Part of the irony is that there really is a lot of efficiency to be gained and money saved from remote (or at least more flexible) work, including from the government. One thing they should be doing is shutting down a lot of the buildings and selling off the property. My company found it was cheaper to maintain a small HQ for meetings and do short term rentals for big training and/or collaboration sessions than to get stuck on a bunch of long term leases.
To the extent there are problems with the federal workforce I think it's more of a management issue, and probably an over protection of employee issue, than anything else.
The backlash from guys like Trump and Musk isn't about discipline or realism, it's a backwards looking cultural thing.
It's going to keep getting worse until the normal parties get serious about immigration. They've got about 3.5 million people in some kind of indefinite status, many from Muslim countries and with no interest in assimilation into the West.
The only way to start dealing with their political crisis is to eliminate their protected status and start repatriating as many as they can, and to stop letting more in. Unfortunately the mainstream parties have gone the other way by trying to ban citizens from even talking about the issue. This has the effect of making AfD appear as brave truth tellers when they're actually shambolic bufoons.
But make no mistake, the way to save democracy and western norms there, here, everywhere is to just take the L on mass, illegal and/or irregular immigration.
It's possible my line of work is such that it's pretty trivial to meet the 'what would you say you do here' minimal level of accountability. If the contracts aren't moving along, or the analysis around whatever question wasn't provided, it would be noticed and noticed fast.
The harder to measure is the long term value of good legal advice and scrivening. What's the worth of 'nothing bad happened'? Of course I will certainly assure you, for the sake of myself and my various creditors, that the services are both real and invaluable!
I've always found this kind of thing to be a strong sign of bad management in the private sector. Everyone knows who works and who doesn't and paranoid micromanagement rarely works out as a long term leadership strategy.
However I will say I guffawed at the insinuation that the feds listing what they did last week would be a threat to national security. I mean it's absolutely a great line but, man, the chutzpah!
I don't think it will be doomed as a profession but I do think it will become a job fewer and fewer people need to do, with the entry level jobs becoming much more scarce. The efficiency I've seen reported from enabling something like copilot is huge, and have been told that the real learning curve for existing coders is to start thinking of themselves as editors rather than writers.
I foresee a lot of legal work going this way over time. It won't hurt the senior folks like me (we will just become even more editors than we often enough already are) but it's will mean less work at the entry level, and fewer people growing into that senior role.
Heh my outsider's perspective is that CO has an interesting, maybe somewhat unique combination of lifestyle appeal and proximity to the left coast that it will remain a magnet for the voters Democrats do really well with.
My question (concern) is what happens if PA starts to follow something like the trajectory of OH. The only bulwark against that is Philadelphia and it's suburbs but I don't see Philly as the same kind of outwardly emanating blue pillar that BOS, NYC or DC are.
The maps thrown around are devastating not just for the presidency but for the senate, govnernorships, and state legislatures. If the GOP is able to continue to tone down its own ambient politics of racial grievance, which like it or not it's getting better at, the Democrats are in for some real pain. College grads are both too few and too concentrated to make up a broad, national base. Conversely, the GOP doesn't have to win racial minorities outright, it just has to get a big enough chunk of their middle and working class to prevent the Democrats from running up the score like they used to be able to.
I think that's a fair rejoinder to the narrow idea that Democrats could do one weird trick to comprehensively change their electoral fortunes. However what's being suggested (by me at least) is the need for a bigger reinvention. It involves jettisoning a lot of bad cultural baggage but that by itself won't be enough.
Bill Clinton and the New Democrats did something like this in the 90s, kicking the party out of the sclerosis and outdated thinking. Trump has partially done it with the GOP, casting off a lot of the zombie Reganism and neoconservatism. His success is limited by the fact that it rests on a cult of personality and is born of the self interest of the Trump family and hangers on rather than a well thought through political project, but there is a willingness in there to go outside the box.
What I don't get, and what boggles my mind, is that suggesting that the Democrats should also be thinking this way gets you called a racist or told that change is not really effective with the implication that no one should ever try it. That all sounds to me less like wisdom and more like a cope for continued failure.
CJ, I'm trying to figure out your thought process on this. Let's put the presidency aside, and take it as a given that we're in a moment where those elections are going to be relatively narrow.
How would you go about trying to compete for the Senate, and for state houses and governorships? Is there any sort of change in strategy or branding you'd consider or is this in your estimation the best they can possibly do? Because that hasn't been going well either.
