Jack Wylder here. Did you know that while in Facebook NiceGulag for Crimes Against the Narrative, Larry sometimes uses Twitter as an outlet to verbally smack down Common Internet Shit Gibbons? You can follow him at @MonsterHunter45 Yeah yeah I know- you hate Twitter. That’s okay. But you’re missing out on some hilarious stuff right now. Especially with people outraged that Musk is planning on letting people have free speech, letting people just think whatever they want! The outrage! Can you imagine? Anyway, Larry is worth following- trust me on this.
Recently he did a series of Tweets I thought so good they needed to be immortalized here on the blog. (Keep in mind these were written in blocks of 288 characters with his thumb, on his phone, between doing other things, so formatting was not a priority.) Enjoy!
There’s a red wave coming because normal voters are fed up with democrat bullshit. They suck at governing and they cater to their base, which is psychotic.
But the GOP has a history of being lame, cowardly, corrupt squishes, so our government keeps sucking.
How do we fix it?
This is my opinion, based upon working as an accountant/contractor for the most efficient part of our stupid government, which was still a fucking clown show when compared to the corporate world (or at least the non-woke corporate world)
A well known, yet denied, truth is that most government employees are entrenched and don’t do shit. They’re utterly useless.
Depending on the department you could fire a ton of them and all it would do is free up parking spaces.
Now, there are some government employees who work their asses off. Good. There are some government functions which are necessary. Great.
A great many don’t work, or the work they do is utterly pointless.
As any honest gov employee. They will admit this to you in private.
If they say no, everything we do is vital and everyone here is vital, they’re a liar protecting their budget, or one of the useless ones.
Most places, if there are 5 employees, 2 do 90% of the work.
Pournell’s Iron Law says that as it grows over time any bureaucracy’s purpose will change from its original mission, to a new mission of protecting and growing the bureaucracy.
So now our Department of Labor by itself is bigger than LBJ’s entire federal government. This stuff never shrinks. It only grows. It’s an endless leviathan.
The leviathan needs to grow and protect itself against all threats, which is how you get super evil shit like the CIA and FBI meddling in US elections…
Or constantly expanding its powers into new places, like the #MinistryOfTruth
This leviathan will find allies which help it expand in size and power. The more power/money you give it, the more it can bribe and co-opt other institutions. Academia, media, corporations, etc.
Whichever political philosophy is the most unprincipled will rock this arrangement
As the leviathan grows in power, it will become more malicious, spiteful, and controlling. Dissent is crushed. Freedom dies.
@elonmusk is currently a speed bump in this, which is why the control freak contingent is super pissed at him.
The big question is, do the people own their government, or does the government own its people? If we are just assets of the gov, we can be spent freely, and bad assets get eliminated.
The leviathan is compelled to own EVERYTHING.
Slowing the leviathan down isn’t enough. If you concentrate on stopping one part, others keep growing. Then when our bipolar country elects a new leader, those parts start growing again. Repeat forever. And it just keeps getting bigger.
So we’ve got to shrink the whole thing
If the GOP had a brain/spine (lol) they’d slash the shit out of everything. They’d starve the beast. They usually don’t, because they are total chickenshits. They’ll pay lip service to this, do nothing, or feed their favorite parts.
The DNC gleefully feeds the whole thing.
Trump’s biggest weakness was he surrounded himself with people who loved government, and loved expanding government. Of course all of those fucked him at every opportunity.
We need somebody who actively HATES the government to run it.
if I was President (ha!) I would only create a single new executive branch entity. The Department of Fuck Your Job Security.
The DoFYJS would consist of surly auditors, and their only job would be to go into other government agencies to figure out-
- A. do you fuckers do anything worth a shit?
- B. which of you fuckers actually get shit done?
Then fire everyone else.
Right now it is pretty much impossible to fire government employees. The process is asinine. It is so bad that the worst government employees, who nobody else can stand, don’t get fired. They get PROMOTED. It’s easier, and then its somebody else’s problem.
But the DoFYJS don’t care. If your job is making tax payers fill out mandatory paperwork and then filing it somewhere nobody will ever read it?
Fuck you. Gone. Clean out your desk.
We need to get rid of entire agencies. Gone. WTF does the Department of Education improve? NOTHING.
Gone. Fire them all. Sell the assets.
Any agency that survives this purge, move it out of DC to an area more appropriate to its mission. Do we need a Dept of Agriculture? Okay. Go to Kansas.
