I'm not sure what the net workforce reduction will actually be on final tally. Some that were let go were re-hired or came back as contractors (generally higher $).
The less tangible but important question is workforce efficiency. Government tends to have a lot of tribal knowledge not captured in written processes, or "if you need to do x you have to talk to y", and if y isn't there anymore will things get slower (as no one else knows how) or faster (as they were a roadblock).
The path to gathering wealth is simple, and anyone has a good chance of success. See Bogleheads.org for details. ( Once the path is clearly understood, discipline is the primary factor. You have to live below your means, there is no exception. Also, a long compounding timeframe is useful. )
You can live YOLO like the rabbit or you can live like Warren Buffet the tortoise. You don’t get rich quickly, you get rich slowly with large gains at the end, after compounding has done its magic.
Financial literacy is easy to obtain, but watch your sources. Trust the Bogleheads!
> anyone has a good chance of success. .. discipline is the primary factor. You have to live below your means, there is no exception.
The people living on two dead end jobs that don't properly feed their families and leave them vulnerable to dismissal if their car breaks down so they can't get to work really do not have 'a good chance of success'.
They are not in a position to live below their means without imposing monastic levels of discipline and deprivation on their children.
Horatio Alger was a mythologist, not a documentarian.
But there are many, many people who can find financial success with a little knowledge and discipline. The FIRE community is full of people on all points on the journey.
On the other hand, giving up and spending what you make assures you won’t become wealthy.
For many people, it’s a choice. For a few, circumstances and bad luck drive the end result. I think it’s wise to prepare as if you’re in the capable majority, not the unfortunate minority.
The fish I’m talking about include hungry homeless people, poor people that need clothing, and young people dealing with unexpected pregnancies. There are ministries for all of those here, staffed and funded by churchgoers.
Maybe think about it, see if there are some fish you could pick up.
Helping in these areas is what makes us human. If you need to invoque a deity to explain the action, good for you. The most important part is that help is provided.
Now, unexpected pregnancies is not the strong part of Christianity. When you start to promote teaching about sex and birth control we can talk.
You’re right, those fish are not specific to religious people. But it is true that religious people give more time and money to them. Less religious people tend to give and volunteer less for such causes. I offer no judgement or theories about why, but the data is strong.
About the sex ed., the clinic I volunteer at offers pregnancy related information, including pamphlets that explain pros and cons of things like the ‘day after’ pill. Of course the preferred option is always ensuring good parenting for the newborn child. Clients can take video classes on parenting skills to earn reward points good for diapers, baby food and clothing. It’s really a good program, provided free to the people who need it.
> But it is true that religious people give more time and money to them. Less religious people tend to give and volunteer less for such causes. I offer no judgement or theories about why, but the data is strong.
You may want to look at https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38407059/, a large mets-data study. Religious people give more when this is public, and vice-versa. I offer no judgment on that either :)
> About the sex ed., the clinic I volunteer at offers pregnancy related information, including pamphlets that explain pros and cons of things like the ‘day after’ pill. Of course the preferred option is always ensuring good parenting for the newborn child. Clients can take video classes on parenting skills to earn reward points good for diapers, baby food and clothing. It’s really a good program, provided free to the people who need it.
I volounteered for a long time at an organization that provided the same services. We provided information about abortion, pills, medical facts. Everything was on the table, from an abortion to raising your child.
Do your pamphlets address abortion as one of the solutions, making it at par with giving birth? I unfortunately know about "help centers" for pregnant women who were in fact driving them away from some solutions (mostly abortion). They were fortunately made illegal in France because everyone should have a neutral, unbiased access to information and help (including abortion).
For reference, Total Fertility Rate in France is 1.66 vs 1.60 in the US.
Teen pregnancy is four times lower in France - because we do serious sex ed and people have sex knowing what to expect.
... when in public view. Vanity and all this. Non-religious people are happy to keep their generosity to themselves.
> What made you stop volunteering at the clinic?
I started to travel the world. This was also a time where I experienced first hand how religion impacts people. So far in France we were shielded from that.
The point remains that religious people give more time and money to charitable causes than non-religious people. The motivators may be sinful (vanity, etc), but the good works are what should matter. Better to have hypocrites feeding the hungry than no food at all.
