If we fired 25% of the federal govt workforce, it would save 1% from the federal budget.

This has nothing to do with trimming waste and everything to do with replacing the government with loyalists from top to bottom. What comes after that isn't going to be pretty.

Absolutely.

The effects are going to be felt for a good couple of decades to follow.

Is that staff costs only? Or including the things those staff would spend money on too?

Overhead for staff isn't that much more. And even one person can spend money like it's going out of style if they have a budget that says they can and the implicit threat it'll be cut if they don't. They'll just spend it in dumber ways.

The "federal budget" is something people often mention, but it's quite misleading. At least in terms of what we think of.

The reason is that the overwhelming majority of the budget is spent automatically - pensions, medicare, social security, and all of these expenses are unavoidable and in a mandatory expenses category. The remainder of the budget, including military, is considered discretionary. That discretionary spending is the thousands of pages that Congress creates (and fails to read) each year. And it's in that budget that most of the things we associate with government came from - everything from education, to roads, to infrastructure, and also the military.

So by the numbers in 2024 the discretionary budget was "only" $1.7 trillion and after military spending "only" $900 billion was left. "Only" obviously needs to be in quotes but that's indeed only about 13% of the e.g. $6.7 trillion total budget in 2024. And so each time you cut something the amount of money left for the things we generally associate with government skyrockets. So for instance USAID was "only" $50 billion, but that was more than 5% of the entire discretionary budget!

US Federal Workers cost $293 billion [1], and contractors amounted to $760 billion. This is excluding secondary costs/benefits, which are extremely high for government workers, and only direct payments. It also excludes budgeted expenditures that would have been performed by those employees. So that's already $1.05 trillion and we're clearly substantially lowballing the figure. Yet that's already more than the entire discretionary budget excluding military, and certainly far more than 4% of the entire budget (as would be required for cutting 25% to only result in a 1% cost saving, as proposed).

[1] - https://www.afge.org/article/afge-continues-to-debunk-miscon...

If I spend 90% of my budget on mandatory items, and I cut 10% of my discretionary spending, I've shaved 1% of my total budget. Have I really accomplished that much? Is that going to keep me out of the poor house if something goes wrong? Is it worth a massive sacrifice to obtain?

Probationary employees means not just the new hires, but any federal employee who changed jobs internally in the last year. Who's going to want to work for the Federal government after this bloodbath? No one with any talent, which I'm sure is either the goal or a happy by-product.

This is about Trump and Co. destroying govt institutions they don't like, and weaponizing other institutions with loyalists. Just look at what's happening in the DoJ.

Most mandatory spending is on healthcare, social security, interest payments on debt. For anyone who values anything other than those things, every penny should be accounted for. The percentage of the total budget now becomes irrelevant.

>For anyone who values anything other than those things

Nah, we'll cut those too: https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/finance/gop-targets-88...

As mentioned elsewhere, this is literally impossible. Directly cutting mandatory spending would require new laws which, in turn, would require a supermajority in the Senate due to the filibuster, meaning the DNC would also need to be all-in on it. On the note, keep this in mind the next time some party, which can't see past tomorrow, tries to eliminate the filibuster.

Checks and balances are very important and I'm very happy to see the GOP making 0 effort to end the filibuster in spite of it currently being rather liberally used by the DNC.

It's important to note though that the goal is not to reduce debt. The goal is to cut taxes (largely for the rich).

I mean if debt was an issue why vote for the guy who has increased the national debt by the most in history and whose spending plans were going to increase the debt by almost twice of his opponent?

https://www.investopedia.com/democrats-vs-republicans-who-ha...

The person who wrote that article is remarkably ignorant of essentially all topics that she covered to the point I'd consider that lower quality than an average internet shitpost. I don't know where to start so I'll just bullet point things in no particular order:

- The US parties almost entirely ideologically swapped sometime in the 19th century. Some claim it happened with FDR in the 30s, others claim it didn't "really" happen until LBJ in the 60s. Everybody acknowledges it happened. What a "Democrat" did in 1913 is irrelevant.

- Congress dictates budgets, not the President. The President has veto power (which can be overruled by Congress), but nothing more.

- The modern US economic system enabling us to go arbitrarily far into debt only began in 1971, when we defaulted on our obligations under Bretton Woods.

- The total deficit under Trump was $5.6 trillion, under Biden it was ~7.6 trillion [1]. I assume the author was looking at delta debt and then 'inflation adjusting' it... ugh.