This will also cause all the DC/NOVA power monger set to resign so I don’t have to waste time firing them
Oh, and right wing pet causes, you’re not safe. I worked for the Air Force. We all know that we could fire 1/3 of the GS employees tomorrow and the only noticeable difference would be more parking available on base.
Cut everything. We never do, because somebody might cry. Too bad. They’re called budget cuts because they’re supposed to hurt. Not budget tickles. Fuck you. Cut.
Shutting off the money faucet will also destroy the unholy alliance between gov/media/academia/tech.
Right now there is a revolving door, government job, university job, corporate board, think tank, the same crowd who goes to the same parties and went to the same schools and all that other incestuous shit just take turns in the different chairs.
Sell the fucking chairs.
Every entity that gets tax money inevitably turns into a pig trough for these people. Cut it all off. All of these money faucets ALWAYS cause some kind of financial crisis later anyway.
See the student loan crisis caused by the government, here is free money, oh college has become expensive and useless, so now we need more government to solve it. You dummies get to pay for it. Have some inflation.
It’s all bullshit.
Quit pretending any of this makes sense.
The only way the leviathan shrinks is we elect people who actively hate the government to the government, and then only let them stay there long enough to fuck the government without getting corrupted by it.
The instant you see the small government crusader you sent to DC going “Oh, well maybe an unholy alliance between the state and OmniGlobalMegaCorp to develop a mind control ray is a good thing” FIRE HIM.
So there you have it. That’s my platform if you elect me president. Fire fucking everybody. And only give me one term. Thank you.
Oh wait… why did I just get these hot insider stock trading tips in my inbox from Blackrock? I guess a second term is cool.
Seriously though, something has to break. We can’t afford the loss of money or more importantly, freedom. The government either has to start cutting off parasites and control freaks, or stuff is going to get way way worse.
You don’t have to fire them. Too much trouble fighting the unions.
Just reassign them to a cubicle in the brand new Useless Government Functionary Sump Agency located in the tent city outside of Minot, ND, where they will be issued a surplus pentium 486 with no modem or internet card, and the only program installed is Minesweeper.
They’ll quit before winter.
any of them stupid enough NOT to quit before winter will die. I like this plan.
The unions were JFK. There should not be any public service unions, especially with all the recent criminal conspiracy. Pinkertons machine gunning strikers would be an improvement over the current level of intolerable.
The federal civil service system was the Mugwumps. It was a political act taken because of a political opportunity, and because ideological reasons made it seem like a good idea.
Teacher’s unions in 2018 should have been all the clues needed that the status quo didn’t hold, that it is time to treat certain entities as enemies, and act with decisive resolve. In particular, state attorney generals should have started treating property tax funding of public schools as sex trafficking conspiracy under SESTA.
Public unions and civil services are ultimately political decisions, and can be removed with political decisions.
Also, judges and law faculty who speak positively of democracy should be peacefully removed from those positions.
Democracy inherently includes impeachment of judges from office by mechanism of lynch mob.
If you have democracy, violent removal of officials from office is part of that.
Only in something other than democracy, like a republic, can you have a custom that judges are never violently removed from office.
We do not have a democracy, and it is wrong for people to say that we do, and it is wrong for them to say that democracy is a good thing.
I like this plan.
I used to work for the federal government at one of the punishment sites for our agency. At an area-wide function, there was a man being escorted around by one of the DC types. The person being escorted had spent tens of thousands of dollars calling sex lines while at work on a government phone– this is something our annual training assured us was a surefire way to get fired and face criminal charges. Yet here he was getting sent to BFE as a research scientist and still pulling down a six figure salary.
That man worked in BFE until he retired. Purgatory assignments don’t work, you need to fire the fuckers and gut the agencies.
Firing them is just as hard. Even if you gut the agencies, there’s still an order of retention. If this whole topic were a serious policy proposal, then you’d have to change federal employment law and the U.S. Code before anything. You could RIF some out, and gutting the agencies is something we can all agree with in spirit, but the reality is that the executive doesn’t have full control over every agency, and has no control over some. Even defunding them isn’t going to get rid of all the employees.
So, until you can get the law changed, make those fuckers play minesweeper in ND. If they survive the winter, and least they’re not actively harming anyone in the performance of their duties.
I wouldn’t even let them play minesweeper.
Four plain walls. No windows. No phone. No t.v. No internet. Nothing to read. One chair.
“Your new duties, UGF [useless government functionary], is to watch the paint on the wall and be sure it isn’t flaking.”
Ssoooo, the old UAW “Job Bank?”
For the record, I’m a Fed Civ and I approve this modest proposal!
