6 ms·

Yes, and here's some nuance: based on my experience, the majority of the people in the bureaucracy want it to be more efficient. To effect cuts, you can either

Yes, and here's some nuance: based on my experience, the majority of the people in the bureaucracy want it to be more efficient. To effect cuts, you can either cut the budget without improving efficiency, leading to a loss of scope (which is what the current administration is doing, and is not great), or you can keep your scope while improving your efficiency such that you don't need as much money, which is vastly preferable. Those in the general public who thinks that government budgets should increase monotonically are a linear combination between total idiots and outright politically malicious.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
bratbag 1y ago
The majority of obese people want to be thin, but will die obese anyway. Just wanting something that requires a significant overhaul of how you do things, is not enough.
- paddleon 1y ago
  better analogy: the majority of fouix-gras birds would prefer not to be force-fed and caged. The people working in the bureaucracy do not have the authority to overhaul it.
  - parineum 1y ago
    The people working in the bureaucracy chose to be there. Bureaucracies self select for people that are okay with it. I'm sure there's a few who are there to change it from the inside but they are the exception. You're not going to find a lot of vegans working in a meat packing plant.
    - wizzwizz4 1y ago
      But you are going to find vegans working in a slaughterhouse. Some people prioritise pragmatism over ideological purity. (See https://our-compass.org/2020/06/15/i-worked-undercover-inside-a-slaughterhouse/ https://our-compass.org/2020/06/15/i-worked-undercover-insid... and parts of https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-50986683 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-50986683.)
      - kashunstva 1y ago
        > But you are going to find vegans working in a slaughterhouse. Your first link is the first-person account of a vegan who went undercover to document the abject cruelty that exists in slaughterhouses. The pragmatism was in service of a mission to protect animals by disseminating information on such cruelty rather than the “I need a job.” type of pragmatism. There’s a moral distinction here.
        wizzwizz4 1y ago
        The first link's narrator blew the whistle to industry regulators on practices unethical by non-vegan standards, something that is only possible if you're on the ground. The second link quotes an interview: > Basically, I'm an animal lover. I don't take any pleasure in what we're doing, but if I can do it as quietly and professionally as possible, then I think we've achieved something. I was not at all referring to 'the "I need a job" type of pragmatism' (which would not be moral pragmatism for a vegan); rather, doing a job that involves killing animals in such a way that your presence reduces the marginal harm could be seen as defensible to a vegan.
egorfine 1y ago
> the majority of the people in the bureaucracy want it to be more efficient and thus be fired?
- rkomorn 1y ago
  Or just actually deliver what people need faster and better?
  - egorfine 1y ago
    There are no incentives for that. Bureaucrat will get paid at the end of the month no matter what. But if said bureaucrat makes its own process more efficient, they might get fired because they are not needed anymore.
    - potato3732842 1y ago
      Worse, their boss's (maybe not direct boss, but somewhere up there) prestige, power and career potential directly tracks headcount. So even if the DMV clerks want it to not suck, management want it to suck.
    - etiam 1y ago
      Most bureaucrats are also humans, and not solely or even mainly motivated for their every action by having it rewarded with maximum salary profit. Plenty of dysfunctional bureaucratic organizations have high rates of occupational burnout and high employee churn due to the stress of repeatedly enforcing policies the employee knows full well are morally reprehensible. So in real psychology, I claim there's plenty of incentive, even for the majority of people in the organizations.
      - egorfine 1y ago
        > Most bureaucrats are also humans Not for long. > high rates of occupational burnout and high employee churn See
scotty79 1y ago
> government budgets should increase monotonically It should and not even just linearily. If economy grows by roughly even percentage each year same should be true about government budgets. Otherwise you just leave money on the table for billionaires to scoop up and sit on. Of course it should be funded with taxes not debt and that's where the worst part of government spending is. That it's done by indebting itself to billionaires and letting them suck more and more government money each year through debt servicing.
- roenxi 1y ago
  That seems like a difficult position to make coherent. The comment seems to start by arguing that government spending should increase as much as is reasonably possible because it draws resources away from billionaires. Then the second half seems to be a complaint that increasing government spending has created a resource for billionaires to draw from to enrich themselves. It seems that if you believe the first, the second is hard to complain about. There is a social contract that the billionaires must fund [yea much] government. They are. If they then pay a little extra tax and it goes in a circular loop back to them, which is weird but I'm not sure how you are arguing it to be a problem - clearly under this frame they are going to be worse off than when they started, so they have been taxed some amount. The question is whether that amount is reasonable or not, I suppose. But that has nothing to do with whether they have a custom of a ceremonial handing of some billionaire money to the government to be handed back to the billionaire on top of their taxes.
  - scotty79 1y ago
