Sweet

I only heard about this today from reading the Musk thread. There no way counties are going to swap their debt holdings for 100 year holdings, and deliberately make their economies less competitive. I think these politics are going to be disastrous.

I would say that your experience is not the norm. Don’t get me wrong, there are parts of government here that work very hard and are underfunded. Then there are other sections with people doing very little all day and the headcount should be reduced by a lot. So it’s a mixed bag, however my experience it is far more often like I described vs what you described.

It some ways it’s bad. It would be better to be clear and say X department will get a X% cut in staff budget over the next years. Implement a hiring freeze, offer redundancy. Allows sections to focus their work and reduce headcount in workable way. Although I think you need all these sections audited to measure what they claim they need vs what they actually need too. In other ways firing everyone quickly is good, as you said it cuts the bill sooner, and importantly it doesn’t risk someone else coming in a reversing the plans you set out.

I’m in the UK. We had a requirement to land within a % of our total allocation as a department each year which is why there is always this end of year madness. I know this to be the case right across the board. We managed contracts too, they tended to work like you suggested. However if we underspent on a grant the underspend is held centrally. This is then money that ‘has to be spent’ to land within the % budget allocation. I’d say it’s similiar for those grants you worked on too, even in America. If you save like 10% I.e. you did a good job of delivering below budget, chances are that saved money sits somewhere in an account that admin and senior managers fret about spending later

From the best history channel on YouTube (imo):

Yep. We get the same order from the top, ‘we must hit our budget’ bs. Hundreds of thousand blown on anything from cars for field work, big monitors for computers, special cameras for zoom meetings a G a pop. I was asked repeatedly to find stuff to spend by higher ups and I just refuse. Anyone in my management who came to me looking to put order something like that I blocked. Worse case scenario is the money goes back to treasury and you might get a smaller budget next year. Efficiency isn’t rewarded. But audits are coming one day, and people signing this stuff off may have to justify themselves.

Having worked both private and in government - not in the US I might add - the scale of government waste is staggering.

Lol

Governments should set a rule. The deficit must be below GDP growth except during a national emergency. That way the national debt should be shrinking as a % of GDP. Getting the deficit under control does not mean getting the deficit to 0.

BBC reporting: In comments to Russian media this morning, Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov outlines Russia's position on the 30-day ceasefire proposal. In a nutshell, Ushakov rejects it, saying it would amount to nothing more than a temporary respite for the Ukrainian military and a chance for it to regroup. He also says that Russia is seeking a "long-term peace settlement in Ukraine that takes into account Moscow's interests and concerns", and adds that a "normal exchange of opinions" between Russia and the US is "taking place in a calm manner". Ushakov also says the US understands that Ukraine's membership of Nato is out of the question.

I don’t have the link to the full report, so I don’t know how the data was cooked. The difference might hang on ‘job growth’. Thanks for following up, it never even occurred to me the figures might be wrong or misleading.

It’s not just that. Cubs regularly says things just wrong. UK retirement is 66, going to 68. Many people base workweek is 40 hours although for many it’s more. Maternity pay is generous compared to federal American, but comparable to some states and what some American companies offer. Welfare state is too big here, but shrinking it is certainly not a ‘fear’ of mine. It’s a long overdue necessity quite aside from anything to do with defence spending and Ukraine etc.

lol. It wished I lived in this Europe of your imagination.

this is a long term trend that is unsustainable. I don’t get some of the tariffs, but longer term the shrinking of government should put the US in stronger footing.

Suspicious that it is a Russian national, but I'm not sure it was deliberate based on the trace of the ships.

Sales at Tesla must be fairly poor for this to be happening. I’m not sure it will have the intended effect. The best thing for Tesla might be for Musk and Trump to have a very public falling out lol.

Just so you know Red Lion, I’ve been poltically ‘conservative’ from my early 20s. My criticisms of Trump and Elon don’t come from the political left. But I think I can still call a spade a spade.

If he hasn’t been dropped on his head he has been taking one too many joints. He’s impulsive and regularly says wild stuff. I think he should dip from politics, he does too many other good things. Politicans spin all the time. Biden saying under his leadership job growth far exceeded that of Trump’s missing of course important context. Biden also repeated the lie about Trump saying Nazis were ‘fine people’. Trump says and most ridiculous things too. He spins like all politicians and lies too, only his tend to be bigger. I can’t stand any of them right now.

Why does it need spun? It’s potentially an end which is good. There may be a bitter taste depending on how everything pans out but it’s a start.

I don’t remember that but if he did that was dumb. I know there was some concern that inflation would lead to wage growth and the so-called viscous circle. Agree most likely cause, although don’t blame Powell from pulling the only lever he had.

Yes, it was inflation that Powell was trying to stop, so why did you say wage growth lol?

Didn’t you say repeatedly that inflation had little to do with Fed policy because it was a result of Covid? How can Powell get no credit yet get the blame lol.

This was the leaked plan from last year. Now that Ukraine has agreed to a ceasefire the pressure moves.

Lol, I am willing to bet that the people who predominantly own Teslas are those on the political left. People don't like giving money to companies run by people they don't like - it's just how the world works. It's not just Tesla, the Disney thread had some chatter about their strategy of producing content which alienated people - not helped when they directly got involved in Florida politics. Also look at what happened with Budweiser when they pushed a particularly agenda.

I think he deleted this one: