GSA Eliminates 18F

>It doesn't mean anything.

It certainly means something in context, seeing as virtually everyone in the civil service has been painted with this same brush regardless of whether the term's use is correct or not.

> "bureaucrat" is a pejorative

> "bureaucrat" doesn't mean anything

These two sentences appear to be contradictory.

> It doesn't mean anything.

Language is everything. Are they a government workers or are they a bureaucrats? Deep state operatives or public servants? All of these words could describe someone who works for 18F.

18F workers are public servants, some of the best in the government, but by calling them bureaucrats, it makes their work seem inefficient and their removal seem logical.

Accepting the word chosen for the conversation determines what actions are acceptable. Protestors or rioters? Freedom fighter or terrorist? Peacekeeper or occupying force? Security or surveillance? Whistleblower or leaker? Regulation or Red Tape? Tax or Theft? Patriot or nationalist? Socialism, Marxism, or communism?

Peace (justice) or peace (submission)? Woke (generational injustice) or woke (any leftist idea I don’t like)?

It's precisely because these words have exact meanings, that they are so insidious. Many end up becoming shibboleths, dividing us vs them.

There are companies, PR firms, private intelligence, and think tanks that A/B test words and ideas in order to create the right metaphorical context to get people to submit to a certain framing.

A good read on the general topic of control via metaphorical framing:

https://commonslibrary.org/frame-the-debate-insights-from-do...

Gary Stevenson is one of the strongest rising voices on what the wealthy have been doing to the working and middle classes over the last decades (under parties of both sides in both the UK and the US), a trend being rapidly accelerated under the current US administration.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/3331 The agenda of the president does not matter

Well, Checks come from the Check Republic. A region and culture that has had its own trials and tribulations in the past century, getting over taken and reformed a few times.

Balances, on the other hand, were from old lost Balancing Empire. This was really just a stubborn remnant of the Roman Empire that didn't want to admit the party was over.

Together, the refrain "Checks and Balances" is normally to remind us of our ambiguous and ephemeral place in history. Are we hardy folk like the Checks who will remain even as the political landscape changes? Or are we Balances left twisting in the wind?

Then, I think the earlier poster was expressing his own sense of loss in proclaiming there aren't even Checks anymore. It's no longer ambiguous, we are un-Checked and out of Balance.

It's not our job to educate fascists, crack a book.

They are either deceptive or incredibly incompentent. There is no burden to any industry in giving the American taxpayer a free and authoritative easy way to file. Similarly, firing so many FDIC inspectors saves nothing, they are paid by the banks not the government.

I'm going with deceptive.

But 18f? They've been one of the most visible streamliners of government bureaucracy we've seen.

Yes, that is the goal, but not quite how they sell it.

The sell is to individuals to get their votes, not corporations (who of course are on board, but cannot vote), and more amorphous for not being above board. About how people's hardship are being caused by "enemies" who must be punished. Thus the "cruelty is the point" observation.

Simply stating their goal, "the hyper rich feel too fettered, with respect to the rights/safety/wellbeing of individuals", would fail for being overly direct and honest.

(I have no doubt there is governmental waste. But their behavior is not consistent with doing the work of identifying and eliminating waste. Waste elmination here is a side effect (that can be pointed to) of mass elmination independent of waste.)

You're a zealot or incapable of cognitively understanding what the words mean.

Dissolving agencies is easy. Push the legislation through congress. The republicans hold control of the legislature, have the ability to blackmail their caucus through the oligarchs, and have a supreme court that has dropped all pretense of legitimacy.

The budget bill devastates things like Medicaid, but doesn't dissolve the department of education.

How is that incorrect? They're deliberately being cruel to government employees so they quit and the agencies are de facto dissolved.

Cruelty and profit or it isn’t capitalism

Digressing a bit: is there any correlation between Bangaldeshi-Americans preferences in US politics (Democrats vs GOP) and their preferences in Bangladeshi politics (Awami League vs BNP vs Yunus)? Or are those largely orthogonal dimensions?

This is a very one-sided take, you should ask people on the street of any Russian city what they think of Gorbachev and his policies. I agree with GP with one exception: Gorbachev probably thought he was doing good things for his nation and the actual consequences were unintentional. Probably less so in this case, but I have no desire to tell Americans how to operate their country, so pay no attention to me.

