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Comments
43 responses to “Monday’s Forum”
Gavin
If you haven’t read Thomas Frank before, now’s a great time to start.
Don’t let yourself think Musk’s attempt to blowtorch the administrative state hasn’t been tried before. If you’re not aware of Tom DeLay and his actions in DC from 2003-2006, enjoy this summary.
Joe
When will people notice the shrinkflation in their tax bills? We are clearly on the cusp of experiencing significantly reduced government services from the slashed federal government. Yet, I am quite confident that, no matter what “tax relief” they vote for in Washington, the federal tax bill for 95% of Americans will not go down. We will all be paying the same amount of money for reduced defense, reduced research, reduced soft power, reduced grant funding and extension services. If government services were packaged like Snickers bars we would be paying the full size price for the fun size bar.
Woah, that’s an asshole I haven’t thought about in years.
Grumpy realist
Elon’s now threatening to put on Admin leave and then fire anyone who hasn’t returned to work by this Monday. Which would mean most of my agency.
We’re still waiting for directions from above as to what to do about that silly “what five things did you do last week?” email.
Mister Bluster
@Jax:
I humbly accept your righteous whipping.
In my defense I am posting my comment from yesterday’s Chainsaw thread that you missed:
Mister Bluster says:
Sunday, 23 February 2025 at
@James Joyner:..Easily tracking what time posts and comments are made are not in my best interest given heightened scrutiny by people who don’t understand what academics do.
Now I understand.
I am speaking only for myself when I say a pox on those who would cause you grief.
I’m guessing they would be of the anti-vax crowd.
…are displaying the vigor of a geriatric turtle.
I laughed out loud. Keep it up and before you know it The Tonight Show will be booking you.
“They are profoundly aware that they MUST act fast and with some degree of ferocity, even recklessness, else we will default back to the status quo of leaders who pretend to be in charge while the embedded system runs things behind the scenes.”
DK
@JKB: Illegal immigrant oligarch Musk and his unqualified DOGE kids are the unelected petty technocrats.
Indiscriminate mass layoffs from the world’s richest man and biggest welfare queen will only get more unpopular. The spoils of MAGA incompetence:
– firing nuclear staffers, scrambling to rehire them, being unable to make contact
– firing AT controllers, as planes crash
– gutting health agencies and firing experts therein during disease outbreaks
– firing veterans, scrambling to reverse it
– crippling national parks by firing rangers, scrambling to rehire them
– emailing termination threats to lifetime appointees and staffers in the judiciary
Good luck to Republican candidates tasked with polishing this turd, especially in the upcoming Virginia elections where govt jobs are numerous.
They’ll run into the same troubling they’re having corralling enough votes to gut Medicaid and blow a $4.5 trillion dollar hole in the deficit with more tax cuts for billionaires. While tarriffs and trade wars push Trumpflation higher.
Charley in Cleveland
If your cause is righteous and just you don’t have to “act fast with some degree of ferocity.” No one objects to eliminating waste, but intelligent people object to burning down the house when your goal is to clean out the garage. The myth of petty technocrats is a pretty thin reed to lean on when you are stripping the government of institutional knowledge and its ability to respond both quickly and competently to a crisis.
Grumpy realist
@JKB: there’s a rule-of-thumb used in computer programming, engineering, business restructuring, and many other areas: if you run across a fence, make absolutely certain you know why that fence is there before tearing it down.
This is no difference. “Move fast and break things” may be grudgingly acceptable when you’re dealing with code for a social media app, where you can always resort to a prior version of the code if it turns out you really screwed up. It’s an absolutely idiotic idea when it comes to things like fumbling around with the security on nuclear weapons, or stopping epidemics, or…shall we say Chernobyl? After the database has been breached, the epidemic has started spreading like wildfire, or the containment wall has cracked, it’s too late to say “oops, my bad!”
Not if you want to destroy the thing you’re changing.
After you break it, you can argue it’s unfixable and has to go.
MWLib
@Kathy: @Kathy:
You get a gold star for correctly identifying the modus operandum of the DOdGEy wrecking crew.
JohnSF
@JKB:
As the Republicans are in charge of the Executive and both Chambers of Congress, why are they imminently likely to begin automatically deferring to these supposedly ascendant “petty technocrats” and the “embedded system”>
Or is this just an excuse for massively cocking things up?