---

That's just the basic historic/factual backing. The "stats" are even worse, but enough is enough. In any case, the issue is not what happened in 1913 or even Trump's first term, but what is happening now. Trump's first term he promised to do what he's doing now but instead just mostly carried on the military machine (at least without starting any news wars, which was nice - though he was trying his hardest with Iran) and filled his entire cabinet with political establishment types who did their thing.

Trump 2.0 seems to have genuinely gained some sort of messianic delusions, probably from the attempted assassinations, and is actually doing what he said he would do before. And those current actions are what is really changing the game like nothing that's happened in decades.

[1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFSD/

The deficit also doesn’t paint the whole picture. The debt significantly increased near the end of the Trump administration which added to mandatory spending via interest payments.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEBTN

>Congress dictates budgets, not the President. The President has veto power (which can be overruled by Congress), but nothing more.

congress makes budget, but the president has always been a means to apply pressure and influence the budget. After all, if a president declares an emergency or crisis, and congress doesn't fund for that, then they may risk re-election. That's always been the "legal" means of the president settting the budget.

Also to cut regulations, aka the police for corporations and the rich.

Trump got saved by the pandemic so we can call his policies “unprecedented” for unprecedented times. It hides a lot of how poor he did.

Did he? I was under the impression that Biden did a lot of the stimulus in 2021. Trump did a bit, but if that still hid how badly he did that's crazy.

That's great. Congress should be the ones making budget decisions, not Musk. Trump has control of both houses, why not cut spending and give Musk his tax breaks legally?

Congress has not made a budget in many years. They pass “continuing resolutions.” Why aren’t they doing their jobs?

They will try to: https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/finance/gop-targets-88...

But despite being a minority, such a budget will be highly unpopular and democratic congress can still use that to push back against it. It's faster for Trump to just force it through, if he's going undeterred.

>The reason is that the overwhelming majority of the budget is spent automatically - pensions, medicare, social security, and all of these expenses are unavoidable and in a mandatory expenses category.

Don't worry, they want to cut that too:

https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/finance/gop-targets-88...

March is going to be a bloodbath. For who, I can only wait and see.

As is typical for media on this issue, that article is highly misleading. That's the House, not DOGE, asking a committee to cut an average of $88 billion per year over the next decade. That committee in particular also has oversight over a stupidly large number of things from commerce to energy (as per their name) and everything inside which somehow even includes healthcare as well.

But it's impossible to cut mandatory programs' spending directly without a law passed which would require a super-majority in the Senate due to filibusters. On that note, consider now how critical the filibuster is. It wasn't long ago that Democrats wanted to end the filibuster to try to roughshod some voting law changes. Had that succeeded then now the Republican party on a super-narrow majority in the Senate would similarly be able to pass literally any law they want. Checks and balances are important because tomorrow will not be like today - a truth that will remain forever.

So in any case, they're going to need to carry out cuts not related to mandatory spending, or indirectly cut mandatory spending which can be done by things like reducing administrative costs, not spending millions of dollars on Politico subscriptions, and so on. But healthcare (or any other mandatory spending) cuts themselves will be impossible unless the DNC is also on board with it.

Those expenses are only unavoidable if you don't consider cutting fraudulent claims, which may have been enabled by people who are incompetent and/or working inefficiently. If you're able to cut a small but significant portion of fraudulent "pensions, medicare, social security, and all of these expenses are unavoidable and in a mandatory expenses category" by proxy from cutting the people, that represents a larger proportion of the total budget.

If we take Twitter/X as an example of this process, my personal experience has been that it has been degraded to a spams and bot hell shortly after Musk took over. But my personal experience isn't quantifiable, what is quantifiable is X valuation which, according to Fidelity, has been depreciating and back in Oct. 2024 was estimated at nearly 20% of the original acquisition price.

The Fidelity valuation is old news. All the most recent debt sales were either just below or just above 100% of the original price. Example article: https://www.afr.com/technology/banks-offload-8-8b-in-debt-li...

While it shows investors aren't concerned about X ability to pay back its loan term, it isn't a proxy for valuation. Banks usually sell issued debt to investors soon after the debt is issued. In this case it took 2 years.

Ah yes, sold Feb 15 2025[1]...right as the CEO took over running the US government and raided the US treasury department.

