@marick @khinsen Note also that the chart you’ve linked to is civilian employment. The DoD decline does not reflect a smaller army (there may have been, but that’s not this table), just fewer DoD civilian workers. I’m not sure why you’d want to break that out of civilian workforce and describe its reduction as masking an increase in other departments. 1/
@marick @khinsen As you say, contractors “don’t count” to the ideologues, so we’ve deemed a so-called “mixed workforce” a virtue despite high cost and the fact that it’s severely impaired state capacity as nothing is learned, every project is a new contract, started by overpriced consultants, effectively from scratch. As people like @Alon have carefully shown, consultantifying government hollows capability. 3/
they may come off as innocuous, but poets have very deep connections to organized rhyme.
This post is based on true events.
“Constitutionally, Congress is a superior branch of government to the presidency, and it is explicitly designed to check the president.” @davidfrenchjag https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/01/opinion/trump-judges-federalist-society.html
// yes.
@marick @GeePawHill @RonJeffries there *is* a dark side of the moon with respect to that light reflected from earth. it does get sunlight, but no earthlight.
cynicism and wisdom are not synonyms.
@jonathankoren just leave it, don’t go through it, it will break your heart.
free-floating nostalgia can be painful.
far from anti-elitest, MAGA is a conspiracy to make even the most predatory elements of the erstwhile elite look good by comparison.
they take every warning as an instruction manual.
never actually throw your scapegoat off the cliff. you will find all of a sudden you have no one but yourself left to blame.
@simon_brooke i do think governance is hard, information challenging work, that requires devotion and specialization.
each of us who constitutes everyone knows our own values and interests, but converting that into policy that would support it and organizing coalitions that would enact such policies are skills one must develop.
@billseitz @khinsen huh! 50,000 is still to many, but lots better than 750,000!
@khinsen A majority of constituents personally knowing and regularly interacting with representatives, would make them much less susceptible to lobbyists. With 350,000 representatives, lobbyists effectively have to persuade a whole public, they can’t just buy off a few people.
@admitsWrongIfProven the unthinkable becomes the inevitable during crises. that’s why it’s important to have worthwhile ideas lying around that at they time they are proposed seem unrealistic, unthinkable.
i unironically think the job of the future might be politician.
we'd have a better world if we had a lot more of them, if every thousand, rather than every almost 800,000 of us, had a paid professional representative enfranchised in our political system.
@curtosis Please listen carefully!
Your call is very important to us.
Huh! IRS Direct File is implemented in part in #Scala, both JVM and JS. https://github.com/IRS-Public/direct-file