[ilaksh]

My take is that we actually need more efficiency in government, and from a technology standpoint, they might have some good ideas.

I have a very pro-technology worldview. I'm independent leaning left but I thought that Democrats have been extreme, wasteful and untrustworthy in their own ways.

It's very unfortunate that this stuff like efficiency and technology integration is now associated so closely with neo-Nazis. Maybe I just didn't want to believe it. But when Musk did those Hitler salutes, I had to accept a new reality.

I don't think cutting programs or screwing up code is our main worry. The Secretary of Defense is literally an alcoholic neo-Nazi Crusader who talks about almost nothing besides getting rid of affirmative action and how evil Muslims are.

I am scared that they will actually try to deport millions of people, there could be massive detainment camps that become concentration camps. You only need a lack of food and one or two really serious neo-Nazis for that to become a death camp.

I am also afraid that they might trigger WWIII, fully fueled by racial hatred and dehumanization of Chinese people.

I am almost scared to write posts like this because who knows if they will start hunting down people from the internet.

[MattPalmer1086]

This meme that government is just hugely more inefficient than business is not correct in my experience.

I've worked for both. I have seen massive waste in business, millions spent for no gain, staff employed to build a manager's empire, not to do anything that was actually needed and other terrible outcomes. Obviously that also happens in government too, although the bigger problem there was a whole bunch of lazy staff who were hard to fire.

But... A business can largely choose its market and optimise for that. A government cannot - it has to work for pretty much everyone. Business can choose to skirt the law or even break it. Government departments must comply with all law to the best of their ability.

Not saying there are no ways to improve government efficiency. But the people who think you just need a business approach (unless you just want to break it all) are deluded.

[ivewonyoung]

The big difference is that taxpayers are on the hook for government inefficiency and for most services there is no competition, the classic example being the DMV. Having one hour queues frequently is rare in private businesses.

Whereas with businesses they could go out of business if they overspend on inefficient processes and there can be competition on both quality and price.

One of the root causes is that it's very difficult to fire government employees for bad performance so that's why government services suck and cost a lot in almost every level of the government and in pretty much every country with some exceptions, like say the NTSB in the US.

It's not even that low performers should all be fired, but the fact that knowing you it's hard to get fired leads to many people underperforming given natural psychology. The other problem being lack of incentives tied to performance.

[ModernMech]

When the public government services are privatized, it's not going to look like a bunch of scrappy companies engaging in free market dynamics to deliver services better than the government could; it's going to look like darling contracts granted to crony insiders who leech tax dollars into offshore accounts while delivering the worst possible service they can get away with.

[MattPalmer1086]

The majority of people I worked with in government were actually very motivated. Sometimes it was public service, sometimes they were ambitious for their career, sometimes they just liked what they were working on.

I have not really seen more motivated people in business due to performance incentives. Even in the financial sector, other than maybe traders and quants, I can tell you most people don't work harder because of the annual bonus.

It was certainly a bit dispiriting working with the minority of people who appeared to do absolutely nothing and just hung around for years. We all knew we had to work harder because of them. Some of them would definitely have been fired in a business.

[rbanffy]

> we actually need more efficiency in government

Government services should be efficient, but that should never happen at the cost of being independent from the people in office, transparent, auditable, secure, and accountable.

[whateveracct]

Exactly. There are a lot of things above efficiency on the priority list.

[exceptione]

> It's very unfortunate that this stuff like efficiency and technology integration is now associated so closely with neo-Nazis

Do not mistake the Nazi's too. They were very efficient and highly organized. IBM played a great role in delivering the tech the Nazi's needed.

[rapnie]

Undoubtedly the IBM's of today are primed and ready to get the train rolling again. It is hard to be pro-technology realizing that the ownership of all that tech is ultimately the brainworm billionaire class. Who we already know are fascists.. as per daily news.

[ilaksh]

Maybe it's not that new then.. after all, I guess the Nazis did a lot of great work on rockets.. but very unfortunate. That association clouds people's views of technology in general. Technology itself is not biased or ignorant or evil. It's a lever. It should be able to help everyone.

[craigmcnamara]

DOGE is just a dipshit rebrand of the US Digital Service, which was created under the Obama administration, and did bring real improvements and efficiency to the Federal Government. They're behind the IRS free to file program that I heard was just killed off. They also did login.gov. There is a huge number of lower profile improvements across the government that they're responsible for.

DOGE is a farce and I hate that I have to type the name of a joke from 2009 because Elon is a child and Trump is a crook.

[thomassmith65]

DOGE (as in the sh**coin) is price manipulation. Elon may own a third of all DOGE in existence. So he pumped it when he appeared on SNL, pumped it on Twitter, and now pumps it via his reach as a newly minted oligarch.

[dragonwriter]

> It's very unfortunate that this stuff like efficiency and technology integration is now associated so closely with neo-Nazis.