I’m glad to hear you’re getting to see the world. I hope your journeys are enjoyable.
Surely by now you must have noticed that the Right is completely uninterested in solving these things? Cutting social nets and criminalizing abortions will only aggravate these important issues.
Also, I don't see why caring about the homeless prevents also fighting rampant gambling addictions?
The homeless meals and clothes closets have been in place for years. Through administrations and legislatures of all kinds. Nobody ‘solves the problem’, unfortunately.
There are limited resources. That’s why you see churches feeding the hungry and clothing the needy, but probably not fighting gambling so much. People are only able or willing to give so much.
I understand, but I doubt that OP meant "individual churches" when speaking of the "Christian Right". More likely, he meant the evangelical movement currently controlling all branches of government, and the people that give it sufficient mandate to tear through the social nets actually able to releviate these issues.
Not long ago, Tesla dealerships were being firebombed and random Teslas vandalized. The perps were lefties, intent upon trying to harm Elon Musk. There were a great many appreciative onlookers in left leaning subreddits and similar places.
Politically, it seems the people slowing EV adaption can be on both sides of the aisle.
The vandalism was not anti-EV, was performed by a tiny number of extremists outside of any sort of Democrwric politics, so attributing it to both sides" doesn't make a lick of sense.
It's not like elected Democratic officials were saying "we hate EVs, everybody go out and vandalize Musk's businesses." There is no political movement among democrats to avoid the technological transition that the rest of the world is enthusiastically taking.
There is no comparison, the idea is absolutely ludicrous.
Ok so now we are asking people uninvolved to a tiny number of incidents to jump (how high?) on things they have no control over. Instead of focusing on the politics that is actually their domain: the unconstitutional destruction of institutions mandated by Congress by an out-of-control executive branch that is breaking the law. Let the FBI and police deal with local property crimes.
And even if more Democratic politicians condemned it, how would you hear about it? What media do you consume that would let you hear that voice? And what does your respect translate into?
Even asking Democratic politicians to condemn the violence shows that you are placing the onus on Democrats for something that they did not do. It's very strange behavior.
Right, and materially - what do you think damages EVs more? A few fires, or structural policy choice deliberately intended to destroy the industry?
Yes, we can truly both sides everything. But we can't just claim things are the same when they're obviously not.
It's clear, and indisputable, that most EV adoption is coming from green policy, particularly around the economy. And who is most responsible for that? The explicitly pro-oil republicans, or not-them?
The policy choice to stop subsidizing EVs while, simultaneously halting their adoption from overseas, was intended to deliberately hurt the industry as a whole.
We know this because the people doing it are explicitly pro oil. Trump has gone on a few times now about how much he loves oil.
And, to be clear, the subsidies didn't go away, they moved. If we want to talk subsidies, oil is at the tippy top of that list. It's disingenuous to just ignore it. I mean, for fucks sake, MOST of the corn grown in this country is just so we can turn it into gas. Do a deep dive on that.
> If we leave the market alone, people will allocate resources where they are actually needed the most
If we left the market alone, we would've abandoned gasoline cars a long time ago. They're one of the most, if not the most, blessed products by our government. They get every special treatment, bailout, and subsidy in the book. Down to even the streets. 25 trillion on interstates alone.
>The policy choice to stop subsidizing EVs while, simultaneously halting their adoption from overseas, was intended to deliberately hurt the industry as a whole.
Chinese EVs are a Trojan horse. Even if they weren't, we cannot compete with the Chinese on cost and probably can't trust their quality standards.
>I mean, for fucks sake, MOST of the corn grown in this country is just so we can turn it into gas. Do a deep dive on that.
I know that. Ethanol somehow reduces certain kinds of supposedly harmful emissions, and it gives farmers someone to sell their corn to. We need to support farmers because a market spread too thin on farming means people would starve. If we had crop issues, rest assured that they would probably stop using ethanol until things got back to normal.
>If we left the market alone, we would've abandoned gasoline cars a long time ago.
We had EV cars a hundred years ago and abandoned them. Petrol works better. People could be encouraged to use electric trains or something but it turns out that city life is not practical or desirable for everyone.