Snyder has a great talk at a conference where he talks about how the liberalization of Russia was a move towards the west, but they did it without a fundamental ingredient -- Rule of Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_law).

So Russia was effectively cargo culting the idea of capitalism and democracy. They did things that looked right, but because they didn't understand a core principle, Rule of Law, they did not get democracy or capitalism. Instead opportunists attained all of the once governmentally owned assets, and then used their levels of wealth gained to consolidate their own power, leaving Russia in the current mafia state/oligarchy it is in.

I wish I could find it for you, but it's kind of painful to search for videos based on semantic information.

Snyder's US centric video on rule of law, was not only prescient, but it builds some of the scaffolding needed to understand just how bad everything is right now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6fpu_9S31c

Why? Because I've seen Propublica cherry pick quotes before and taken them entirely out of context?

The media has been lying to us for decades and no, I don't take them at their word, especially when they share a clip that removes all context.

The most important task now is for every civil servant and citizen to maintain a paper trail on what they can.

So that when this gets litigated, everyone who broke the law is convicted.

I’m not sure why the downvotes are here - tax breaks and rebates are likely going to be part of Republican spending outlines going forward, damn the deficit.

> The super rich don’t really pay taxes,

No.

They often pay FAR less than an average person as a percentage, often times paying nothing for a year.

In total amounts - most of them are still paying millions in taxes per year - most of them end up paying tens if not hundreds of millions in taxes over their lifetimes.

Thanks, term I'd never heard of. Usually think of that in terms of an "oligarchy" or "plutocracy".

And as an added benefit it sounds a lot like "corpsocracy" with the "corp" and a country that's a "corpse" animated by "corps." That uses their military "corps" to exert control. Insurance company with a military.

No, absolutely wrong.

Neoliberalism is about a big, functional government that is utopian and takes care of everything for you.

"You own nothing, and you'll be happy."

You can argue in practice it's terrible (subjective, no one really cares about your opinion). But it's hard to argue its GOAL is to be small.

She wasn't working as a government advisor until a few days ago. She was doing this in her spare time, for free. Or rather for negative amounts of money, since she was paying her own AWS fees. Her husband (who is not involved at all) was also doxxed.

Sadly, the last art of that MO is “…knowing that if you do fuck something up critical, that other people will point out your mistakes, so you have no incentive to actually be right in the first place”.

This comment would land a lot harder if you actually mentioned any specifics.

Also seems to be unaware of the fact that NGO's are usually soft-power. They are either carrots or sticks in diplomacy or a cover for IC.

Are you sure the question wouldn’t be “why don’t they just take it out at payroll like they did before $RIGHT_WINGER did this, that would be more efficient and save everyone time like every other country in the world?”

No.

Taxes are in hindsight so you've already made whatever donations you did by the time you paid taxes.

Donations either lower your tax bill or have no effect on it. So, by not filling taxes (_and getting caught_) you're just increasing your tax bill.

Are you saying the only way that citizens are informed of the current tax rates is through price tags?

Even in countries where price tags must include VAT/GST, the exact tax content is usually broken down as a line item on invoices and receipts. Best of both worlds.

I mean, it's both. Intuit gives money to representatives that ideologically dislike taxes, and therefore WANT it to be a horrible experience so that you'll go along with getting rid of it (which Intuit knows will never actually happen).

Both parts are true. The goal as a whole:

  * Eliminate all taxes
  * Eliminate all regulations
  * Use the government for financial gain (by the "right people")
  * Use the government to oppress all "others" (those who are not white christian men)
  * Crown a king and ensure that crown stays within their select group

Taxes aren’t hard but people have been encouraged to talk about it like it’s a colonoscopy by Roto-rooter. Someone can have all W-2 income and only take the standard deduction, but thanks to that messaging they’ll act like filing your own taxes is incredibly dangerous with a high chance of ruining you for life (I know someone whose parent worked for the IRS as an auditor and they noted that many people ended up neutral or even getting a refund because an audit for someone who wasn’t trying to cheat would usually find deductions that they hadn’t claimed).