    > There is a social contract that the billionaires must fund [yea much] government. I don't think that's the contract. Government must be funded by citizens which all are consumers. What billionaires extract from consumers can't go towards funding the government. Unless it's borrowed directly from billionaires which is what got most governments in financial problems they are currently in. > The question is whether that amount is reasonable or not To asses that you only need to compare rate of growth of billionaires wealth to the rate of growth of the entire economy. Then you can see how much they suck out of non-billionaires.
callmeal 1y ago
>To effect cuts, you can either cut the budget without improving efficiency, leading to a loss of scope (which is what the current administration is doing, and is not great) Um, $11,000,000,000 for ICE is not a cut. $850 Billion for the department of war (an increase of $25 billion over last year) is not a cut. But yes, CFPB's funding for 2025 which gets reduced from about $823 million to about $446 million is a cut. Which will be great for consumers because we can now start paying extra fees that will boost corporate profits.
- throw10920 1y ago
  When did I ever try to justify those budget increases or cuts? You need to improve your reading comprehension.
callmeal 1y ago
>government budgets should increase monotonically Well, they should track population growth. You cannot effectively serve a larger population with the same resources, otherwise we would continue to have two lane freeways everywhere.
- throw10920 1y ago
  Here we have the "stupid" bit of my reference. No, the budget should not track population growth, because improved technology means that occasionally the cost to provide the same service to an individual decreases, whereupon the budget should also decrease. Or, for instance, a military threat or other transient event (eg COVID) that necessitated temporarily elevated funding levels expires, and the budget should decrease accordingly. The converse being, of course, that sometimes transient events or large shifts (eg increase in costs of materials used to make some important good that the government procures) make things cost more, and so the budget should increase in proportion to those beyond population growth.
  - callmeal 1y ago
    Improving technology has not increased housing stock or transportation options. Everyone still needs a place to stay and ways to get to/from work. Another issue is that using technology to reduce humans in the loop is what gets us "your call is important to us..." levels of customer support. If the number of people who need to apply for id/license/passports keeps increasing, then the number of people servicing those requests also needs to increase (or we need to stop complaining about the dmv). No amount of technology is going to replace that need.
    - throw10920 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - cindyllm 1y ago
        [dead]
_heimdall 1y ago
The challenge for the second approach is that budgets are going to be spent once they have been allocated. If you improve efficiency and reduce costs that savings will just get spent somewhere else or on some new initiative. Government work and corporate work are very much the same in that way, budgets are use it or lose it and everyone will use it this year so their budget isn't reduces next year.
- the8472 1y ago
  Some companies manage to maintain war chests, others have some insane "we had EOY leftover budget so we spent it on another redesign" craziness going on. Ditto with the "we must spend it, otherwise we'll get less next year". Where do such terrible incentives come from?
  - throw10920 1y ago
    > Ditto with the "we must spend it, otherwise we'll get less next year". Where do such terrible incentives come from? That specific one is an unfortunate side-effect of needing to allocate budgets in advance. Large organizations working with a lot of money need to statically schedule their budgets in advance - and because they don't have crystal balls, they can't actually know in advance how much they'll need, and have to make educated guesses. If a department didn't use all of its allocated budget last year, sure that's a very weak signal that it was given too large of a budget - but it is a signal, and there aren't very many other good ones.
    - _heimdall 1y ago
      In my opinion this has always been a sign that an organization grew too large. Its the way of the world now to aim for growing into a huge org, hiring as much as you can on the way up. Once those in charge know little more about a part of their company than the budget surplus at the end of the fiscal year the model just doesn't make sense.
    - the8472 1y ago
      It's not a signal, no. If you're good at forecasting but don't have a crystal ball then you'll overestimate on some years and underestimates on others, averaging out. And the budget-burning shows that this encourages making over-estimates and then spending the excess to make the actual numbers match the prediction. It's no different than research based on falsified data at that point.
runako 1y ago
> To effect cuts, you can either cut the budget without improving efficiency, leading to a loss of scope (which is what the current administration is doing, and is not great), or you can keep your scope while improving your efficiency such that you don't need as much money, which is vastly preferable. The US federal government has taken a third route: increasing scale faster than resources. Before this administration, the # of federal employees sat roughly where it was in 1969 (there have been some fluctuations since then). In addition to the added tasks/departments/etc., there are 70% more Americans for which to administer government. Scope has gone up quite a bit faster than headcount. I haven't done the analysis, but would be curious to see how this compares to given companies over similar timelines.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

bratbag 1y ago

The majority of obese people want to be thin, but will die obese anyway. Just wanting something that requires a significant overhaul of how you do things, is not enough.