I don't think “efficiency and technology integration” is. I think DOGE is because its being done by neo-Nazis and in support of a blatantly fascist administration and doing things that look a lot more like ideological censorship and corrupt self-dealing than efficiency and technical integration, including specifically targeting things in government that actually did efficiency and technical integration.

[loanedempathy]

Blue team is hesitant to use its power in a lot of ways, and due to insisting on consensus most of the time they are handicapped. Red team actually seems to know what power is and how to use it--unfortunately for us, they lack discrimination and strategic planning in its application.

Blue team also required a bunch of thought-killing exercises and public signalling of things that are clearly inefficient and intellectually bankrupt and dishonest--this drove away a lot of smart people that actually wanted to get shit done, and made it easy for red team to point over and say "see, they're lying/delusional/woke?" as covering fire when red team pushed for their own odious agendas.

Blue team also not only failed to address issues but deliberately lied about them: the immigration crisis was pilloried when Trump wanted to build a wall, but once Biden took power a few weeks later suddenly _then_ the immigration crisis was a real policy concern. When people were complaining about the cost of food and goods, that was silly--but now that Trump's in power, suddenly we are told to care again. The attempted manufacturing of consent by the media on the left (and to be clear, red team does the same thing) is now too obvious not to be used against them.

Given all of this:

* Things aren't as bad as they're being made out to be, though they are serious.

* There is an entire industry relying on your fear and anxiety to exist, so practice good information hygiene.

* Maybe look beyond the obvious labels (woke, Nazi, marxist, fascist) to understand what's actually going on--don't be intellectually lazy.

* Revisit the things you think you know and why they're Good or not--and consider what others would think of them (for example, we can't both talk about how it's only a matter of years that "white" will be a minority in the US and that that's a good thing _and also_ claim that reactionary concerns about replacement are wholly unfounded).

Good luck to you.

[ilaksh]

I would like to believe that those are just intellectually lazy labels. Are you sure it's not 100% accurate to say that Musk and Hegseth are neo-Nazis? Or that we are headed straight for new American Holocaust against Hispanics and a race-fueled third world war? I want that to be hysterical paranoia or "intellectually lazy labels". But look at the historical parallels.

[DonHopkins]

"Goatfucker" is a fair and accurate and intellectually rigorous label.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Popehat%27s%...

Popehat's Law of Goats

He who fucks goats, either as part of a performance or to troll those he deems has overly delicate sensibilities is simply, a goatfucker.

"He claimed he was just pretending to be racist to trigger the social justice warriors, but even if he is telling the truth, Popehat's Law of Goats still applies."

[loanedempathy]

If you're referring to me, you'll have to do better than namecalling.

If you're referring to Musk or the current administration, calling them names doesn't really seem to have worked for what, at least nine years now?

[DonHopkins]

Confessing to fucking goats isn't quite the power move you make it out to be, but if you want to take one for the team, and claim that what you're doing is merely performance art intended to troll, while "things aren't as bad as they're being made out to be" and "concerns about replacement" are actually well founded, then be my guest. The fact that a racist doesn't mind being called a racist doesn't make them not a racist.

[loanedempathy]

I don't think you're reading me in the way that I intended, and I think you're being very uncharitable.

I did not claim that their concerns about replacement were well-founded, merely that they were understandable. Again, go back and read what I actually wrote: we cannot both acknowledge that there is a decline in the proportion of whites in America, that there are policies being pursued that help with this (again, no moral judgement, simply a statement of fact), and also that the people who are scared about losing majority status are completely without basis in their concerns.

If you cannot understand the tiny pier of truth that these people use as a foundation for the massive pile of other nonsense they've stacked (or had stacked) upon it, you will never be able to get them to change.

I'm not asking you to agree with them. I'm not asking you to say that the whole of their beliefs makes any sense at all.

I'm asking you to understand that they aren't pulling this completely out of thin air, and that if you want to have more success than you've had it may be worth it to acknowledge their concerns and try to show how your preferred policies would serve them better and how their current preferred bozos are manipulating them.

You and people like you might assert that they're idiots, misinformed, evil, or whatever else--but their vote counts as much as yours, sometimes moreso, and so you ignore or misunderstand them at your peril.

[jhp123]

so when Elon Musk stands at a podium and performs the Nazi salute, it is "intellectually lazy" to use labels like "Nazi" or "fascist"?

[budududuroiu]

> dehumanisation of Chinese people

What?

[ilaksh]

Hasn't started yet. Give it a few months or a year for the Taiwan situation to start to really boil and for them to have had their fill of rounding up Hispanics.

[budududuroiu]

I don’t doubt there’s a racist element there, but people are blind as to just how deep United Front cells are stuck in the US. From running illegal weed grows, pushing power and doing transnational repression, it’s a way bigger threat that people don’t realise

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/09/nyregion/chan-china-nyc-i...