ll pay a smaller share of your income to the state, to “welfare”, whatever. But it’ll be a smaller share of a smaller income, and you’ll face a lot of new and miserable costs, financial and in quality-of-life terms. /fin
@Phil the share of the workforce Federally employed has dramatically shrunk, because people making errors like yours have been around since the 1970s. that has increased the cost of the Federal government, as contractors charge much more and over time perform much worse (as they don’t preserve institutional knowledge). 1/
@Phil the fiscal footprint of the Federal government is down to health care, social security, and military. USAID, for example, is a rounding error. Trump has promised to preserve and protect SS and Medicare. Should we go after VA? Medicaid for the poor? Dramatically shrink the military? 2/
@Phil There are things we could do! If we reformed the patent system, made use of compulsory licensing for drugs, we could reduce hundreds of billions of expenditure. we’d have to fund more pharma research publicly, but that’s be a bargain. What’s Trump doing? Oh, wait. He’s killing NIH and NSF, again, things that cost a rounding error, but with enormous payoffs. 3/
@Phil Even on his own terms, on your terms, these guys prejudices don’t address the problem they claim to be after. It’s just ignorant hostility blowing up hobbyhorses. Shithole country stuff. /fin
@Phil do you know how much, say, Federal government employment has grown as a share of the population?
i think a pretty good, pretty accurate, way of explaining to less news-obsessed people what’s going on is Trump and Musk are turning the US into a “shithole country”, as the man himself once put it.
@admitsWrongIfProven 20:30 UTC / 21:30 UTC+1 https://interfluidity.com/office-hours/
everyone should be in favor of a democratic people’s republic. seems obvious.
from https://xcancel.com/lexfridman/status/1887587308087427072
Screenshot of tweet from Lex Fridman: Everyone should be in favor of transparent, efficient government. Seems obvious.
we should have understood there’s no real moat around LLMs when Musk was able to stand up a near-frontier model so quickly. only the myth of Musk’s specialness allowed us to ignore homegrown evidence.
i guess what the election decided is before we rise from the ashes, we will be ashes.
“The idea that ‘fascism = strength’ is just a piece of propaganda unwittingly reproduced by critics of the fascism thesis.” #JohnGanz https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/lets-get-real
austerity is not the same thing as efficiency.
in fact, often the correlation is inverse.
This post is valid for 24 hours.
why does Microsoft "deactivate" your Skype credit if you don't use Skype for 180 days, but let you (and force you to) reactivate it to get it back? what good does this extra flow and hassle do anybody?
without comment.
Chart of gold futures, which are at an all-time high.
once a coup has proceeded to a certain degree, it becomes difficult to distinguish putting down the coup from a coup on behalf of different interests. once control of the state is up for grabs, what faction can claim to be above factions? all, of course, will try.
“A power-mad president possessed of radical theories of executive authority and convinced of his own royal prerogative has given de facto control of most of the federal government to one of the richest men on the planet, if not the richest, whose own interests are tangled up in those of rival governments and foreign autocracies as well as the United States.” @jbouie https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/05/opinion/trump-musk-federal-government.html ht @hilzoy
“So many of these things are so wildly illegal that I think they’re playing a quantity game and assuming the system can’t react to all this illegality at once” https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/02/04/elon-musk-government-legal-doge/
@Phil https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/dec/16/elon-musk-government-security-clearance
his kids don’t have anything.
