> The first, and what should be obvious to anyone with an ounce of empathy, is that these are real people who's lives are being toyed with. It isn't like you are trying out a new business process. You are literally playing with entire lives here as if they are disposable things. This alone makes what is happening inhumane.
This makes no sense. It is not a life, it is a job. The person isn't dead. They get a generous severance and find a new job.
What are you trying to say here? That once someone is employed, the have to keep being employed forever and ever and they can never be let go even when their job was pointless and anything else is inhumane?
Jobs come and go. Every rational adult understands this and makes arrangements for what they need to do if they have to find a new job. Stop acting like these are disabled children that the government is obligated to take care of.
For better or worse, government jobs are perceived as something you get for life. That was part of the appeal: yeah, the pay is less than in the private sector, but they're unlikely to fire you even if you're not good or if the role no longer makes sense.
But that aside: even if we want to alter the deal, there are good ways and bad ways to do this. Jobs are important because they are a big part of your life and because you need one to pay the bills. So you should try to avoid "haha so long" / "oops, clicked the wrong button, come back" kinds of situations.
> For better or worse, government jobs are perceived as something you get for life. That was part of the appeal: yeah, the pay is less than in the private sector, but they're unlikely to fire you even if you're not good or if the role no longer makes sense.
Yeah, that is definitely "for worse". The point of hiring someone to do a job is to get something useful done. Not to hand out do-nothing sinecures to lucky lottery winners. I have friends who have transitioned from private to public sector and they unanimously complain about how useless the government lifers are. This is your tax money that is being spent.
and if you aren't getting what you're owed for that money you have the ability to vote out the people responsible for that and elect people who can deliver what we're asking for. Try voting out the CEO of walmart.
Believe it or not, when a bunch of incompetents aren't dismantling them, most government agencies get their work done. There are a lot fewer "do-nothing"s than you think and a lot of hard workers who are proud to serve their fellow Americans.
You don’t need to vote out the CEO of Wal-Mart. He can’t put you in jail or confiscate your income via taxes. You just go shop at target or somewhere else instead.
The most universally hated companies are also among the richest. Voting with your wallet is a myth. The entire point of a private company is to confiscate your income. They must charge you as much as they possibly can while providing you with as little as they can possibly get away with. Maybe you've even noticed prices going up while enshittification and shrinkflation increases.
The richest companies do the most business. If you have a billion transactions a year and 0.1% of the time something goes wrong and a customer is pissed off, that's a million pissed off people writing angry reviews online. That makes it seem like they are "universally hated", but you don't hear anything from the 99.9% of people who had perfectly fine, unremarkable experiences.
In my lifetime I've gone from paying a few cents to dollars per minute for phone calls (on the high end for international calls), to being able to have a video call with anyone, anywhere in the world for essentially free.
TVs have gotten bigger, lighter, and cheaper. Cars are more powerful, have better gas mileage, and are much safer. Air travel quality has declined, but so have prices. New video games have consistently been around $50-$60 since the 1980s. If they kept pace with inflation, they should cost $140 to $150 now. The phone in my pocket is about 1000x more powerful than the top of the line desktop I couldn't afford in the 90s and even before inflation it's about 1/3 the price.
Food has more variety and is cheaper. Craft beer was not a thing 30 years ago. Coffee was Maxwell House freeze dried garbage from a can, not fresh roasted beans.
I'm sure there's more. The government is responsible for basically none of that.
> If you have a billion transactions a year and 0.1% of the time something goes wrong and a customer is pissed off, that's a million pissed off people writing angry reviews online. That makes it seem like they are "universally hated"
The most hated companies tend to be the ones who have been causing harm for years if not decades and impacting vast numbers of people: Purdue Pharma, Nestlé, BP, Facebook, Monsanto, Comcast, Johnson & Johnson, 3M, etc. Several of the most hated companies have been directly responsible for killing millions of people. This isn't about "angry reviews online", sometimes it's about getting away with fraud or even murder.
> In my lifetime I've gone from paying a few cents to dollars per minute for phone calls (on the high end for international calls), to being able to have a video call with anyone, anywhere in the world for essentially free.
Your calls also used to be much more private, but now the software, devices, and services you use are spying on you and your communications to varying degrees in ways that would have been illegal when you had a landline. Call quality was also vastly better ("you can hear a pin drop" vs "can you hear me now")
> TVs have gotten bigger, lighter, and cheaper.
They also take multiple screenshots of every second to spy on what you're watching, they push ads on the screen even when you're playing video games or watching DVDs, and have microphones and camera collecting your personal data.
> Cars are more powerful, have better gas mileage, and are much safer.