That’s not accidental: the rich have been funding anti-tax messaging since the introduction of the income tax, and it’s heavily promoted by the media voices they fund. The tax preparation industry is similarly biased since it’s with so profitable for the median voter to think that they need to pay hundreds of dollars every year to fill out a couple of forms.

You know how everyone complains "oh I can't do anything this weekend I have to do my taxes"? They want that pain, so that you bitch and moan about the heavy burden of taxation, and then support the party that claims they want to reduce the heavy burden of taxation.

But also, Intuit spends a lot money lobbying.

My friend owned a tax preparation place for awhile. Half her clients could file with the short form. Most of the rest had either dependent care deductions or EIC, that's it. <5% used deductions beyond SALT and mortgage interest. It's a gross business. They charge people for being ignorant and dumb with money (via refund loans)

Hell, I have a fairly complex return. It takes me <90 minutes with a $40 software package.

who, exactly, is in control of independent agencies if Congress never corrects their power and the Executive isn't in charge?

For example: the perennial fight over "net neutrality" was because Congress absconded their duty to write regulation and handed it off to the Executive to figure out in a vague way that allowed for flip flopping policies with the force of law every time the administration changed.

You know what would stop the Executive power grab currently happening? If Congress would do their damn jobs. The Republicans in Congress are more to blame for this mess than the White House. This is supposed to be their power that they are just sitting and watching get taken away.

But the Democrats aren't guiltless either. People who care about this sort of thing have been complaining for decades, right through Democrat majorities and administrations. They had plenty of chances. The whole beltway fucking sucks and we are so cooked.

I don't see any evidence that 18F was any more "far-left" than tech workers on average.

>The "anti-woke" crusaders are honestly more unbearable than any social justice warrior type I've met because they will not shut up about it and it colors their whole life.

I'm the complete opposite. Swap "anti-woke" with "social justice warrior" and you have my experience across multiple years, both inside and outside of companies.

As far as I can tell all these groups never shut up and it colors their entire life. Far left and far right is just a circle, the join at the same extreme.

What we need is a center. Just stuff that makes sense. The problem is our "sense" has been under attack we've basically collectively lost it.

And after it happens let's keep filing for free.

And to remove anybody not blindly obedient.

Paradoxically this is a real witch hunt

You have to get rid of the technically literate internal competition if you want an oversight free monopoly.

I do wonder just how large a revenue boost a lot of news outlets saw during the first Trump administration, and how much that played into how weirdly favorably they treated him in this campaign.

The NYT had 3 straight weeks of breathless Biden is too old front-page headlines based on speculation and tenuous connections. Trumps equivalent actions/incoherence which could be interpreted in as an age-related decline were being continually "sanewashed". Further, all concerns about an old president suddenly vanished when Biden dropped out, even though Trump will be older than Biden was by the end of Trump's term.

Yeah I’m plenty critical of the NYT myself (esp. in their last month of coverage), but they do ostensibly cover any big news story, including the ones about Trump. Re:fascism, I specifically remember them covering the “I need generals like Hitler had” comment, to pick a memorable example.

While we’re at it, they even endorsed Harris as an institution, writing;

  “This unequivocal, dispiriting truth — Donald Trump is not fit to be president — should be enough for any voter who cares about the health of our country and the stability of our democracy to deny him re-election,”

Nobody knows what is going to happen in four years. That includes you.

You technically have a point, even Russia has elections. But that doesn’t matter because they are just for show.

In US you generally gerrymander to the max or throw all sorts of road blocks to discourage voter participation, but we might also see more physical harassment going forward, both for voters and poll workers.

Which is odd — all the YC startups likely have another talented pool of eager engineers to likely hire. Or they probably think they’ll just be replacing engineers with angentic ones (sic).

What do you mean? There are several special elections happening April 1. New Jersey and Virginia have governor elections this November. Mid-terms in every state next November. These elections, like all elections, are run by states, not the federal government. Which ones do you think are not going to happen?

Hopelessness is their tool, not ours.

Apathy and nihilism are unproductive, even if current outcomes are bad. Without hope, there is no motivation for change. Act. Do. Vote. Volunteer.

There will be election... But how?

- how many free media? - will the queues be longer in some places? - will Trump have money from all the big companies? - Will some people have accidents?

Even Russia, Cuba and North Korea celebrate elections

We sure as shit are or there will be civil conflict. Period.