Surely it would be easy enough to order OMB to set up a special audit task force, (and give even MUSK a position in it to salve his vanity), hire qualified auditors, set them stern goals for investigating any waste and fraud.
Then the reports come back to OMB, that agency, and the White House, and external experts draw up a plan for closing down operations regarded as wasteful or unproductive, and submit such plans to Congress with strong public recommendations for them to be implemented.
I cannot see why this approach would be far more likely to avoid legal problems, not cause chaos in the public administration, respect the prerogatives of Congress, and generally be less likely to end up a total and epic cluster-fudge.
CSK
Very sad news: Roberta Flack, 88, has died. Wonderful singer. RIP.
Slugger
I’d like the people talking about inefficiency in government to show me an efficient one somewhere. Not a hypothetical literary creation, but a real life on earth efficient government. An internal combustion engine typically has a thermodynamic efficiency of <40%. That means that 60% of the fuel
you put in your tank generates some random heat that doesn’t move your car. Lots of engineers have worked on improving this, but real improvements have not come. The laws of thermodynamics insures this waste. Our government has waste; show me an Erehwon that has no government waste. When firefighters sit around the station making spaghetti, it isn’t waste. The downtime is necessary to have staffing when real fires break out. Maybe a certain amount of government inefficiency is simply inevitable.
I suspect Musk actually knows this; he is just as smart as I am. Perhaps this is all a sham intended to rally political power and as a desired byproduct reestablish the default of white males in positions of power. Not all white men of course, in the past there was clearly an elite who had first claim on power.
Grumpy realist
@Slugger: another rule of engineering: you can have a robust system or you can have a maximum-efficient system. However, you cannot have both at the same time.
This morning at Dept of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) HQ in DC as mandatory return to office began, this video played on loop for ~5 mins on screens throughout the building, per agency source.
Building staff couldn’t figure out how to turn it off so sent people to every floor to unplug TVs.
…democratically elected branches of government after a century of usurpation by petty technocrats
This is really unworthy of you. This is garbage. Those democratically elected branches passed laws to make this bureaucracy, which is doing exactly what it was mandated to do.
There was no usurpation. This is language meant to justify authoritarian rule, while pretending to be democratic. This is the kind of thing people say just before declaring martial law and launching a coup.
This may be the most disappointing thing of yours I’ve ever read.
Grumpy realist
@Matt: one of my co-workers when I worked for the Japanese government pointed out that what “just-in-time” had done in Japan was simply move materials and product from sitting in warehouses to being on the backs of lorries stuck in traffic…
Liberal Capitalist
Had a chance this weekend to watch De Niro in a miniseries: “Zero Hour”.
De Niro (as former President Mullin) had a great line in the film:
“Freedom allows people like you to do whatever you want. Liberty is what protects the rest of us from people like you.”
I think that this is something that we have forgotten in our modern society. So many think that Freedom (especially the mistaken definition of “Freedom of Speech”) is such that it overlays ALL other concepts.
It’s not. Without liberty, there is no freedom. And I think that idea has been lost… and critically needs to be brought back by those who attempt to oppose the existing Putin-centric coup.
What is Liberty?
In the US Constitution, liberty means freedom from arbitrary and unreasonable restraint. This includes the freedom to act according to one’s own will, and not just physical freedom.
Many people use the term freedom and liberty interchangeably, but I would say that they are two different things. Liberty is to function freely within a society or social structure that supports freedom within a rule-of-law framework that value and supports the individual.
So, to have freedom in liberty is to live in a society that does not arbitrarily act in a destructive manner against the individual.
If you agree with what I have said, then you understand why, in this past month, we have lost our liberty. Our framework to function as a society (internally, as well as externally with other social structures/nation states) has been potentially become irreparably damaged.
In the past few decades, the GOP had valued individual freedoms, but downplayed liberty, as the idea of liberty inherently has the idea of a social contract… and that really grinds harshly against the idea of individual freedoms without any government restraints at all.
But liberty is not that. And the preamble of the constitution makes that extremely clear:
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
“WE” do this. Because unless acting as a “we”, then we cannot have freedom without doing the work as a society to ensure freedom.