I can accept this compromise position.
IIRC, there have been successful lawsuits fired by FedGov employees alleging that a transfer to another part of the country was actually payback-motivated punishment, and they should be reassigned back to their old office at their old location. So, unfortunately, even your idea likely wouldn’t work.
Well the spirit of Larry’s post is one of fantasy, so it wasn’t meant to be taken seriously. However, under an Executive directed RIF action, it becomes a lot easier to accomplish.
But yeah, federal employment law is complex, and none of this was framed as a serious policy proposal. The title of the new department was the giveaway.
I live about 100 miles away from Minot…this April we got one snowstorm that dumped three feet of snow on us. One week later we got a second snowstorm that dumped an additional two feet of snow (in 36 hours) on top of what was left of the preceding week’s snow and 18000 people (including us) were without power for over 24 hours. Some were without power for almost a week.
This was coming OUT of a winter where temps dropped to almost 40 below zero (Fahrenheit) plus massive wind chill…and this continued for multiple months.
I don’t even want to live here 😂 Move those idiots to some drafty Cold War era warehouse in Minot, give ‘em a single space heater and watch them naturally fade away.
Instead of Minot, which sounds too idyllic, can we send them all (Canadian and US employees) to Joint Government Liaison Camp Nunavut??
40 below is actually the point where the Fahrenheit and Celsius scales intersect, coincidentally. It’s the one point where you wouldn’t have to specify one or the other.
You have my vote!
I’d also take a good, hard look at the problem as existed before the Department to Fix This Problem was enacted. If the problem is still pretty much the same, or worse than before the program was created, that department goes away.
Excellent work. Of course, if you were ever elected, Democrats would contract with CrowdStrike to secretly install kiddie porn on your phone to get you out of office ASAP.
Government needs a failure mode that removes the failing component.
I’m not convinced that markets are better than government, in their first drafts. However, the legal frameworks that empower government agencies discourage quick production of second drafts (by design), and there’s no functional way for an agency to fail and stop doing the failure. So, they continue to feed.
Market organizations have an incentive to deliver second drafts (ect) from competitors and fail and stop consuming their feed.
I’m hoping we all realize that governments do fail, in time, but that it’s a terrible way to sough off the deadwood. Uber could die tomorrow and we still have Lyft. Same is probably true for the DofEd, but the only mechanism to stop feeding a government agency is to pass a law. The incentives are unbalanced in ways that make this an impractical failure mode .
I don’t think there’s an easy way out of this without a Constitutional amendment to prevent perpetual programs. Even then, I’d bet Congress would have a pretty streamlined process for cloning/reauthorizing the sunset programs. With diffuse costs, focused benefits, delayed consequences and mandatory, obscured, payments, I don’t have a lot of hope for solving this problem.
There is a DEAD SIMPLE method for fixing it. Split the department in half. The half that SOLVES the problem gets paid. The other half doesn’t.
As a government employee (state level), I 100% agree with all of this. I’m even in one of those useless positions, but I know that if I quit, they’d just fill it with someone else, and even if I quit and managed to convince them to cut the position, they wouldn’t actually cut it, they’d just move it elsewhere within the department. They only cut positions when there’s some kind of massive budget crisis. The last one happened 11 or so years ago, and while they cut a bunch at the time, I’d bet there are more positions now than there were before that cut. Some of them things like “Diversity and Inclusion Coordinator”.
State vs Federal is an interesting comparison. States don’t have control of the money supply, have faster consequences for policy, and are more limited as a consequence.
Now, get some politically competent Libertarian (I know, I know, better luck finding a live gynosphinx) and put this into action.
The same problem exists in Canada, so I share the reaction of delight to this proposal. An administration of civil servants with the anti-regulatory attitude of Ron Swanson and the devotion to really helping people of Leslie Knope would be a wonderful thing.
Unfortunately, the question that then comes to mind (over and above the practical difficulty of finding enough Swansoknopes of this type) is how to prevent the development of a spoils system, which would inevitably recur if mass firings at all federal bureaucracies became a hallmark of every administration changeover. There is also the difficulty that no change to a set of rules can eliminate the universal problem of people simply determined to partisanly exploit the rules’ letter rather than live up to their nonpartisan spirit. As Lawrence Garfield says to Kate Sullivan in Other People’s Money, “You can change all the laws you want. You can’t stop the game. I’ll still be here. I adapt.”
I admit to a lot of stubborn skepticism that the power of the beast can ever be used to effectively starve itself. If the unduly burdened or contributing states exercised a mass tax revolt, I wonder how much effect that would have.