I appreciate your efforts to try to convince people that the last 10 or 12 years of escalating craziness around identity issues was all a figment of their imagination. When it comes to me I'd say save the pixels.
Saul, many of the people claiming there is a problem voted for Harris. I know I did.
I agree with a lot of your big picture analysis of why Harris lost. What I don't get is why your reaction to other Democrats saying we have a major branding problem is to call them all secret racists and sad pathetic little men.
At a certain point the goal of the party isn't just to narrowly win the presidency it's to get a sizeable enough senate and house majorities to actually do things. Yes Trump is a really big threat right now but the best thing that can be done to check him outside of using the courts is to thump the GOP in the midterms. Are you sure your approach to this subject helps?
Interestingly the modern DEI kayfabe has IMO actually increased risk, especially in an environment with a conservative federal judiciary that one assumes is very ready and willing to hold against companies for discrimination and/or hostile work environment for white people.
I've been in-house long enough to watch the evolution. Back in the day instead of "DEI" it was typical to have something that might be called 'Compliance' or 'Code of Conduct' training. This would include insights like 'don't sing rap lyrics with profanity or racial slurs in the break room' and 'do not offer members of your staff a promotion in exchange for sexual favors' kind of stuff. People would often groan about this too for various reasons but it was all generally consistent with what the law is. While stuff like this was never going to be determinative in a lawsuit the consensus was its better to have it than not for CYA purposes. At a certain point a lot of the risk conversation ends up being about not wanting to be seen as an outlier when the inevitable claim occurs.
That's all very different though from the idea that companies are going to establish highly race conscious hiring practices, set up a bunch of identity based affinity groups, or worst of all bring in some Robin DiAngelo (or whoever) acolyte to confront your work force in live sessions and/or create really aggressive training materials.
From a risk perspective it's gone from mild CYA to just begging to be sued.
A good HR department can have useful compliance and administrative functions (think benefit management). I think what happens in a lot of places is they assume a 'create the culture' kind of function and do a bunch of stuff antithetical to their actual mission, which is protect the business.
I am sure everyone is tired of my opinion on the subject but whatever.
To me a lot of this circles back to the mission of the Democratic party. Does anyone know what it is anymore? Historically I always thought of it as stuff like protecting the commons, standing up for the rights of the little guy against larger social and economic forces, and ensuring the state acts as a check against poverty and inequality through various social democratic lite programs and entitlements.* Oh and usually an overall more sensible foreign and fiscal policy, at least over the lasf 25-30 years.
The question moving forward is whether that stuff (maybe modified for the 21st century) still matters or if it's endlessly indulging and implementing the sensibilities of people deeply ensconsed in academic and NGO culture. I'd like to recover something like the former, but I suppose time will tell.
*Obviously there have always been tensions, inconsistencies, and hypocrisy, that just makes them a normal American political party.
Heh, sanctimonious rage? The tone was intended as constructive and friendly.
Anyway accusing anyone of sanctimony is pretty rich coming from a guy who down below is speaking approvingly about the Pope just because of a single point you agree with, as if you actually care what the Holy See says about anything generally.
Also not sure what you mean by 'gain advantage.' Maybe you'll be more specific. But the reality is that women now outnumber men in college by about 10%, and are outpacing them on virtually every educational achievement metric. Plenty of high earning, high prestige professions like medicine and law (my profession) are close to female dominated and based on pipeline will be even moreso over the next generation or two. I don't have any problem with this in principle. So rest assured, all the opportunity is there for them, and there's no need for these official anf quasi official discrimination games.
I was going to make a joke about trying to fit a halberd in an SUV but according to Wikipedia sig sauer firearms would be a fully authentic representation.
I don't think any of is likely to turn out well. I've never voted for Trump or any Republican for president. If I have to cop to anything it's voting for Larry Hogan twice for governor in a context where Democrats would hold legislative super majorities.
Here is what I'd offer as food for thought from someone who still votes D but probably has some big disagreements on a handful of cultural issues.
1. I think the ability to do the kinds of really good things the government can do rests in large part on the government being, on balance, effective and responsible. Not perfect mind you, because nothing is perfect. But it does need to operate from an understanding that it's going to have to work really hard, and be really good, to get credit, and that a relatively small amount of idiocy is going to be weighed (at times grossly) disproportionately against it.