Cars are also spying on everything you do and reporting your driving habits to your insurance company who will jack up your rates if you drive at night or take a corner too hard.
> New video games have consistently been around $50-$60 since the 1980s. I
You aren't counting the fact that parts of games (including parts important to the story) are often paywalled off and the cost of games can end up in the hundreds if not thousands of dollars if you include the DLC (for example the total cost of the Sims 4 is $1,235) or the games which require ongoing subscription costs, when in the 80s there were countless free player-made mods/maps/skins/expansions etc. Also video games are being used to build psychological profiles of you which then gets sold to data brokers and used to push ads at you (https://www.wired.com/story/video-games-data-privacy-artific...).
> The phone in my pocket is about 1000x more powerful than the top of the line desktop I couldn't afford in the 90s
The PC you had in the 90s was your computer. On your phone multiple third parties like your phone manufacturer, your carrier, and the OS maker can all access your phone remotely at any time, view/modify/add/delete files, applications, and settings without any notice to you at all. They have privileged levels of access to your device while you are left with a locked down account without full access to "your" device. Your computer in the 90s was designed to work for you, but your cell phone is designed to collect your personal data for other people.
> Food has more variety and is cheaper.
Food prices are at historic highs right now and that food is less healthy than it used to be as companies have been able to strip away regulations. The same scientists that the tobacco industry paid to lie to the public and government about the harms of smoking are now being employed by the food industry to convince the government that their additives are harmless (https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/04/17/400391693/ho...) and people are eating worse now than they did in the 1980s which shows in the amount of obesity and disease. I have to admit that we have much more variety than we did. That seems to be on the decline in recent years though and people are increasingly finding empty shelves at the stores.
Some things are better today than they used to be, but many things are actually much worse. Every new technology that does something convenient for you is also being used against you in some way.
Purdue Pharma is not one of the richest companies anymore. They have been sued into oblivion. The fact that some terminally online redditors like to farm karma by posting "Fuck Nestle" every time they're mentioned because of a 40 year old scandal is not really representative of them being "most hated". To 99% of people Nestle is chocolate chips and candy bars. Most people do not care about any of this, except maybe Comcast, and that is a case of regulatory capture.
Yeah, things can spy on you to target ads. If this bothers you, block ads. They can target all the ads they want at me, I'll never see them.
Call audio quality might have been better, but video quality was nonexistent. My mom can see her granddaughter from the other side of the world and that was simply not even possible 20 years ago.
You can still root your phone and most computers are still your own, if this is important for you. For the vast majority of people, they don't even understand what the settings mean and it is a relief that they don't have to deal with them. The average consumer experience compared to editing autoexec.bat and fiddling with .ini files to get a game working on Windows 95 is a vast improvement.
> The most hated companies [...] Johnson & Johnson, 3M
You're living in a serious bubble if you think people hate the company they most readily associate with shampoo or scotch tape.
Almost all "most hated company" rankings can be broken into two categories: the ones many consumers had direct negative experiences with (Equifax, Comcast) and the ones they were told by the media they should be upset with (Anheuser-Busch).
> This makes no sense. It is not a life, it is a job. The person isn't dead
People's health insurance is tied to their job. Mass firings by the largest employer in the nation could easily result in several deaths as medical treatments are disrupted and medications missed, delayed, or changed with insurance companies.
Not that death is required to screw up your life either. This is not a great time to be out of work. Household debt is at an all time high. Credit card delinquencies and utility disconnections are skyrocketing, homelessness is at an all time high. People are already struggling. Those problems are likely to only get worse for anyone who suddenly finds themselves out of work. Adding hundreds of thousands of Americans to the already growing pool of unemployed people all at once means that jobs will be harder to find and offered wages will be lowered.
> What are you trying to say here? That once someone is employed, the have to keep being employed forever
Who said anything about forever? Maybe just don't randomly fire vast numbers of Americans indiscriminately and all at once for zero reason disrupting their lives and interfering with services that people want, depend on, and are paying for?
> People's health insurance is tied to their job. Mass firings by the largest employer in the nation could easily result in several deaths as medical treatments are disrupted and medications missed, delayed, or changed with insurance companies.
No, this could not "easily" happen. People get COBRA to continue their health coverage after losing their job. There is Medicaid and other programs for people who can't afford care. There are state exchanges where you can purchase insurance upon qualifying events like losing your job. There are a million and one ways to deal with this. Contrary to popular belief people in America do not immediately drop dead the second their health insurance lapses. This is nonsensical fear-mongering.
COBRA is a joke. It's way too expensive. Medicaid is on the chopping block, but even then it doesn't cover everything and not every doctor accepts Medicaid and "other programs". Tens if not hundreds of thousands of Americans die every year because they don't have insurance and can't afford the treatment they need.