“I admit to a lot of stubborn skepticism that the power of the beast can ever be used to effectively starve itself. ”
As do I. I don’t believe it. There’s no way Ottawa reforms itself. Liberal Jean Chretien was the last guy who really cut down the size of the Canadian federal government, believe it or not. He did it by firing every Conservative in every department he possibly could. Since then it has more than tripled in size.
The only thing that makes them stop is the fear that the people will rise up and kill them all. Look how badly they freaked out over some hot tubs and bouncy castles. That’s what it seems to take, I’m sad to say.
They’re right on track to make it happen though. Rapacious taxes, runaway inflation, crashing the economy, martial law. They’re four for four. Add a war and a nice famine, maybe another pestilence just for giggles, and there you go.
If the stores go empty, that’s when it’ll happen.
Honestly I think I would take a “spoils system” over the permanent bureaucracy we have now. We’d still have corrupt people feeding at the trough, but at least they’d be DIFFERENT corrupt people every 4-8 years or so, and the old useless buggers would be forced to get a real job while their people are out of power.
I’d like to understand, if I can, what exactly, from a liberty standpoint, is wrong with the spoils system as it existed pre-civil service.
Lived in DC for 13 years, worked for the government as a contractor or an actual federal employee for about 9 of those years. Larry’s platform is 100% correct and necessary. Best thing Trump could have done to drain the swamp (which he didn’t even really try to do) would have been to immediately make Gov employment at-will, meaning you can get fired at any time for no reason. I saw so much BS that would have gotten people shit-canned anywhere else it made me sick. Glad I got out of that hellhole.
I loved how the IRS couldn’t ever seem to pass an audit.
Trump didn’t have the power to make government employment At-Will. That requires congress, and the GOP didn’t have the stones to put a bill across his desk for it.
Preach!
I once worked with a guy whose dad worked at Hill AFB, and there was a guy in his department who had a year left before retirement, knew he couldn’t be fired, and spent that year doing nothing but sit in his corner for eight hours a day playing Minesweeper. No one else liked it, they all pretended he wasn’t there, but there he sat with his Minesweeper game, comfortable with his job security to the boring end.
My gripe is when they have a snowstorm or other weather event hit Washington, and they say “non-essential workers should stay home.” If they’re non-essential, why the Hell are they still collecting a paycheck!
Excellent question! When I was in D.C., we had an ice storm hit every winter. Those times I got called into work (Pentagon) to handle something, I saw maybe 10 civilians out the hundreds that were there in good weather. I swear we got everything done faster and with less whining.
Given the tendency of the auditors to also become their own problem, it strikes me the better solution is to simply shut down the agencies entirely, wait a few years to see what breaks and make new, tiny agencies to deal with the thing that can’t be dealt with locally.
I would expect mere audits to get subverted or diverted. If we’re going to push hard enough to have actual teeth, better to cut the root out and start over without the baggage.
It’s Herbert’s Bureau of Sabotage. I love it
Naw, BuSab is a whole hell of a lot more ruthless.
And exactly what we need.
Frank Herbert’s Bureau of Sabotage (BuSab) has been reinvented. The wikipedia page at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureau_of_Sabotage is possibly up for deletion because that idea annoys the hivemind there.
Just give me the Kumaresh Yar. I”ld fix the bastards real quick!
Come on, Larry. You would unleash a flood of useless parasites from their warrens in DC and the surrounding suburbs into an unsuspecting nation? We can do better. Must do better.
How about we volunteer them for the first lunar mining operation? They can have shares and everything.
Or maybe we change their jobs to homeland security and post them along the border holding hands and blocking entry. Wait, scratch that. Their jobs can be converted into hand-sorting recycling from existing landfills. That should appeal to their green side and be productive.
I’m only engaging in such a though exercise because modern generations are too squeamish for what really needs to be done when fighting against a malignant cancer.
The only job those useless sods would be qualified for in Lunar Mining is as surface ablator, at about 5km/s.
na just fire them for cause. They are INCAPABLE of doing anything else so they will starve soon enough.
Our local region sent a small government advocate to the state congress a few years ago. He did his job. Refused to sign bills with pork added to them, was completely transparent about what he was doing with his constituents. Someone at the state DoT complained to our local politicians because this guy wouldn’t sign a DoT funding bill due to all the riders; the DoT told our local guys they weren’t going to fix our roads. The next election, voters gave the congressman the boot because he wouldn’t go along to get along.
True story.