>They get every special treatment, bailout, and subsidy in the book. Down to even the streets. 25 trillion on interstates alone.
Every country prizes its auto industry (if it has one) because it is related to nearly every other production capability. Building all the shit the military needs from scratch down to the raw material supply chain is not something that can be done in a hurry. Also, I don't know if you knew, but the interstates are used for rapid shipping and military movement. Trains still exist but they can't compete with trucks on highways for most things.
> we cannot compete with the Chinese on cost and probably can't trust their quality standards.
This already played out with Japanese cars and it turned out it was the quality rather than the cost that was hard to compete with. I'm going to bet that EVs from Asia will be better built than anything made in the US or Europe before too long (if not already). They'll manufacture at scale and work out the kinks.
Western companies should have been doing this. I feel that Tesla tried and never really got there. Protectionism alone won't make it happen.
You're oversimplifying (to be fair, so did I). There is usually a cost/quality tradeoff. In the long run I think every major country could figure out how to make things with any given level of quality, and have certain costs in the same ballpark. But our labor costs are higher than nearly any other country. Chinese labor is currently very cheap.
>Western companies should have been doing this. I feel that Tesla tried and never really got there. Protectionism alone won't make it happen.
Just because some people online claim they want $10k EVs doesn't mean they would buy them. It also doesn't mean that we could make them for that price, at any level of effort. We pay auto workers WAY more than the Chinese pay theirs.
Protectionism is why we have not already been flooded with crappy cars from overseas. We do not allow garbage vehicles to be imported. Neither do other countries. Of course, forcing people to buy cars at higher prices or different quality points inhibits domestic innovation. But if the industry dies because of ideological purity, we would be worse off as a nation than we would be driving cars that cost slightly more or lack certain features.
I wasn't really thinking about cost, but quality, when I made the comment about what we should be doing. Quality at scale with better processes and automation. I think history shows its the scale that matters. Once you have scale you can improve quality across everything.
> Protectionism is why we have not already been flooded with crappy cars from overseas.
I don't live in the US, but another Western country, one that doesn't protect the car market because we have no car manufacturing here at all. I'm not seeing a flood of crappy cars. The Chinese EVs seem very good on price and (so far, new models take time to reveal problems and serviceability) quality. Regulatory protectionism is a good thing, but I'm also not convinced that folks in China would be happy with crappy cars either.
>Quality at scale with better processes and automation. I think history shows its the scale that matters. Once you have scale you can improve quality across everything.
I agree but I don't think it is possible to maintain an advantage in process or scale permanently in general. If you expect other countries to never figure it out, you're wrong. But there can be a situation where higher local costs in some areas are offset somehow by transport costs or strategic subsidies for domestic production.
>Regulatory protectionism is a good thing, but I'm also not convinced that folks in China would be happy with crappy cars either.
China has many protectionist policies, some of which they have leveraged to steal technology from foreign competitors. The Chinese people are not very happy with their vehicle options, but they do not have the option to buy foreign either for the most part. To give you an idea how unhinged it can be in China, I've heard of campaigns to force everyone to discard perfectly good appliances and scooters to stimulate their economy and eat up excess product. It's a bad move but that's how they roll.
Foreign cars cannot be imported en masse to China, and even the cheapest Western-made cars are more expensive than the average Chinese buyer wants to pay. The cheapest new car on the US market is about $25k I think, and the average is closer to $40k.
>I don't live in the US, but another Western country, one that doesn't protect the car market because we have no car manufacturing here at all. I'm not seeing a flood of crappy cars.
I think you'd be better off buying cars from neighboring countries. Anyway, I think every country that can support car manufacturing should do so for strategic reasons. What I was referring to is US-specific rules about what kinds of cars can be imported. Imported cars are usually the more luxurious models due to the rules. The rules as I understand them involve listing out features that each model has. Bare bones and low-quality cars are rejected even if they could be useful to someone, because this strikes a balance between letting people buy what they want and supporting local industry.
>The Chinese EVs seem very good on price and (so far, new models take time to reveal problems and serviceability) quality.