Billionaires do not understand the concept of liberty. MAGA, I am sure, will refute and reject liberty outright. And that means that we are lost.
More’s the pity.
gVOR10
@Grumpy realist: Some years ago I read an auto industry consultant. He quoted a comment that Just In Time was easy for the Japanese as their plants were so close together. The consultant said trucking parts from, say, Detroit to Bowling Green KY, took about the same time as trucking parts across Tokyo.
gVOR10
@JKB: Just so you can’t say no one ever told you: We talk a lot about details of politics and policy and even the psychology of liberal v conservative. But what it comes down to, everywhere and always, is how much the wealthy and powerful will share with the rest of us. Which side are you on?
CSK
Dan Bongino apparently wept on his podcast after accepting Trump’s offer to become deputy director of the FBI.
Dutchgirl
A post at LGM posed the question of what to say to a Trump vote whose face has been eaten. While I am unlikely to such an interaction in real life, my response would be to gently ask, do you feel like you were wrong about some things? And the answer would tell what I needed to know about the capacity of that person to hold themselves accountable at any level.
Daryl
@CSK:
This is the most farcical of all the farcical nominations that Diaper Donnie has made to date.
Grumpy realist
@gVOR10: especially since a lot of the trucks were going from the west side of Tokyo to Chiba, which is on the other side of Tokyo Bay. Hence the decision to build a tunnel underneath the bay.
Finally got directions from the higher ups at the DOC as to what to do about the “five things I did last week” email. Report it, but report to our supervisors only, don’t report to OPM. Chain-of-command, y’know.
Malicious compliance, anyone? Chef’s kiss to whoever wrote that up,
Rob1
Neo-Nazi group plots rebuild as Trump’s FBI chief takes helm, audio reveals
Exclusive: Terrorist group the Base appears defiant as new administration aims to deprioritize threat from far right
If you haven’t read Thomas Frank before, now’s a great time to start.
Thomas Frank’s Wrecking Crew is an essential read. It was pivotal in my own political consciousness. We may have all lived through the key events detailed by Thomas’s excellent account of the emerging Republican scorched earth strategy, but without comprehending the implications for the future we now live in. It’s all there, the roots of this awful malignancy the Trump Administration express every single day.
Not if you want to destroy the thing you’re changing.
After you break it, you can argue it’s unfixable and has to go.
Except, there are going to be human beings broken in the process, and there will be no putting them back together. I hope someone is keeping a tally.
steve
Have been doing a deep dive on the old people getting paid by Social Security issue. (The OCD kicked in.) Anyway, people should have been suspicious about the way Musk reported the numbers. The SS admin (SSA) actually tracks how many people it pays by age group. It pays money to about 90,000 people over the age of 99. The census bureau reports that the US has about 101,000 people over the age of 99. What Musk has concentrated on is reporting the large number of people who dont have recorded death dates over the age of 99. That’s a much larger number but these are deaths from before the computer era that never got reported to the SSA. If they were receiving money from the SSA then they would be making SS payments to the over 18 million people without recorded deaths, which isn’t happening.
All of this was reported in a 2023 IG report. The SSA noted that it would be very expensive to try to dig up the death dates that are missing. A lot fo time spent going through microfiche in newspaper archives when we already know the number of people over 99 receiving SS is less than the population number.
Nonetheless, Musk supporters claim this is evidence of the incompetence of govt. That there are still tons of people not getting deaths recorded because the govt doesnt care. Which led to looking at how deaths are reported. Deaths are reported by hospitals, funeral directors and families. As a back up check the SSA scans the death certificate lists of the states. They can still miss the couple hundred times a year someone puts their dead spouse in the freezer or buries them, but those eventually get caught and we get to read about them in the news. It is possible to devise a system to catch those people, but it would be very expensive to do so, and since we are talking about efficiency and saving govt money, we dont do it now. Maybe something AI can do in the future.
I’d like the people talking about inefficiency in government to show me an efficient one somewhere.
And I challenge anyone to prove that big business isn’t without inefficiency and waste. I spent a good many years looking around inside the “belly of the beast” and can attest to a shocking degree of excess.
That big government is far more inefficient than big business, constitutes one of the big deceits politically leveraged since forever.