I'm sure this is a completely above board sale that definitely does not represent a legal-if-you-don't-look-at-it way to bribe the de facto head of the US government / the expectation of massive corruption (ala: Tesla's stock price rising on the news Elon Musk was running DOGE - weird right? The CEO is apparently going to be too busy to run the company because he's now running the government so the stock price goes up...to be fair, technically that's not a bad bet)

Because we know the new administration definitely wouldn't take bribes in the form of financial instruments[2]. Definitely no history of it[3].

[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/banks-sell-down-mor...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/markets/currencies/trumps-meme-coin-...

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2024/08/02/tru...

If you invent reasons to dismiss what people say then there's nothing anyone can say to convince you otherwise.

There's a gap between "no you can't see the dragon in my garage, he's invisible, intangible, emits no body heat, and has no gravitational field" and "here's some citations to back up my belief".

Are the citations sufficient? Dunno. Just saying this isn't what you call it.

> a legal-if-you-don't-look-at-it way to bribe the de facto head of the US government / the expectation of massive corruption

How does the sale of the debt help Elon Musk or Trump? They don't own that debt, they don't make money off that debt. Do you expect the fund managers to forgive the debt as a bribe? That would clearly be a bribe, but until that happens, it isn't and I don't think it is terribly likely.

There are plenty of real things to be upset over, you don't need to make up imaginary ones. All that does is dilute the real concerns and make your opposition less effective.

I'm saying when you see a lot of smoke coming from a house, the neighbours probably didn't just buy an industrial sized BBQ and suddenly decide to have a huge cook off after some kids threw a bottle through the window.

So you think a debt purchase is blindongly obvious example of bribery? Then it should be easy to explain how it is bribery.

You comply, we buy your asset for 5x its value. You don't comply, we don't. Simple.

The debt was the bank's asset, not Musk's or Trump's. That isn't an explanation.

[2] seems like a grift, not a bribe.

[3] is an unnecessarily verbose story with practically no substance. In 2017 a $10m cash withdrawal was made to a Research and Studies Center said to have a “relationship with the Egyptian General Intelligence Agency.”

Using those facts, and the fact Trump was friendly with Sisi at a UN event, an entire investigation was launched to see if Trump was the final recipient.

If you look at it with the counter assumption of Trump being innocent, there still seems to be a reasonable motive for all this.

The FBI wanted information about an Egyptian cash withdrawal from one of Egypt’s own banks, subpoenaed them by bringing up presidential relevancy, and punished them $50k a day until the bank sent the documents.

> He thinks this is a feature, not a bug. Is he wrong? I don't think so.

Twitter lost 84% of its revenue.

Do you want the USA GDP to shrink that much over the next few years?

The good news is that GDP is positively correlated with greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels. Lower GDP, lower temp. I mean the famines will certainly "help"... I don't think the Senate will let it get that far, though. Only takes a few Rs in the House to impeach. 67 senators is a hard climb but 0% YoY GDP decline could do it... Or it could give Trump the stimulus he so badly craves.

They won't go hungry. I don't think famine will stop them. They don't want to lose their dictator that is willing to advance their agenda.

But they need to have a strong economy AND strong, consistent revenue to fund their defense budget. Don't forget that...

They need it to seem like that. Russia mistook the illusion for a reality, and is now stuck in a war of attrition with an economy that, on paper, is only a tenth of their own, and which is being supported by the international equivalent of loose change.

When Putin realised that, his body language changed: https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-ukraine-war-putin-neumann-int...

(Oh how hyperbolic headlines are…)

The US's GDP isn't based on the amount of bloat in its government. Sure spending finds its way into the economy, but tax dollars saved also will. As for Twitter/X - the goal isn't revenue but profit, and Twitter was not in a good shape before Elon. Musk recently noted they are barely breaking even now, and the recent sale of X debt was just above original pricing. Considering big advertisers are coming back to X, that's probably only going to look better.

The twitter deal kind of worked out for Musk because Trump won the presidency. It's a way to buy favors from the US government now. Basically a corruption vehicle. From a end user stand point, twitter is terrible now. Lots of bots, full of life hack and crypto scams and a lot of scientists and other interesting people completely abandoned the platform.

Control the media, control the narrative. A tale as old as time.

> The US's GDP isn't based on the amount of bloat in its government. Sure spending finds its way into the economy, but tax dollars saved also will.