They are cheap but low-quality and no doubt infused with Chinese spy/sabotage tech. I'm sure that they can eventually improve on quality, but ultimately countries in the West that produce cars now need to guard their own industries against insurmountable foreign competition. Nobody can beat the Chinese on price, generally. Their government will eat a loss to put competition out of business, because they want to take over the world. So the best we can do is act accordingly.
> We need to support farmers because a market spread too thin on farming means people would starve.
People would not starve if we stopped the ethanol mandate. In fact, corn prices would fall because the government would no longer force ethanol to be mixed with oil. Less demand would decrease the price.
I'm obviously talking about maintaining spare production capacity. Far worse things than higher prices would happen if we actually had crops fail. If the government stopped requiring ethanol, there would be fewer farmers (although a few might convert to other crops, some land is not suitable for many different crops).
The perps were patriots, resisting a murdering (among others, destroying USAID) sociopath committing mass treason against the government.
There were also like maybe a dozen actually destructive cases. No one got hurt. Total property damage was maybe a half million dollars? We're arguing over the dumbest pittances of nothing, even if we add an order of magnitude here. This is ridiculous.
Personally, your post seems to be strongly condemning, as if this was some absurd nightmare situation. I find it just ridiculous cowardice to pretend like this was an actual scary and bad problem. I'm not sure how many 9's of non violent peaceful protest it was, but it was a lot of 9's, and very little actual harm.
Yes, a brand had it's image destroyed. It did it itself. Telsa's leader set it's brand's name on fire. Molotov'ed itself into kingdom come. From which it seems impossible to recover. A brand that was early in on EV's. But it seems facetious and ridiculous blame this political suicide in public, with nazi salutes and chainsaws, on the left. Get real man; you have to be joking. The left didn't slow this down; what kind of a fool do you take us for?
The pendulum goes back and forth. The right is in power now, so the left will point out deficiencies and promise improvements. If enough people believe things could be better, than the left will win power in the next election.
Then the cycle starts over again. It works wonderfully, and the USA has prospered because of it.
Sometimes immature people do crazy things because they’re narcissistic and want to try to circumvent the rules. They could do the right thing and try to bring change legally, but through either stupidity or lack of morals they instead go outside the law. People all across the political spectrum should view such people as a liability to us all.
Alas the pendulum just tore down 1/3rd the white house & Congress.
No respect in the slightest for this nation. The cycle starting over here is a bunch of disgusting plutocrats & Federalist Society nut jobs trying to strip America bare & argue up is down to ignore the bill of rights.
It's not legal. It keeps being shot down. The DoJ is fully in the pocket of the white house which is maybe technically legal but was a deeply deeply disturbing idea even a decade ago. What's happening now is an insult to law, and the terrormongers in power are at war with the justice system, because they have no respect for the law & want to abuse it.
A couple cars getting a bit messed up doesn't scare me at all. To be afraid of the people, to cower and scare as if it's gone great evil? It's so so so so small a trial, doing such little against our society and law. Imo to compare the two feels a farce.
Ok, sure… but my guess is that ACA costs aren’t your only political decision maker if you are financially independent. Other things, like market performance under one party over the other probably hold a greater weight on your political considerations. A person in that circumstance generally doesn’t vote with their wallet, they are voting with their portfolio.
But if you are younger, perhaps with a chronic condition, in a job that doesn’t provide a health insurance benefit, and with minimal 401k…you are weighting ACA costs…and are in a demographic that historically votes more blue.
Why? I didn’t vote for Trump, but 4 out of the 5 years he was in office my investments grew pretty substantially in a way that they didn’t under Obama and Biden, I can’t really count 2020 since there was somewhat of an external factor that year. Even still I didn’t lose, just didn’t grow as much.
If AI and tariffs don’t result in substantial market losses for me (and they haven’t yet) why should I care?
Might be some confirmation bias at work in one or both of us. I tend to see conservative people in the FIRE space, seems you see the opposite. I’ll look more closely to get a better feel.
I’m right-leaning, I agree it does not help Republicans.
Also, propping up ACA ( I say this as an ACA user ) is not the answer, either. The subsidies were temporary, making them permanent only adds to the never ending flood of red ink.
Healthcare needs a complete reboot. As someone on the right, I am open to a reasonable big government solution. ( After all, even Nixon wanted public healthcare. ).
It’s long past the time for patching. We need a reboot.