Grumpy realist
@Rob1: also we should not forget that the government provides services to individuals simply because it is mandated to do so, no matter how economically inefficient the provision of said services turns out to be.
If Musk wants to “run government like a business”, then he can get rid of all postal services outside urban areas. All those rural people getting mail—just inefficient, right? They can always drive to the nearest city to pick up their mail from a P.O. Box they’ve rented, amirite? Even if it’s 80 miles, right? If they didn’t want to drive so far they can always move, right?
Liberal Capitalist
Musk can just tell all the Americans that are over 99 years of age that upon their death they must report to the US government to report they have died, or they will be fired.
As it turns out, here in Silicon Valley, one of the worst signs for a company, an indicator that it’s time to find a new job, is when the executives start talking about cutting costs, and focus on that rather than growing the company. Yes, costs matter, but topline is more important. Growing the topline is the hard thing.
I wonder if the Leo and Crow Court will take up the inevitable appeal. Holmes’ husband might be a good tipper.
Eusebio
The “five things you did” email was yet another example of trump administration people, in this case OPM, disregarding basic principles because they’re suck-ups who want to please the man, or they’re too chickenshit to push back on ridiculous directives. Maybe the OPM higher-ups thought they did a good thing by resisting the statement that employees would lose their jobs if they didn’t reply within a day, but it’s obvious that they couldn’t have said such a thing. So they settled on an email that breached the chain of command and was logistically unreasonable… and also put employees in the position of not knowing how their responses could be used against them.
In addition–and I haven’t seen this get a lot of attention–the OPM email was an information security disaster in the making. The government works with proprietary, controlled, and otherwise sensitive information. If employees were truly motivated to justify their work, then they’d be inclined to, knowingly or unknowingly, provide details on what and who they’re working with, and information associated with that work–all potentially sensitive. And they could’ve done that while still complying with the “do not send…” line in the OPM email. The responses would be consolidated into a database, and that database would be shared, so bad things could happen.
As for some of the organizational heads resisting the directive by telling their people to hold off or to not respond at all, that wasn’t necessarily pushback. It was likely in their self-interest.
Kathy
Come June 29th, the iphone lineup will be old enough to vote.
If Musk wants to “run government like a business”, then he can get rid of all postal services outside urban areas. All those rural people getting mail—just inefficient, right?
Plus, he could create exclusive upscale “boutique” taxes for the wealthy. They’re used to paying morefor upscale. Status costs more.
Kathy
Lately Hell Week Resurgence has devolved into two modes: 1) Brutal, and 2) Stressful.
I can handle the first. The second is much worse.
DrDaveT
@Eusebio: I have suggested to my wife that she fill out her “five things” list entirely with items like “Advised [redacted by law] on legal strategy for the government in defending [redacted by law] in matter of [redacted by law].” That would actually be factual — both in what she accomplished, and what she is allowed to put in an open email to OPM.
Comments
43 responses to “Monday’s Forum”
If you haven’t read Thomas Frank before, now’s a great time to start.
Don’t let yourself think Musk’s attempt to blowtorch the administrative state hasn’t been tried before. If you’re not aware of Tom DeLay and his actions in DC from 2003-2006, enjoy this summary.
When will people notice the shrinkflation in their tax bills? We are clearly on the cusp of experiencing significantly reduced government services from the slashed federal government. Yet, I am quite confident that, no matter what “tax relief” they vote for in Washington, the federal tax bill for 95% of Americans will not go down. We will all be paying the same amount of money for reduced defense, reduced research, reduced soft power, reduced grant funding and extension services. If government services were packaged like Snickers bars we would be paying the full size price for the fun size bar.
@Gavin:
Woah, that’s an asshole I haven’t thought about in years.
Elon’s now threatening to put on Admin leave and then fire anyone who hasn’t returned to work by this Monday. Which would mean most of my agency.
We’re still waiting for directions from above as to what to do about that silly “what five things did you do last week?” email.
@Jax:
I humbly accept your righteous whipping.
In my defense I am posting my comment from yesterday’s Chainsaw thread that you missed:
Jeffrey A Tucker lays out what most are missing about DOGE and Trump finally after a century toward returning power to the democratically elected branches of government after a century of usurpation by petty technocrats.
