US Forest Service firings decimate already understaffed agency

Side note: Call me a treehugger but the use of the word "unimproved" to refer to the last remaining shreds of wildlife not yet paved over and replaced with Starbucks strikes me as the most dystopian fucking shit.

The large swaths of seldom-used private land in the US really grind my gears. It’s the perfect example of the “I’ve got mine” mentality that a lot of Americans have.

Visiting Europe, where most private land has access ways (and I believe laws regarding shared use, in some cases) gives feelings of respect towards both neighbors and the earth, which should (in my and woodie guthrie’s opinion, at least) be a shared experience.

I’m not sure if it’s at all related to the first point, but in America, it would probably be more common for visitors (or ‘trespassers’) to leave someone else’s land worse than they found it (when compared to the shared respect generally found in Europe). Speaking in broad strokes, of course.

Looks like MGL c. 266, § 120 is the source here. It does say that as long as the land is "improved or enclosed" and has signs posted, you still can't trespass. It's unclear to me if "improved or enclosed" is meant to be exhaustive or is illustrative -- I think that in effect, this would come down to the court's interpretation.

https://malegislature.gov/laws/generallaws/partiv/titlei/cha...

Can you point to a source for your belief? Maybe I'm misinterpreting you, but it seems legally improbable.

How are people supposed to access the national forests if there aren’t roads? I’d rather loggers do their thing deep in the forest so the areas that are popular can continue to be wild. We all know logging isn’t going to stop anytime soon

That is a gross mischaracterization of what the USFS does.

It's a great place to visit but you wouldn't necessarily want to live there.

Thinking about comparable situations in Scotland, you can get a rural property cheaply, or even a spare castle, but .. that's not where the jobs are, that's not where people's friends or social scenes are, there's no shops, and often the weather isn't on your side. What people want is parks as an amenity they can visit. I suppose they'll be privatized and people will be charged to visit them.

    They took all the trees and put 'em in a tree museum
    And they charged the people a dollar and a half to see them
    -- Joni Mitchell

So then the only people who get to enjoy nature are those who can afford to pay for it...

Nature has to be _preserved_ if it is to be enjoyed by all.

Yep and don't forget ranching. Cattle graze on nearly all public land out west for practically free.

It's very much not a "false" accusation, it is an real accusation and i'm not hiding it?

Unless i misunderstood english (which is very much possible), saying "my pet theory" is equivalent to saying "i'm inclined to believe", i.e not a belief i hold strongly, but a belief nonetheless?

I don't see what is hidden, is it how i turned my sentence that bothered you? Was it bad english (which is totally possible, i'm not a native speaker)? Or you disagreed with it, and you chose to do moral criticism rather than criticize the logic?

The farmers voted for this AFTER Trump's first term left them fucked from retaliatory tariffs.

Hopefully saner minds prevail before that happens.

I mean I'm not confident they will, but it'd be nice.

They are trying to completely destroy the federal government. These departments will start spiraling down the drain, and essential services will begin to fall apart. These people are literally looking to destroy our government from within. Good luck, America, this is what you voted for, you gorgeous morons.

AFAIK, this affected probationary employees of all or most agencies. So I’m not sure how this argument makes sense as something the Forest Service did wrong or could have prevented.

Also, the government should be efficient but shouldn’t be required to break even or profit… it’s a public good.

That argument only makes sense if you don't know how government spending works or what the top-down direction was.

Agencies generally aren't just given a big sack of money to do whatever with. It's allocated for specific types of things in specific amounts, and in particular, employee pay is separate from other things and governed mostly by a given number of employee slots rather than a specific dollar amount. The forest service couldn't save those jobs by just shifting funding from, say, vehicle purchases without much higher level approval.

It doesn't really matter though because the direction to the forest service and everyone else wasn't "reduce your budget by $Y". It was "fire all your new employees immediately". There was no opportunity for the forest service to "better manage its finances". I think giving the forest service and other agencies time and flexibility to figure out how to be more efficient based on specific domain knowledge is a fantastic idea. Even if that ultimately did lead to layoffs, at least it would be an informed decision. That's not at all what's happening, and whatever excuses proponents of this approach come up with, firing people like the woman in the article is exactly what was expected.