"Bloat" presumes. "Tax dollars saved" would only be relevant — still incorrect, but relevant — if you were matching tax cuts with spending cuts, rather than trying to balance budgets.

If the USA balances its budget in a way that *somehow* has no side-effects, the GDP shrinks 7% just from that cut alone — but these cuts do have side effects so it is worse than that.

And doing using layoffs as a discovery mechanism is going to have Chesterton-fence type mistakes, where you only find what's wrong when the stuff you stop paying for is maintenance whose absence takes a while to become visible to non-domain experts. Dams will fail and flood valleys, bridges will fall into rivers, that kind of thing has gotten into the news in other countries when maintenance was forgotten.

The infrastructure that your government is responsible for is the backbone upon which the wealth of the rest of your country is built. You can eliminate the entire Federal Highway Administration and Joe Average won't notice anything for nearly a year… but if and when you do hire them back, you may have to hire back a lot more than you fired just to catch up with the damage done.

And so it goes for many other aspects of your country. CDC's also in the news now. OK, until you get your next pandemic… oh, wait, you're already having one. Nukes? You won't notice the problem until other governments no longer fear your nuclear deterrent. Armed forces in general? British didn't see any problem with shrinking their forces until the Russian invasion of Ukraine and realising how close they were to not being able to defend themselves if invaded. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration? Getting rid of that means a lot of companies can get away with skipping safety processes, so it might even seem like the economy goes up… until you get some equivalent of the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal.

> As for Twitter/X - the goal isn't revenue but profit, and Twitter was not in a good shape before Elon.

They made a profit in two of the years before he took over; an 84% revenue decline means that the company cannot even service the debt he saddled the company with during the purchase, even if he fired all remaining staff and reduced server, utility, real estate, and insurance, and all other costs to zero.

> Musk recently noted they are barely breaking even now, and the recent sale of X debt was just above original pricing.

Do you trust him?

According to this link, they sold more of their debt than they were expecting to, for more than expected to, but it was still less than they paid for it.

Going from $1b to $5.5b and from 90¢/$ to 97¢/$ is less bad rather than good.

https://www.business-standard.com/world-news/morgan-stanley-...

>Sure spending finds its way into the economy, but tax dollars saved also will.

Tax savings too a $40k a year person immediately find their way into the economy. Tax savings to multi-millionaires and billionaires tend to result in ever higher asset prices. They have too much spend effectively, so they hoard it.

So essentially the process here is:

1. Buy Twitter.

2. Fire most of the staff.

3. Piss everyone off so all the advertisers shun you.

4. Barely get the company breaking even, mainly due to all the cuts, even though the platform itself is barely limping along.

5. Cozy up to a wannabe dictator that dupes (slightly less than) half the country to elect him as president again.

6. Make the advertisers realize that their continued prosperity depends on bending the knee to you, due to your political connections. Not to mention your platform is now a way for people to buy favors from the government.

7. Profit.

(No need for a "???" step before "Profit", well done...)

We truly live in the darkest timeline.

> Twitter lost 84% of its revenue.

How much of that is because of politics? Already at the point of takeover, Musk was so hated by half the US for various reasons that it became profitable for major publishing platforms to abandon Twitter/X "on principle". When you're in that situation, nothing on the object-level can help you - neither good management nor technical competence. Revenue depends indirectly on the public opinion, and half of it wants nothing to do with you.

US nuclear arsenal is not in this situation.

Is it politics that people don't want to do business with shitty people? I'd call that being human.

If I owned a bill board space, and set everything around it on fire, wouldn't you think it was my fault that advertisers didn't want to pay to use it any more?

No, but then burning everything around the billboard doesn't necessarily make you a shitty person, and also opinions of people siding with advertisers aren't somehow the definitive ones.

I mean, why do people who hate what Twitter is now care about it's lost revenue? Especially given what it was, and where the revenue came from, this isn't exactly an argument that generalizes well.

The real question is why people think Twitter's lost revenue is linked to Musk's management. There doesn't seem to be a theory about a causal link. If anything the argument is "Musk is a bad person -> Twitter lost revenue" which suggests his management practices had no effect on the company's operation.

FWIW, I absolutely blame his management of Twitter rather than his political alignment or questions of morality.

Reason being, look at Tesla stock price: Musk's gaffes have a short term impact, but overall the price is way up since buying Twitter.