2. I think the Democratic party and the progressive permanent bureaucracy, and its auxillaries in education, corporate HR, and influential NGO spaces, desperately want to be able to discriminate against my sons based on race and sex. Your own comments here at times suggest you'd be comfortable with that too. I don't think any progeny of mine ought to be given unfair advantage (as if my glorious genes aren't enough- kidding) but I'm never going to be on board with a system like that. Neither are a lot of people, including, increasingly, the people who are nominally supposed to benefit from it.
Now at the end of the day I vote based on the fact that I think the greater evil is, for example, to (pretend to but not actually) balance the federal budget on the backs of health insurance that mainly helps poor women and children. And thats to say nothing of putting ignorant yahoos in charge. It's like trying to solve a problem by giving a monkey a hand grenade. However as long as the Democrats and progressive bureaucracies are steeped in this stuff it will be asking for many, many people ro swallow a bitter and bordering on poisonous pill.
Hungary is a unitary parliament system which makes it a lot easier to totally take over. I think Trump is going to leave a mess of smoking craters and ruins, kind of like a half-as*ed renovation job that never got passed or even completed the demolition stage.
Unlike you I wouldn't call myself an internationalist but I am a kind of realist that sees the upside to self interested noblesse oblige and non-zero sum thinking where the opportunities present themselves.
It seems to me that the core failure is that of America's outward looking organizations, from the aid agencies, to the spooks, to even the military itself to exercise some basic judgment and self auditing. It's clear to me that DOGE (to say nothing of Trump himself) is completely Twitter brained. The reason this stuff is on the radar is because it's become so easy to meme-ify the various idiotic-to-disastrous things these organizations do. Bottom line is if we want PEPFAR (and to be clear, I want PEPFAR) we need to be able to say no to DEI in Serbia or promoting gay or trans or whatever comic book characters for Peru's department of education, and wherever else.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/24/2025”
Part of the irony is that there really is a lot of efficiency to be gained and money saved from remote (or at least more flexible) work, including from the government. One thing they should be doing is shutting down a lot of the buildings and selling off the property. My company found it was cheaper to maintain a small HQ for meetings and do short term rentals for big training and/or collaboration sessions than to get stuck on a bunch of long term leases.
To the extent there are problems with the federal workforce I think it's more of a management issue, and probably an over protection of employee issue, than anything else.
The backlash from guys like Trump and Musk isn't about discipline or realism, it's a backwards looking cultural thing.
"
It's going to keep getting worse until the normal parties get serious about immigration. They've got about 3.5 million people in some kind of indefinite status, many from Muslim countries and with no interest in assimilation into the West.
The only way to start dealing with their political crisis is to eliminate their protected status and start repatriating as many as they can, and to stop letting more in. Unfortunately the mainstream parties have gone the other way by trying to ban citizens from even talking about the issue. This has the effect of making AfD appear as brave truth tellers when they're actually shambolic bufoons.
But make no mistake, the way to save democracy and western norms there, here, everywhere is to just take the L on mass, illegal and/or irregular immigration.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/17/2025”
It's possible my line of work is such that it's pretty trivial to meet the 'what would you say you do here' minimal level of accountability. If the contracts aren't moving along, or the analysis around whatever question wasn't provided, it would be noticed and noticed fast.
The harder to measure is the long term value of good legal advice and scrivening. What's the worth of 'nothing bad happened'? Of course I will certainly assure you, for the sake of myself and my various creditors, that the services are both real and invaluable!
"
I've always found this kind of thing to be a strong sign of bad management in the private sector. Everyone knows who works and who doesn't and paranoid micromanagement rarely works out as a long term leadership strategy.
However I will say I guffawed at the insinuation that the feds listing what they did last week would be a threat to national security. I mean it's absolutely a great line but, man, the chutzpah!
"
I don't think it will be doomed as a profession but I do think it will become a job fewer and fewer people need to do, with the entry level jobs becoming much more scarce. The efficiency I've seen reported from enabling something like copilot is huge, and have been told that the real learning curve for existing coders is to start thinking of themselves as editors rather than writers.
I foresee a lot of legal work going this way over time. It won't hurt the senior folks like me (we will just become even more editors than we often enough already are) but it's will mean less work at the entry level, and fewer people growing into that senior role.
"
Heh my outsider's perspective is that CO has an interesting, maybe somewhat unique combination of lifestyle appeal and proximity to the left coast that it will remain a magnet for the voters Democrats do really well with.