paddleon 1y ago
better analogy: the majority of fouix-gras birds would prefer not to be force-fed and caged. The people working in the bureaucracy do not have the authority to overhaul it.
- parineum 1y ago
  The people working in the bureaucracy chose to be there. Bureaucracies self select for people that are okay with it. I'm sure there's a few who are there to change it from the inside but they are the exception. You're not going to find a lot of vegans working in a meat packing plant.
  - wizzwizz4 1y ago
    But you are going to find vegans working in a slaughterhouse. Some people prioritise pragmatism over ideological purity. (See https://our-compass.org/2020/06/15/i-worked-undercover-inside-a-slaughterhouse/ https://our-compass.org/2020/06/15/i-worked-undercover-insid... and parts of https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-50986683 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-50986683.)
    - kashunstva 1y ago
      > But you are going to find vegans working in a slaughterhouse. Your first link is the first-person account of a vegan who went undercover to document the abject cruelty that exists in slaughterhouses. The pragmatism was in service of a mission to protect animals by disseminating information on such cruelty rather than the “I need a job.” type of pragmatism. There’s a moral distinction here.
      - wizzwizz4 1y ago
        The first link's narrator blew the whistle to industry regulators on practices unethical by non-vegan standards, something that is only possible if you're on the ground. The second link quotes an interview: > Basically, I'm an animal lover. I don't take any pleasure in what we're doing, but if I can do it as quietly and professionally as possible, then I think we've achieved something. I was not at all referring to 'the "I need a job" type of pragmatism' (which would not be moral pragmatism for a vegan); rather, doing a job that involves killing animals in such a way that your presence reduces the marginal harm could be seen as defensible to a vegan.

egorfine 1y ago

> the majority of the people in the bureaucracy want it to be more efficient and thus be fired?

rkomorn 1y ago
Or just actually deliver what people need faster and better?
- egorfine 1y ago
  There are no incentives for that. Bureaucrat will get paid at the end of the month no matter what. But if said bureaucrat makes its own process more efficient, they might get fired because they are not needed anymore.
  - potato3732842 1y ago
    Worse, their boss's (maybe not direct boss, but somewhere up there) prestige, power and career potential directly tracks headcount. So even if the DMV clerks want it to not suck, management want it to suck.
  - etiam 1y ago
    Most bureaucrats are also humans, and not solely or even mainly motivated for their every action by having it rewarded with maximum salary profit. Plenty of dysfunctional bureaucratic organizations have high rates of occupational burnout and high employee churn due to the stress of repeatedly enforcing policies the employee knows full well are morally reprehensible. So in real psychology, I claim there's plenty of incentive, even for the majority of people in the organizations.
    - egorfine 1y ago
      > Most bureaucrats are also humans Not for long. > high rates of occupational burnout and high employee churn See

scotty79 1y ago

> government budgets should increase monotonically It should and not even just linearily. If economy grows by roughly even percentage each year same should be true about government budgets. Otherwise you just leave money on the table for billionaires to scoop up and sit on. Of course it should be funded with taxes not debt and that's where the worst part of government spending is. That it's done by indebting itself to billionaires and letting them suck more and more government money each year through debt servicing.

roenxi 1y ago
That seems like a difficult position to make coherent. The comment seems to start by arguing that government spending should increase as much as is reasonably possible because it draws resources away from billionaires. Then the second half seems to be a complaint that increasing government spending has created a resource for billionaires to draw from to enrich themselves. It seems that if you believe the first, the second is hard to complain about. There is a social contract that the billionaires must fund [yea much] government. They are. If they then pay a little extra tax and it goes in a circular loop back to them, which is weird but I'm not sure how you are arguing it to be a problem - clearly under this frame they are going to be worse off than when they started, so they have been taxed some amount. The question is whether that amount is reasonable or not, I suppose. But that has nothing to do with whether they have a custom of a ceremonial handing of some billionaire money to the government to be handed back to the billionaire on top of their taxes.
- scotty79 1y ago
  > There is a social contract that the billionaires must fund [yea much] government. I don't think that's the contract. Government must be funded by citizens which all are consumers. What billionaires extract from consumers can't go towards funding the government. Unless it's borrowed directly from billionaires which is what got most governments in financial problems they are currently in. > The question is whether that amount is reasonable or not To asses that you only need to compare rate of growth of billionaires wealth to the rate of growth of the entire economy. Then you can see how much they suck out of non-billionaires.