Tesla is not in advertising business, though. They are affected by the whims of public opinion, but not as much, as they're established company selling a quality product worldwide.

Musk used to dabble much more in Tesla directly than he's now, I wonder whether the ups and downs of the company correlate with his involvement, especially before he started going off the rails so badly? That would be informative and help separate object-level impact from political hysteria.

> Tesla is not in advertising business, though.

Tesla is absolutely in the advertisement business.

Their marketing and image is the only thing holding the company up (for now).

What I meant is: they buy ads and care about their opinion. They're not a platform selling ads, and they're not an ad delivery vector (like e.g. publishers) either. The latter two kinds of businesses have particular dynamics that are highly sensitive to public opinion, much more so than for any other kind of business.

Did people already forget he allowed Anti-semitism? And then brands left Twitter? And then he threatened to sue the brands for leaving?

We can argue the first part all day. The point was Coca Cola and co. did not want to assossiate anymore and that had an objective dollar amount.

I know less about this situation, but Twitter in 2024 apparently made some controversial blocking changes and that started the bluesky migration. I don't know the dollar amount there, but they apparently lost some big influencers.

If Musk was so politically toxic as to drive an 84% revenue decline, the Republican politicians wouldn't have allowed him to support them or their party.

Why? That entirely depends on political alignment of revenue sources, and I bet that (before the takeover) the balance was heavily on the US left-wing side, as that's also the overall bias in tech industry and social media and news publishing. And all that is amplified by advertisers in general, regardless of political leaning, being very touchy about controversy.

I can easily imagine this to alone be responsible for wiping 84% revenue.

Real world has a different political distribution than the Internet. "Politically toxic" on-line in particular is a knee-jerk reaction that is great at generating consistent revenue streams for publishers and social media on-line, but doesn't translate well to how the entire population of a country actually thinks or votes in the real world.

> Real world has a different political distribution than the Internet.

5% different, almost everyone is online.

But, thinking about your oft-quoted blog post about advertising bring a cancer, I guess if the top ad spenders cut themselves out entirely, then the bidding system could result in the runner-up bidder finding their ads are now almost arbitrarily cheaper.

>5% different, almost everyone is online.

We at best get 70% participation in voter representation. Online wise, I'd wager we get at best 20% "public" participation in terms of who bothers to participate online as opposed to lurking. And that 20% is spread amongst hundreds of subjects.

And we know these aren't created equal. The internet is disproportionately on the younger side, is very slightly biased by "middle class", educated workers, and the gender demographics vary site to site, despite being overall even (e.g. disproportionately male on Reddit, female on Pintrest). There will definitely be a different resuts online compared to making physical surveys.

> Already at the point of takeover, Musk was so hated by half the US for various reasons that it became profitable for major publishing platforms to abandon Twitter/X "on principle"

No, Musk became hated by half the US __because__ of the way he took over Twitter. That lost him a great deal of good will.

> How much of that is because of politics?

The US government is a lot more affected by politics than twitter will ever be.

Different kind of politics. For the Twitter-affecting kind, I'm struggling to come up with a term that wouldn't be seen to some as offensive.

Pretty sure it's the same type of politics. If you think private, profit driven corporations are reluctant to deal with individuals viewed as problematic by their customers, wait until you see how elected, popularity driven officials deal with people viewed as problematic by their constituents.

The only reason you think he isnt wrong is because you think it wont impact you. I hope one day you find yourself in the same situation, even worse, then I hope you remember this comment.

If I do, whether or not I remember my comment, I'll certainly remember yours :(

Sometimes people like you need to go through what others do to realise how wrong you were. Some people have empathy to know. You seem like the former. Its not too late to see that Elon is nothing but a fraud though if you wish to.

I think there is a tiny difference if Twitter is not working or if the nuclear arsenal is malfunctioning.

Yes, so it's a good thing the first step is:

> [Step 1] Question every requirement. Each should come with the name of the person who made it. You should never accept that a requirement came from a department, such as from "the legal department" or "the safety department." You need to know the name of the real person who made that requirement. Then you should question it, no matter how smart that person is. Requirements from smart people are the most dangerous, because people are less likely to question them. Always do so, even if the requirement came from me. Then make the requirements less dumb.

I REALLY doubt the recent high school graduates "yes boys" he brought in are even capable of providing the "name of the real person who made that requirement."

come on bro, you must know somewhere deep inside that this is more complex and consequential than fucking twitter of all things.