@JKB: Illegal immigrant oligarch Musk and his unqualified DOGE kids are the unelected petty technocrats.
Indiscriminate mass layoffs from the world’s richest man and biggest welfare queen will only get more unpopular. The spoils of MAGA incompetence:
– firing nuclear staffers, scrambling to rehire them, being unable to make contact
– firing AT controllers, as planes crash
– gutting health agencies and firing experts therein during disease outbreaks
– firing veterans, scrambling to reverse it
– crippling national parks by firing rangers, scrambling to rehire them
– emailing termination threats to lifetime appointees and staffers in the judiciary
Good luck to Republican candidates tasked with polishing this turd, especially in the upcoming Virginia elections where govt jobs are numerous.
They’ll run into the same troubling they’re having corralling enough votes to gut Medicaid and blow a $4.5 trillion dollar hole in the deficit with more tax cuts for billionaires. While tarriffs and trade wars push Trumpflation higher.
If your cause is righteous and just you don’t have to “act fast with some degree of ferocity.” No one objects to eliminating waste, but intelligent people object to burning down the house when your goal is to clean out the garage. The myth of petty technocrats is a pretty thin reed to lean on when you are stripping the government of institutional knowledge and its ability to respond both quickly and competently to a crisis.
@JKB: there’s a rule-of-thumb used in computer programming, engineering, business restructuring, and many other areas: if you run across a fence, make absolutely certain you know why that fence is there before tearing it down.
This is no difference. “Move fast and break things” may be grudgingly acceptable when you’re dealing with code for a social media app, where you can always resort to a prior version of the code if it turns out you really screwed up. It’s an absolutely idiotic idea when it comes to things like fumbling around with the security on nuclear weapons, or stopping epidemics, or…shall we say Chernobyl? After the database has been breached, the epidemic has started spreading like wildfire, or the containment wall has cracked, it’s too late to say “oops, my bad!”
@Grumpy realist:
Not if you want to destroy the thing you’re changing.
After you break it, you can argue it’s unfixable and has to go.
@Kathy: @Kathy:
You get a gold star for correctly identifying the modus operandum of the DOdGEy wrecking crew.
@JKB:
As the Republicans are in charge of the Executive and both Chambers of Congress, why are they imminently likely to begin automatically deferring to these supposedly ascendant “petty technocrats” and the “embedded system”>
Or is this just an excuse for massively cocking things up?
Surely it would be easy enough to order OMB to set up a special audit task force, (and give even MUSK a position in it to salve his vanity), hire qualified auditors, set them stern goals for investigating any waste and fraud.
Then the reports come back to OMB, that agency, and the White House, and external experts draw up a plan for closing down operations regarded as wasteful or unproductive, and submit such plans to Congress with strong public recommendations for them to be implemented.
I cannot see why this approach would be far more likely to avoid legal problems, not cause chaos in the public administration, respect the prerogatives of Congress, and generally be less likely to end up a total and epic cluster-fudge.
Very sad news: Roberta Flack, 88, has died. Wonderful singer. RIP.
I’d like the people talking about inefficiency in government to show me an efficient one somewhere. Not a hypothetical literary creation, but a real life on earth efficient government. An internal combustion engine typically has a thermodynamic efficiency of <40%. That means that 60% of the fuel
you put in your tank generates some random heat that doesn’t move your car. Lots of engineers have worked on improving this, but real improvements have not come. The laws of thermodynamics insures this waste. Our government has waste; show me an Erehwon that has no government waste. When firefighters sit around the station making spaghetti, it isn’t waste. The downtime is necessary to have staffing when real fires break out. Maybe a certain amount of government inefficiency is simply inevitable.
I suspect Musk actually knows this; he is just as smart as I am. Perhaps this is all a sham intended to rally political power and as a desired byproduct reestablish the default of white males in positions of power. Not all white men of course, in the past there was clearly an elite who had first claim on power.
@Slugger: another rule of engineering: you can have a robust system or you can have a maximum-efficient system. However, you cannot have both at the same time.
https://bsky.app/profile/marisakabas.bsky.social/post/3liwlwvvq6k2s
@charontwo:
I wonder if Trump knows about this yet.