Remember Harry Reid and the ObamaCare debacle, where Nevada voters didn’t want the federal government meddling in their healthcare, but Reid voted for it anyway? Instead of getting rid of him (as they should’ve done), they voted him back in because of all the fearmongering the media and DNC did about his opponent. Now he’s got an airport named after him.
And that’s why we can’t have small government advocates. People give lip service to the idea, but in practice, they only care about the outrage of the moment and who’s going to “fix” it.
When I was a young man living in tidewater Maryland area, the County Executive had been in office for many years. His campaigh strategy was basically “I and my family have gotten rich with me running the county gov’t. I want to keep making money, so I will make sure this county has the best roads, schools etc, possible.
Harry’s the poster child for two-faced dealing. He was a vocal supporter of the Yucca Mountain repository for nuclear waste — until it was completed. Then, no way.
You know Yucca Mountain is right by Yucca Flats, where live atom bomb testing was done by the dozen. ‘snot like the repository was in Yellowstone.
Having a department like the DoFYJS would be awesome. I’d love to be an investigator in that department.
But there’s no need for anything so elaborate. All you need to do is cut taxes. No money coming in, government shrinks.
I’m not talking about one of those Reganomics Laffer Curve tax cuts. Those actually -increase- government revenue. I’m talking about the 60% across the board tax cut.
Now, there are two ways for a thing like that to happen. The civilized way is that Americans vote for it. Proper tax cut by Congress. That would be sweet. But it will never, ever happen. The swamp creatures will fight to the death for their free cheese.
The other way is how they did it in Greece. That’s actually pretty likely. The government keeps taking more and more, until people can’t put food on the table. Then all the people quietly stop having traceable income. Everything is done in cash, under the table. There’s still an economy, but it is all black market. The Greek government only exists because the Germans pay for it.
But one way or another, the government will shrink. If you think about it, Let’s Go Brandon may have already done more to reduce government income than Trump and Regan together.
The problem with cutting income without cutting jobs/department outright were illustrated in the sequestration melodrama. They don’t cut jobs, they cut services. In particular, services to make the voters unhappy with the cuts. They also won’t insure that decent performers stay, and instead will fit it into whatever weird rubric of favoritism, back scratching, and deal making is made. There are some legitimate government functions, and the goal of a cut would be to make it more efficient, not put the same petty bureacrats in charge of deciding what is “worthwhile” and not.
Sadly, our congresscritters will be determined to keep spending the same in the face of tax cuts, which will just lead to them charging more on the Gross National Credit Card. I used to hear conservatives express concern about the national debt, but their lip service to it seems to have cooled since Trump became president.
I work for the military as a civilian, and I can vouch for all of the description of government work and get behind the ideas.
For starters, everyone with the words “diversity,” or “inclusion,” or “equity” in their job title are sliced right off on day one. Do you have a discrimination complaint? It’s your boss’ job to make sure that is made right. That’s why they get the bucks.
> Sell the fucking chairs.
BURN the fucking chairs. With gasoline and LOX.
The first couple with their chairwarmers still seated therein.
Pour Encourager Les Autres.
I’m sorry to say, if this was implemented, the DoFYJS would get to protecting the DoFYJS really quick.
“The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then they get elected and prove it.”
– P.J. O’Rourke
Funny story Larry. I commented on one of your tweets and was suspended for my reference to Tanya. My tweet was “ Don’t forget the white trash elves!”
Now i am stuck in limbo, I can’t log into my account to delete the tweet without giving them my phone number. I will not give them my phone number….
Government agency: a jobs program for the otherwise-unemployable.
in my fantasy mage-wage story I have a group called” The Auditors’ who’s only job is to audit the government, and remove (or kill) anyone not doing their job correctly, abusing their power, or embellishing too much (a little graft is one thing, but there are limits)
I came up with them like 10 years ago. great minds think alike
I see you Auditing the government to make it efficient, and I raise you BuSab impeding the government lest it too efficiently trample over everyone.
I am all for this…but they are right. The DOFYJS first employee needs to be a realistically as possible Agent Franks. No qualms…proof against Intimidation….and zero fucks about shooting you when necessary…and free from any and all persecution for said action.
Better yet we get 10…20…50…100 even better (Though we may have to break out Dippel’s notes to get that many) On day 1 we lose about 25% of those needing dealing with…day 2…after the few roaches that got lucky and were not on the daily menu… realize there is indeed a big hairy-assed Bug Zapper…who is not only accurate as all hell…but is quick and efficient…we would get about 40% of them…the rest of the week would be chasing down and squashing said roaches…and the rest of the vermin…but what a week it would be. We could start a lottery..(JOKING HERE!!) DC could become the new monument to absurdity in government and how not to run a country.