callmeal 1y ago

>To effect cuts, you can either cut the budget without improving efficiency, leading to a loss of scope (which is what the current administration is doing, and is not great) Um, $11,000,000,000 for ICE is not a cut. $850 Billion for the department of war (an increase of $25 billion over last year) is not a cut. But yes, CFPB's funding for 2025 which gets reduced from about $823 million to about $446 million is a cut. Which will be great for consumers because we can now start paying extra fees that will boost corporate profits.

throw10920 1y ago
When did I ever try to justify those budget increases or cuts? You need to improve your reading comprehension.

callmeal 1y ago

>government budgets should increase monotonically Well, they should track population growth. You cannot effectively serve a larger population with the same resources, otherwise we would continue to have two lane freeways everywhere.

throw10920 1y ago
Here we have the "stupid" bit of my reference. No, the budget should not track population growth, because improved technology means that occasionally the cost to provide the same service to an individual decreases, whereupon the budget should also decrease. Or, for instance, a military threat or other transient event (eg COVID) that necessitated temporarily elevated funding levels expires, and the budget should decrease accordingly. The converse being, of course, that sometimes transient events or large shifts (eg increase in costs of materials used to make some important good that the government procures) make things cost more, and so the budget should increase in proportion to those beyond population growth.
- callmeal 1y ago
  Improving technology has not increased housing stock or transportation options. Everyone still needs a place to stay and ways to get to/from work. Another issue is that using technology to reduce humans in the loop is what gets us "your call is important to us..." levels of customer support. If the number of people who need to apply for id/license/passports keeps increasing, then the number of people servicing those requests also needs to increase (or we need to stop complaining about the dmv). No amount of technology is going to replace that need.
  - throw10920 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - cindyllm 1y ago
      [dead]

_heimdall 1y ago

The challenge for the second approach is that budgets are going to be spent once they have been allocated. If you improve efficiency and reduce costs that savings will just get spent somewhere else or on some new initiative. Government work and corporate work are very much the same in that way, budgets are use it or lose it and everyone will use it this year so their budget isn't reduces next year.

the8472 1y ago
Some companies manage to maintain war chests, others have some insane "we had EOY leftover budget so we spent it on another redesign" craziness going on. Ditto with the "we must spend it, otherwise we'll get less next year". Where do such terrible incentives come from?
- throw10920 1y ago
  > Ditto with the "we must spend it, otherwise we'll get less next year". Where do such terrible incentives come from? That specific one is an unfortunate side-effect of needing to allocate budgets in advance. Large organizations working with a lot of money need to statically schedule their budgets in advance - and because they don't have crystal balls, they can't actually know in advance how much they'll need, and have to make educated guesses. If a department didn't use all of its allocated budget last year, sure that's a very weak signal that it was given too large of a budget - but it is a signal, and there aren't very many other good ones.
  - _heimdall 1y ago
    In my opinion this has always been a sign that an organization grew too large. Its the way of the world now to aim for growing into a huge org, hiring as much as you can on the way up. Once those in charge know little more about a part of their company than the budget surplus at the end of the fiscal year the model just doesn't make sense.
  - the8472 1y ago
    It's not a signal, no. If you're good at forecasting but don't have a crystal ball then you'll overestimate on some years and underestimates on others, averaging out. And the budget-burning shows that this encourages making over-estimates and then spending the excess to make the actual numbers match the prediction. It's no different than research based on falsified data at that point.

runako 1y ago

> To effect cuts, you can either cut the budget without improving efficiency, leading to a loss of scope (which is what the current administration is doing, and is not great), or you can keep your scope while improving your efficiency such that you don't need as much money, which is vastly preferable. The US federal government has taken a third route: increasing scale faster than resources. Before this administration, the # of federal employees sat roughly where it was in 1969 (there have been some fluctuations since then). In addition to the added tasks/departments/etc., there are 70% more Americans for which to administer government. Scope has gone up quite a bit faster than headcount. I haven't done the analysis, but would be curious to see how this compares to given companies over similar timelines.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]