AKA the typical doomer non-solution. 'If we blow it up, somehow a new, better systems will magically emerge'.
If I went to management with the dev plan of 'throw all the source away, start over with a new stack, new devs, from scratch, but also I don't know what the new stack will be, and haven't found new devs' I would be called a moron. But if you are a conservative, it's somehow called rational policy and a plan and it's worth the lifetime lasting damage/potential deaths is will cause a shit ton of people and financial ruin it will cause many.
Edit: Throttled so replying by edit. In the example below, Steve Jobs LITERALLY had a stack in mind, a plan, and people/talent lined up.
I think nobody believes that now. Healthcare is broken. It’s time to make things better, not patch the termite infected boat one more time.
Remember the bold spirit of ‘we have to pass the bill to see what’s in it’? If you think ACA is better than what preceded it, then you favor bold steps.
How long have the Republicans said the ACA has to go, yet they don't even have the IDEA of a plan? There was an ACTUAL written ACA when the quote you use was said. There is ZERO actual written plan on the Republican side today. The comparison doesn't make sense.
I favor logical progress. I don't favor 'blow it up so magic can do it's work'.
Unless you were Steve Jobs in late 90s Apple, when in fact they did have to throw all the source away, start over with a new stack and new devs, with imported ideas, not exactly knowing what the outcome would be like. Then you wouldn't be a moron, you'd be hailed as a business genius (I mean NeXTStep->macOS).
US healthcare is broken. Most attempts to fix it make it worse because they don't address the root causes. That doesn't mean everyone who points it out needs to present a 300 page plan for how to address it.
So other than Jobs having a plan, having a proven dev culture that he himself built up, having a production OS, he had nothing?
Not everyone needs to have a 300 page plan, but the Steve Jobs/Politicians pushing to blow things up need to. Or in Job's case he started with way, way, more than just a 300 page plan.
> Also, propping up ACA ( I say this as an ACA user ) is not the answer, either. The subsidies were temporary, making them permanent only adds to the never ending flood of red ink.
It does not add to the red ink, at least according to the accounting rules Republicans used to justify the so-called Big Beautiful Bill's (BBB) costs.
The BBB made many of the 2017 Trump tax cuts, which were temporary and set to expire at the end of 2025 (just like enhanced ACA subsidies), permanent.
Republicans argued that the loss of revenue from making the tax cuts permanent should not count when accessing the effects of the BBB on the deficit because extending something that is expiring doesn't really change anything.
Yes, a "reboot" is needed. A bit of history from what I remember:
Nixon's plan would have passed except for Ted Kennedy, he stopped it in its tracks. Then when the Clintons came in something flipped, the GOP was all against what Hillary was trying to push. I forgot what it was but I think it was some kind of single payer.
So under Obama, the democrats took the Massachusetts plan created by Romney (GOP), which I believe the Heritage Foundation even endorsed, thus created the ACA.
So here we are. Now I think we are in a sad place where for-profit healthcare is entrenched, bribing both side of the aisle to keep their profits high.
> I forgot what it was but I think it was some kind of single payer.
It was not, despite universal single payer having, at the time, outright majority support in polling. That’s one reason it lacked popular support on either side of the political spectrum.
> So under Obama, the democrats took the Massachusetts plan created by Romney (GOP), which I believe the Heritage Foundation even endorsed, thus created the ACA.
IIRC, it wasn't created by Romney, it was created by the insurance lobby and became a (rhetorical) Republican alternative during the debate over the Clinton plan; once that was killed, the Republicans didn't push it nationally (though I think Bush briefly, maybe only during the campaign, pushed a similar mandate-and-subsidy plan that was restricted to only including High-Deductible plans tied to HSAs.)
I’m glad Walter Cronkite is remembered through that school. In my mind, he was one of the last great journalists from an era that wasn’t strongly politically biased.
When I read that I'm always personally confused. He had a commanding voice and had an aurora of being above it all. But when you listened and watched what he actually did, he seemed very political in my mind, though perhaps more of a moderate(?).
He even advocated for world government, endorsed politicians, etc.
The severance packages were an immediate expense. A 10% workforce reduction should bring lower expenses in years to come.
This is rage bait reporting.
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