My question (concern) is what happens if PA starts to follow something like the trajectory of OH. The only bulwark against that is Philadelphia and it's suburbs but I don't see Philly as the same kind of outwardly emanating blue pillar that BOS, NYC or DC are.
"
To me the even more important piece than Barro on DEI is this one from Texiera.
https://www.liberalpatriot.com/p/one-simple-question-for-democrats
The maps thrown around are devastating not just for the presidency but for the senate, govnernorships, and state legislatures. If the GOP is able to continue to tone down its own ambient politics of racial grievance, which like it or not it's getting better at, the Democrats are in for some real pain. College grads are both too few and too concentrated to make up a broad, national base. Conversely, the GOP doesn't have to win racial minorities outright, it just has to get a big enough chunk of their middle and working class to prevent the Democrats from running up the score like they used to be able to.
"
I think that's a fair rejoinder to the narrow idea that Democrats could do one weird trick to comprehensively change their electoral fortunes. However what's being suggested (by me at least) is the need for a bigger reinvention. It involves jettisoning a lot of bad cultural baggage but that by itself won't be enough.
Bill Clinton and the New Democrats did something like this in the 90s, kicking the party out of the sclerosis and outdated thinking. Trump has partially done it with the GOP, casting off a lot of the zombie Reganism and neoconservatism. His success is limited by the fact that it rests on a cult of personality and is born of the self interest of the Trump family and hangers on rather than a well thought through political project, but there is a willingness in there to go outside the box.
What I don't get, and what boggles my mind, is that suggesting that the Democrats should also be thinking this way gets you called a racist or told that change is not really effective with the implication that no one should ever try it. That all sounds to me less like wisdom and more like a cope for continued failure.
"
CJ, I'm trying to figure out your thought process on this. Let's put the presidency aside, and take it as a given that we're in a moment where those elections are going to be relatively narrow.
How would you go about trying to compete for the Senate, and for state houses and governorships? Is there any sort of change in strategy or branding you'd consider or is this in your estimation the best they can possibly do? Because that hasn't been going well either.
"
I appreciate your efforts to try to convince people that the last 10 or 12 years of escalating craziness around identity issues was all a figment of their imagination. When it comes to me I'd say save the pixels.
"
Saul, many of the people claiming there is a problem voted for Harris. I know I did.
I agree with a lot of your big picture analysis of why Harris lost. What I don't get is why your reaction to other Democrats saying we have a major branding problem is to call them all secret racists and sad pathetic little men.
At a certain point the goal of the party isn't just to narrowly win the presidency it's to get a sizeable enough senate and house majorities to actually do things. Yes Trump is a really big threat right now but the best thing that can be done to check him outside of using the courts is to thump the GOP in the midterms. Are you sure your approach to this subject helps?
"
Interestingly the modern DEI kayfabe has IMO actually increased risk, especially in an environment with a conservative federal judiciary that one assumes is very ready and willing to hold against companies for discrimination and/or hostile work environment for white people.
I've been in-house long enough to watch the evolution. Back in the day instead of "DEI" it was typical to have something that might be called 'Compliance' or 'Code of Conduct' training. This would include insights like 'don't sing rap lyrics with profanity or racial slurs in the break room' and 'do not offer members of your staff a promotion in exchange for sexual favors' kind of stuff. People would often groan about this too for various reasons but it was all generally consistent with what the law is. While stuff like this was never going to be determinative in a lawsuit the consensus was its better to have it than not for CYA purposes. At a certain point a lot of the risk conversation ends up being about not wanting to be seen as an outlier when the inevitable claim occurs.
That's all very different though from the idea that companies are going to establish highly race conscious hiring practices, set up a bunch of identity based affinity groups, or worst of all bring in some Robin DiAngelo (or whoever) acolyte to confront your work force in live sessions and/or create really aggressive training materials.
From a risk perspective it's gone from mild CYA to just begging to be sued.
"
I wish it was that easy.
"
A good HR department can have useful compliance and administrative functions (think benefit management). I think what happens in a lot of places is they assume a 'create the culture' kind of function and do a bunch of stuff antithetical to their actual mission, which is protect the business.
"
What is the mission, or the vision or what have you?
Stop Trump for sure. But what else?
"
I am sure everyone is tired of my opinion on the subject but whatever.
To me a lot of this circles back to the mission of the Democratic party. Does anyone know what it is anymore? Historically I always thought of it as stuff like protecting the commons, standing up for the rights of the little guy against larger social and economic forces, and ensuring the state acts as a check against poverty and inequality through various social democratic lite programs and entitlements.* Oh and usually an overall more sensible foreign and fiscal policy, at least over the lasf 25-30 years.