@Grumpy realist: Just in time vs old school logistics…
@JKB:
This is really unworthy of you. This is garbage. Those democratically elected branches passed laws to make this bureaucracy, which is doing exactly what it was mandated to do.
There was no usurpation. This is language meant to justify authoritarian rule, while pretending to be democratic. This is the kind of thing people say just before declaring martial law and launching a coup.
This may be the most disappointing thing of yours I’ve ever read.
@Matt: one of my co-workers when I worked for the Japanese government pointed out that what “just-in-time” had done in Japan was simply move materials and product from sitting in warehouses to being on the backs of lorries stuck in traffic…
Had a chance this weekend to watch De Niro in a miniseries: “Zero Hour”.
De Niro (as former President Mullin) had a great line in the film:
I think that this is something that we have forgotten in our modern society. So many think that Freedom (especially the mistaken definition of “Freedom of Speech”) is such that it overlays ALL other concepts.
It’s not. Without liberty, there is no freedom. And I think that idea has been lost… and critically needs to be brought back by those who attempt to oppose the existing Putin-centric coup.
What is Liberty?
Many people use the term freedom and liberty interchangeably, but I would say that they are two different things. Liberty is to function freely within a society or social structure that supports freedom within a rule-of-law framework that value and supports the individual.
So, to have freedom in liberty is to live in a society that does not arbitrarily act in a destructive manner against the individual.
If you agree with what I have said, then you understand why, in this past month, we have lost our liberty. Our framework to function as a society (internally, as well as externally with other social structures/nation states) has been potentially become irreparably damaged.
In the past few decades, the GOP had valued individual freedoms, but downplayed liberty, as the idea of liberty inherently has the idea of a social contract… and that really grinds harshly against the idea of individual freedoms without any government restraints at all.
But liberty is not that. And the preamble of the constitution makes that extremely clear:
“WE” do this. Because unless acting as a “we”, then we cannot have freedom without doing the work as a society to ensure freedom.
Billionaires do not understand the concept of liberty. MAGA, I am sure, will refute and reject liberty outright. And that means that we are lost.
More’s the pity.
@Grumpy realist: Some years ago I read an auto industry consultant. He quoted a comment that Just In Time was easy for the Japanese as their plants were so close together. The consultant said trucking parts from, say, Detroit to Bowling Green KY, took about the same time as trucking parts across Tokyo.
@JKB: Just so you can’t say no one ever told you: We talk a lot about details of politics and policy and even the psychology of liberal v conservative. But what it comes down to, everywhere and always, is how much the wealthy and powerful will share with the rest of us. Which side are you on?
Dan Bongino apparently wept on his podcast after accepting Trump’s offer to become deputy director of the FBI.
A post at LGM posed the question of what to say to a Trump vote whose face has been eaten. While I am unlikely to such an interaction in real life, my response would be to gently ask, do you feel like you were wrong about some things? And the answer would tell what I needed to know about the capacity of that person to hold themselves accountable at any level.
@CSK:
This is the most farcical of all the farcical nominations that Diaper Donnie has made to date.
@gVOR10: especially since a lot of the trucks were going from the west side of Tokyo to Chiba, which is on the other side of Tokyo Bay. Hence the decision to build a tunnel underneath the bay.
@Daryl:
The MAGAs are thrilled by it.
Finally got directions from the higher ups at the DOC as to what to do about the “five things I did last week” email. Report it, but report to our supervisors only, don’t report to OPM. Chain-of-command, y’know.
Malicious compliance, anyone? Chef’s kiss to whoever wrote that up,
Because, of course the would under the umbrella of a fascist friendly President.
@Gavin:
Thomas Frank’s Wrecking Crew is an essential read. It was pivotal in my own political consciousness. We may have all lived through the key events detailed by Thomas’s excellent account of the emerging Republican scorched earth strategy, but without comprehending the implications for the future we now live in. It’s all there, the roots of this awful malignancy the Trump Administration express every single day.
@Kathy:
Except, there are going to be human beings broken in the process, and there will be no putting them back together. I hope someone is keeping a tally.