1. Cobra is absurdly expensive. “Healthy” people typically opt for no insurance at all, because they’re now unemployed and poor. Some will die. We cannot ignore obvious human behavior to make your argument more convenient.
2. Medicaid is among the programs on the chopping block. Again, we cannot just ignore that little point because it’s inconvenient. This is ALL part of one conservative strategy for starving the beast.
I think the point is that is inhumane to fire someone because of "coding error", from what we know about USA not having a job is affecting your health care so might cost the person life because a "coding error" , so if you are the guy that writes a "findfWhoToFire" function please have some empathy and tripple check your code and write tests, in USA it can cost lives.
I mostly agree with your position. However there are a couple of issues that make federal government work distinct from ordinary business.
1. Fired federal workers typically do not get a severance. Those impacted by the recent reductions in force are not receiving severance packages.
2. Government salaries are usually uncompetitive compared to the private sector; the major difference is the value of the pension. Leaving government service early results in a low pension; the pension is usually only worth it after 20 years of service and if one leaves federal service close to retirement age, to max out the "high-3" pension basis.
3. Because federal jobs are partially a stimulus effort to state economies, workers will have relocated to a region where there is no other employer in their field. Relocation will be necessary to find another job. This is less of a factor for the private sector, where workers typically move to locations where multiple employers offer jobs for their field.
A necessary set of reforms will be to simultaneously a.) raise federal salaries to market rate, b.) replace pension contributions with 401k matching, c.) reduce roadblocks for performance firings for tenured employees, and d.) consolidate contractors into federal employment.
Part of the reason federal employment is inflexible is due to the comparatively low income for many fields; mid-career employees have a low incentive for joining. Likewise, the barrier to leaving early is high due to the sunk cost of the pension. A tenured employee with reduced productivity is difficult to remove. Due to the pension obligations, the government is forced to use contractors to fill out the workforce. Contracting companies often take 50% overhead just to have someone doing the same job as a federal employee.
Such a policy change would take substantial bipartisan cooperation, so it's unlikely to be done in the current political environment.
This is separate from the deferred resignation plan DOGE was offering. Under that plan employees voluntarily resigned and continued being employed for approximately 8 months, with full pay and benefits and no duties. They were free to go get another job during that time. That is more generous than most layoffs.
The pension / relocation are real issues, but if you work in a job that has a demand in the private sector (e.g. Treasury department going to finance), the increased pay from the private sector often more than makes up for the loss of the pension.
What 8 months? If you believe that, you’re a sucker.
Edit: how about all those fired "for cause" even though it's obviously not "for cause"? If you wanna call this shifting goal posts, fine, but consider this - the DOGE is doing something like a "broad spectrum" attack on government employees. Neither their firings nor offers are legal.
DOGE is destroying entire fields. Maybe you built a career in museum curatorship or international development. You don't get paid much but its a decent living and you feel that you are enriching the world.
You don't just wake up without a job. You wake up in a world where you need a totally new career.
There are lots of privately funded museums. Museums are not going to disappear.
“International development” is mostly rich failsons with politically connected parents getting funneled taxpayer money via NGOs and/or a front for the CIA. Good riddance.
"Don't worry, you've got six months of emergency fund and jobs come and go" and "good riddance I'm glad their careers are destroyed those lazy leeches" don't feel like they should be placed so close together.
I personally believe that making mobile games is less valuable to the world than handing out TB meds, but that's just me.
> Foreign governments have long accused the U.S. Agency for International Development of being a front for the CIA or other groups dedicated to their collapse. In the case of Cuba, they appear to have been right.
I don’t think Foreign Policy is considered some crackpot conspiracy theory rag.
USAID was run by the State department, which is known to provide cover for the CIA (every embassy has CIA officers working out of it). This is not a “conspiracy theory”. The CIA does exist and they do spy on other countries.
What do you think the CIA does? Do you think they go to other countries and open an office with a big sign saying “Hello, this is the CIA”?
can just speak for myself, but I wouldn't be employable after a layoff like that... I't get a mental meltdown and afterwards would probably be on disability until I got mentally better. They're literally teaching thausands of people that they aren't reliable and can't be trusted.
I mean, if that's what you're aiming for, good for you, but I'd recon that you'll end up with more people that want your head now than before.
This makes no sense. It is not a life, it is a job. The person isn't dead. They get a generous severance and find a new job.
What are you trying to say here? That once someone is employed, the have to keep being employed forever and ever and they can never be let go even when their job was pointless and anything else is inhumane?
Jobs come and go. Every rational adult understands this and makes arrangements for what they need to do if they have to find a new job. Stop acting like these are disabled children that the government is obligated to take care of.