I know that the US government is more complex than twitter lol. I just think it's stupid to automatically invalidate an idea because it was used in a less complex system (especially when it worked lmao).

... and failed to turn that less complex system into a more profitable company

Unfortunately Twitter is now a machine that allows people to buy favors from the US government, so I expect it to become profitable pretty quickly.

Pretty messed up way for that to work out, though.

I invalidated it because it was tried and spectacularly failed in a complex system.

This is not quite as innovative as you might think, I guess you are advocating for the Chernobyl approach: "Let's turn all safety features off and see if it breaks!"

They turned off the safety features to test a safety procedure. I don't think it is a fair analogy.

They weren't testing a safety procedure, they were testing whether they could get rid of a safety feature. Specifically they were checking whether the plant's turbine could provide enough power to keep coolant flowing without the help of a counterweight system.

It's clear from the speed at which these changes are going in place that step 1 is not being followed, nor is it being encouraged.

> Requirements from smart people are the most dangerous, because people are less likely to question them.

This is just absolutely silly. What other reasonable ways are there to create requirements?

Move fast, break things.

Didn't facebook end up changing that?

There's some things you can't undo once they break.

And also, what if a nation state is different than a tech startup and shouldn't be run quite the same?

Next you’ll tell us sovereign debt isn’t the same as personal debt!!! /s

It is if you have your own personal currency

Once at a certain size didn’t Facebook say move fast but don’t break the infrastructure. Maybe they learned something about being at a certain scale.

Infrastructure and countries if I recall

surely a nuclear arsenal isn't one of those things.

It could also be the motto of an ICBM

If anything ICBMs are better at moving fast and breaking things than the tech industry

i run into this problem often when building teams, people who fail to understand that the real world is not an algorithm. the very first people i release are those incapable of seeing beyond math.

their failure to see wider context, their failures to understand that massive chaotic fractal tier contexts interplay will forever be these people’s downfalls.

sisyphean masochists.

I was going to mention this as well. This is pretty standard musk, delete large swaiths of stuff, see what breaks, and put the essential pieces back. It's supposed to be much faster than meticulous planning.

Yes all with no regard for the impact on people, families and their needs. Lets just make sure to focus on the need of a billionaire to create more wealth. The only reason you think like this is because you think it wont happen to you. Oh boy, I hope it does, then I hope you remember this comment. I so hope the people in here defending this bs end up on the street and impacted like the many innocent people are today. I love hearing the stories of regret from MAGA people, only more to come.

Web company world

1) Delete a system

2) 404 error

3) add the system back with a simple git command

Nuclear world

1) Delete a system

2) Nuclear meltdown causes the abandonment of the Atlantic coast

3) Add the system back over the next 20 years

I have seen it before. This is the “Coffee is for closers” scene from Glengarry Glen Ross: https://youtu.be/elrnAl6ygeM

By that logic, perhaps we should trim 10% of his wealth.

And then we can stop and check - if he is still fine after it, then maybe we didn't trim enough.

It's easy to trim other people when you are completely insulated from the consequences.

Yeah this works for processes.

Doesn’t work in with people though. You will be deemed as unreliable.

Alliances will form without you as no one needs a partner that can leave you standing at any moment.

Running the company is the very opposite of running a country.

The feedback loop is weeks vs years/decades.

Yeah I'd heard this and I think he is right. I'm about to use the approach in a coding task in work.

However this is people's livelihoods, mortgages, kids etc. being on the receiving end of it through no fault of your own must be awful.

This sounds like a software developers take. I think it is an algorithm that can work well in non critical systems. I think it is naive in the extreme to apply it to critical systems.

I don't want to live in a world where it's right. Treating people like this, toying with their livelihoods, is wrong, full stop. It might "work" for certain definitions of "work", but it's morally repugnant.

You could apply the same reasoning to parts of the human body.

Or maybe not.

> Is he wrong?

When it comes to government, yes.

>Is he wrong? I don't think so.

He's assuming everyone will grovel back to him and that this can be undone. That's the wrong part.

Layoffs will often cost you your best employees. Either because you laid them off, because they saw the signs and jumped before the layoffs, or because you end up overworking the post layoffs and they leave over the bad balance. You're never paying 10xer 10x the salary, so the attritiion is usually a matter of when, not if.

people aren't machines. They have their own interests and very few want to feel like they are one step away from being let go.