The question moving forward is whether that stuff (maybe modified for the 21st century) still matters or if it's endlessly indulging and implementing the sensibilities of people deeply ensconsed in academic and NGO culture. I'd like to recover something like the former, but I suppose time will tell.
*Obviously there have always been tensions, inconsistencies, and hypocrisy, that just makes them a normal American political party.
"
If Angela Merkel were still chancellor the whole thing would solve itself.
"
Yea, it is definitely not for everyone. Which is maybe good or maybe just also consistent with the dystopian implications of such a business.
"
Heh, sanctimonious rage? The tone was intended as constructive and friendly.
Anyway accusing anyone of sanctimony is pretty rich coming from a guy who down below is speaking approvingly about the Pope just because of a single point you agree with, as if you actually care what the Holy See says about anything generally.
Also not sure what you mean by 'gain advantage.' Maybe you'll be more specific. But the reality is that women now outnumber men in college by about 10%, and are outpacing them on virtually every educational achievement metric. Plenty of high earning, high prestige professions like medicine and law (my profession) are close to female dominated and based on pipeline will be even moreso over the next generation or two. I don't have any problem with this in principle. So rest assured, all the opportunity is there for them, and there's no need for these official anf quasi official discrimination games.
"
I was going to make a joke about trying to fit a halberd in an SUV but according to Wikipedia sig sauer firearms would be a fully authentic representation.
"
I don't think any of is likely to turn out well. I've never voted for Trump or any Republican for president. If I have to cop to anything it's voting for Larry Hogan twice for governor in a context where Democrats would hold legislative super majorities.
Here is what I'd offer as food for thought from someone who still votes D but probably has some big disagreements on a handful of cultural issues.
1. I think the ability to do the kinds of really good things the government can do rests in large part on the government being, on balance, effective and responsible. Not perfect mind you, because nothing is perfect. But it does need to operate from an understanding that it's going to have to work really hard, and be really good, to get credit, and that a relatively small amount of idiocy is going to be weighed (at times grossly) disproportionately against it.
2. I think the Democratic party and the progressive permanent bureaucracy, and its auxillaries in education, corporate HR, and influential NGO spaces, desperately want to be able to discriminate against my sons based on race and sex. Your own comments here at times suggest you'd be comfortable with that too. I don't think any progeny of mine ought to be given unfair advantage (as if my glorious genes aren't enough- kidding) but I'm never going to be on board with a system like that. Neither are a lot of people, including, increasingly, the people who are nominally supposed to benefit from it.
Now at the end of the day I vote based on the fact that I think the greater evil is, for example, to (pretend to but not actually) balance the federal budget on the backs of health insurance that mainly helps poor women and children. And thats to say nothing of putting ignorant yahoos in charge. It's like trying to solve a problem by giving a monkey a hand grenade. However as long as the Democrats and progressive bureaucracies are steeped in this stuff it will be asking for many, many people ro swallow a bitter and bordering on poisonous pill.
"
Hungary is a unitary parliament system which makes it a lot easier to totally take over. I think Trump is going to leave a mess of smoking craters and ruins, kind of like a half-as*ed renovation job that never got passed or even completed the demolition stage.
Unlike you I wouldn't call myself an internationalist but I am a kind of realist that sees the upside to self interested noblesse oblige and non-zero sum thinking where the opportunities present themselves.
It seems to me that the core failure is that of America's outward looking organizations, from the aid agencies, to the spooks, to even the military itself to exercise some basic judgment and self auditing. It's clear to me that DOGE (to say nothing of Trump himself) is completely Twitter brained. The reason this stuff is on the radar is because it's become so easy to meme-ify the various idiotic-to-disastrous things these organizations do. Bottom line is if we want PEPFAR (and to be clear, I want PEPFAR) we need to be able to say no to DEI in Serbia or promoting gay or trans or whatever comic book characters for Peru's department of education, and wherever else.
"
Autocorrect fail. Obviously I meant NYP but know better than go edit a comment with a link.
"
All paths lead to someone in prison, just a question of how much excitement we have along the way.
"
NYT has more details.
https://nypost.com/2025/02/15/us-news/new-app-offers-personal-bodyguards-and-private-motorcades-on-demand-in-nyc/
Apparently you can specify your security details style of attire. Options include 'business tactical.'
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.