Re:US goverment seeks to rehire recently fired nuclear workers
by ben_w on Sunday February 16, 2025 @04:10AM
(#43066608)
> 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.
"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-...