Was sort of my proposal to President Trump in regards to the funds to rebuild Seattle and Portland after the riots. I suggested we not rebuild…but memorialize the shear stupidity of the Activist mentality that comes from Liberal types whose “open mindedness” has only accomplished their brains falling out…and not reward the Libtard Fascistas.
It just shows how the truism of the saying, “Make a safecracker a cop…all of the sudden everyone is a safecracker!” You take a rabble of Low Intellectal Liberal Fascists and let them believe the Bernaysian bullshit that they are “Anti-Fascist” Everyone is a Fascist. (Same could be applied to BLM racial supremists…thinking because they are “Anti-Racists” thinking any contradicting…or more inclusives…are racists.)
Maybe we should borrow a page or two out of the MCB guidebook…and really start paying a bounty…..(AGAIN I AM JOKING HERE!!!!)
However…Larry…you have my vote…the wifes as well…and a great number of like minded souls in the Blue Shithole state of Washington.
Can we also institute the Jim Morrison Law?
I call it the Jim Morrison Law because it’s 5 to 1 baby, 1 in 5.
For every new federal law and/or regulation, 5 are removed, cancelled, deleted, nullified.
Each and every bill will have to specify exactly which 5 are to be removed.
Upon passage of the new bill, the 5 would be immediately removed from the US Code, Code of Federal Regulations or whatever other place they’re hidden in.
What Would You Say…You Do Here?
Official motto of DoFYJS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4OvQIGDg4I
Excellent reference to “Office Space”. Don’t forget though, to ask why there are two job efficiency agents needed instead of one ?
Curious if you have read “The Weed Agency” by Jim Geraghty. It deals with a useless government agency, the many attempts of DoFYJS-types to eliminate it, the agency’s attempts to protect itself, and, of course, the long-term survival of the agency despite it completely failing the one time it was actually needed. It’s a bit of a depressing read as you realize that nothing short of a nuclear war is going to get rid of the Weed Agencies, and I’m not even sure that would do it.
“The bureaucratic machinery becomes a juggernaut, rolling over human concerns and welfare with terrible speed, jerking the universe of sentients one way, then another, threatening to destroy everything in a fit of spastic reactions. ”
I always thought that what we really need is Frank Herbert’ Bureau of Sabotage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureau_of_Sabotage
Correia/Wilder 2024
All kidding aside, I’d vote that ticket if there was a reasonable chance y’all could pull it off.
Here, let me make you all madder.
Savannah River Site started something called In-Tank Precipitation ~30 years ago. Million-plus gallon radioactive waste tanks would have sodium tetraphenyl borate added to them to drop heavy metals out of the solution so it could be decanted. Oh, geez, it generates benzene! OMGOMGOMG we can’t DO that. ~$440 million gone.
We HAD to restart at least one 1950s-1960s design reactor to make more nuclear material. We’ll build a cooling tower so we don’t make people mad that we cook the lake built for the purpose, because it has since grown over. Oops, we *don’t* need to start this thing, and the cooling tower has to go, too, even though there’s nothing wrong with it, it’s clean. (It wouldn’t have been for long had it run, since Tritium produced in the processes can’t be confined and would have concentrated in the cooling tower water. This was known!) ~$14M just for the tower, several hundred $mil for starting a reactor selected because the contract with DOE was “cost-plus”.
You may have heard of MOX, where plutonium was going to be reconfigured to be useful as nuclear fuel for power plants (yes, that can be done, it’s actually a trivial problem). The MOX plant changed designs several times and was written off after several $billion. We at other Site facilities wondered if anybody knew what they were processing if they couldn’t even design the plant – and then the Site newspaper came out with the news that the DOE found NOTHING WRONG.
In these and dozens of other cases just at that site, some articulate SOB was able to sell and then DEFEND an atrocious idea because…
…it’s someone else’s money.
Emanuel Goldberg said that the purpose of war is the consumption of human output. Well, if you don’t have a war…
Freedom is that short period between your throwing out invaders and your own government doing the same thing to you.
I forgot something – we can start small.
The Social Security office and the Post Office are open for a grueling 27 hours per week.
Seems to be room for improvement there.
Any hot insider stock trading tips I would immediately post online. That would quickly discourage anyone sending me such things.
Simpler version: cut budgets across the board by 10% per year. Give bonuses to managers who can cut more than that.