Have been doing a deep dive on the old people getting paid by Social Security issue. (The OCD kicked in.) Anyway, people should have been suspicious about the way Musk reported the numbers. The SS admin (SSA) actually tracks how many people it pays by age group. It pays money to about 90,000 people over the age of 99. The census bureau reports that the US has about 101,000 people over the age of 99. What Musk has concentrated on is reporting the large number of people who dont have recorded death dates over the age of 99. That’s a much larger number but these are deaths from before the computer era that never got reported to the SSA. If they were receiving money from the SSA then they would be making SS payments to the over 18 million people without recorded deaths, which isn’t happening.
All of this was reported in a 2023 IG report. The SSA noted that it would be very expensive to try to dig up the death dates that are missing. A lot fo time spent going through microfiche in newspaper archives when we already know the number of people over 99 receiving SS is less than the population number.
Nonetheless, Musk supporters claim this is evidence of the incompetence of govt. That there are still tons of people not getting deaths recorded because the govt doesnt care. Which led to looking at how deaths are reported. Deaths are reported by hospitals, funeral directors and families. As a back up check the SSA scans the death certificate lists of the states. They can still miss the couple hundred times a year someone puts their dead spouse in the freezer or buries them, but those eventually get caught and we get to read about them in the news. It is possible to devise a system to catch those people, but it would be very expensive to do so, and since we are talking about efficiency and saving govt money, we dont do it now. Maybe something AI can do in the future.
Steve
@Slugger:
And I challenge anyone to prove that big business isn’t without inefficiency and waste. I spent a good many years looking around inside the “belly of the beast” and can attest to a shocking degree of excess.
That big government is far more inefficient than big business, constitutes one of the big deceits politically leveraged since forever.
@Rob1: also we should not forget that the government provides services to individuals simply because it is mandated to do so, no matter how economically inefficient the provision of said services turns out to be.
If Musk wants to “run government like a business”, then he can get rid of all postal services outside urban areas. All those rural people getting mail—just inefficient, right? They can always drive to the nearest city to pick up their mail from a P.O. Box they’ve rented, amirite? Even if it’s 80 miles, right? If they didn’t want to drive so far they can always move, right?
Musk can just tell all the Americans that are over 99 years of age that upon their death they must report to the US government to report they have died, or they will be fired.
@Rob1:
As it turns out, here in Silicon Valley, one of the worst signs for a company, an indicator that it’s time to find a new job, is when the executives start talking about cutting costs, and focus on that rather than growing the company. Yes, costs matter, but topline is more important. Growing the topline is the hard thing.
On a spot of good news, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the convictions of Holmes and Balwani of Theranos.
I wonder if the Leo and Crow Court will take up the inevitable appeal. Holmes’ husband might be a good tipper.
The “five things you did” email was yet another example of trump administration people, in this case OPM, disregarding basic principles because they’re suck-ups who want to please the man, or they’re too chickenshit to push back on ridiculous directives. Maybe the OPM higher-ups thought they did a good thing by resisting the statement that employees would lose their jobs if they didn’t reply within a day, but it’s obvious that they couldn’t have said such a thing. So they settled on an email that breached the chain of command and was logistically unreasonable… and also put employees in the position of not knowing how their responses could be used against them.
In addition–and I haven’t seen this get a lot of attention–the OPM email was an information security disaster in the making. The government works with proprietary, controlled, and otherwise sensitive information. If employees were truly motivated to justify their work, then they’d be inclined to, knowingly or unknowingly, provide details on what and who they’re working with, and information associated with that work–all potentially sensitive. And they could’ve done that while still complying with the “do not send…” line in the OPM email. The responses would be consolidated into a database, and that database would be shared, so bad things could happen.
As for some of the organizational heads resisting the directive by telling their people to hold off or to not respond at all, that wasn’t necessarily pushback. It was likely in their self-interest.
Come June 29th, the iphone lineup will be old enough to vote.
@Grumpy realist:
Plus, he could create exclusive upscale “boutique” taxes for the wealthy. They’re used to paying morefor upscale. Status costs more.
Lately Hell Week Resurgence has devolved into two modes: 1) Brutal, and 2) Stressful.
I can handle the first. The second is much worse.
@Eusebio: I have suggested to my wife that she fill out her “five things” list entirely with items like “Advised [redacted by law] on legal strategy for the government in defending [redacted by law] in matter of [redacted by law].” That would actually be factual — both in what she accomplished, and what she is allowed to put in an open email to OPM.