There's very little evidence that actual financial mismanagement determined what departments were targeted for layoffs so far. They might say that's why they're doing it, but are tight lipped with any evidence to support it. From the outside, it seems like they just want to cut as many federal jobs as they can get away with without consideration for the impacts because they want to destroy the administrative state and maybe privatize its functions.

They don’t get to decide that. They are paid by the federal government, any revenue they get goes back to the federal government. Trump/Musk are laying off federal workers regardless of how much revenue they bring in, or if their jobs are self sustaining or even profitable based on the fees they bring in. For example, he laid medical equipment inspector whose jobs are completely paid for by fees.

government agencies sometimes operate at a loss. that's fine - as citizens of a functioning society, we pay taxes to maintain services which improve shared, public life.

According to recent executive orders, it looks like there are plans to sell to overseas interests, but only those who would be able to pay much more than states or domestic entities.

Seems like Trump is setting himself up to sell to the highest bidder on a case-by-case basis, according to which foreign parties he likes at the time, with no opportunity at all for any that make him whine.

House costs are close to nothing for a billionaire. And for the billionaires who are breaking the country's bones so they can shape everything to fit their interests the payoff is so great that a house (or 1000) is nothing.

Their "house"? Their ""insurance policy""?

Do you know what a billionaire *is*?

What?

Why were they wrong?

The theory expresses by an slim state that does only a few things, but does not interfere with businesses. "Trickle-down" is one "theory" of theirs: if you give money to the rich, directly or reducing taxes, the money lands in the end at the poor, but this "theory" has been disproven so often that you can't call it a theory anymore.

Neocons is the more common phrasing. Chicago school economics style policy (eg Milton Friedman), use of military force to police world, etc.

"Neoliberalism" is Reaganomics, a series of beliefs about the world:

* The government is generally the problem [with our economy], not the solution to our [economic] problems.

* Low taxes, low regulation, and low barriers to trade favor positive-sum economic development.

* The market will perform most regulatory tasks for us out of enlightened self interest.

* Ricardian specialization in international trade is to the benefit of all.

* Money made by the wealthy will trickle down to everyone else's quality of life.

* The Laffer Curve is self evident and we are self-evidently always on the right side of it; Cutting taxes will increase receipts.

Conservatism is highly compatible with this worldview, but it was embraced by liberals as well after the country re-elected Reagan in a landslide. Clinton's "Third Way" portrayed itself as an alternative to traditional Republican and Democratic concerns that was socially progressive but promoted a slightly softened version of this economic theory. Some version of or equivalent to the Third Way has basically been in control of the Democratic party ever since due to its superior ability to fundraise for campaigns, due to the slow death of the labor movement, and due to the death of the dream of international communism among fringe intellectuals.

In an attempt to differentiate itself, conservatives tilted hard, hard right on social politics (if not always policy), and brought the economic policies to an extreme that would have been nonsensical a generation earlier.

Most people who didn't spend the last two or three decades living off of returns on their investments, have been frustrated with the failed promises of neoliberalism, and it is losing traction with liberals; Or rather, [neo]liberals are losing traction with the electorate.

Neoliberalism is an economic theory embraced by both parties (and globally really), and have been since the oil crisis during Carter. It can be confused with liberalism the political theory, but it's different. Each US political party has a slightly different flavor, but economically it's the same. It's good from a macroeconomic perspective and a strategic perspective, but eliminating trade barriers allows US companies to outsource labor to poorer countries at the expense of US workers for lower prices (in a nutshell). Think Apple in China, Tata, US manufacturing in Mexico, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism#United_States

I assume neoliberal conservatives are the conservatives who embrace neoliberalism, but both parties have embraced it for generations. We seem to be rolling it back somewhat since the main strategic benefit (containing the Soviet Union) is no longer as relevant (until recently I suppose).