Federal workers say they increasingly distrust platforms like Facebook
theverge.com
theverge.com
Maybe I’m just more aware of it now vs. 20-30 years ago, but I feel the division with our country just keeps growing more and more with each passing year/presidency.
And I feel like social media/FB play a big part in this. It seems the extremes on both sides just continue to grow more extreme. And I feel like if social media — and news media — would just go away, we’d see much less division/extremism.
But unfortunately extremism, shock, anger, and contempt for “the other side” is what gets clicks/views.
I don’t know what the solution is. Well, the solution is what I said: get rid of social & (extreme) news media. But there’s no way that will ever happen; extremism breeds extremism.
I keep seeing this. Within my still living parents’ lifetime, people were literally and legally “divided” by Jim Crow laws and segregation. America wasn’t exactly a great egalitarian nation in the 60s.
Not to mention Vietnam and Kent State.
The difference is that once algorithms could be optimized for "engagement", a company simply can't resist amping up the dopamine hits. Because the ultimate goal of those networks is persistent, unrelenting attention. They are for-profit businesses whose primary income is ads (upwards of 98% of Facebook/Meta revenue.)
So the more attention you can drum up, and the longer you can maintain it, the faster the money printer can go brrrr.
Eventually an American will independently reinvent the car bomb, or someone on the left will decide to take a gun to a building containing political representatives.
Does Timothy McVeigh count?
Personally, I'm surprised that the American right wing (including Trump himself!) didn't seem to stop being pro-gun even when two different people made an attempt at Trump:
https://www.nrahlf.org/articles/2025/2/10/nra-issues-stateme...
If that didn't change their minds, I don't think anything can. Literal Jesus could descend from heaven on the wings of Biblically-accurate angels and tell them "When I said 'thou shalt not kill', I didn't give you any exceptions for self-defence, for stand-your-ground, or for the death penalty." and my expectation at this point is they'd not only ignore it, they'd call him 'woke' for suggesting it.
edit: added quotation marks
In tech we face layoffs constantly, so much so that's not a huge shock when a FAANG lays off hundreds or even thousands. We might get a couple of stories if the layoff is particularly large but the general consensus is "this is the way of the world, go find another job". Contrast that with the stories we are seeing about DOGE and the general reaction to layoffs and contraction of several govt agencies.
I think the root of it lies in how both types of jobs are pitched. You get into tech knowing that you will most likely get laid off but you take the deal because compensation if very good in the field.
This is in stark contrast to how a government job is pitched, you won't make the best salaries there, but it's a safe steady job with loads of benefits and you can easily build a career inside just a single agency.
My personal feelings on this are mixed, on the one hand it always sucks to get laid off so I feel for the employees. But on the other hand, something like 40-50% of my paycheck goes out in taxes and I would prefer if my government actually spent it on things to improve my life versus dumb shit domestically or abroad.
And, while the billions of dollars the US has spent per year on foreign aid until now sound impressive, if you compare the per capita amount with other rich countries, it's actually not that impressive (and these numbers include all foreign aid, not just USAID): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_foreign_aid#/med...
What kind of soft power can a nation wield when you’re being outspent 5-to-1 by a charity now?
I agree here, but one thing that has come to light recently is that the federal work force is only ~6% of the federal budget. That means that most of those taxes are not going to pay the salaries of government workers.
Also, a lot of the money from our taxes goes to public health, safety, resource management, and infrastructure. I'm happy to pay for things like that. I don't doubt that there is significant waste as well, but there have been a lot of egregious lies lately about how much waste there is and _where_ that waste is located.
FY 2022 spending was around $6.75 trillion, civilian pay was $271 billion, or around 4% of the spending for that year. You'll find the numbers have been hovering around 4-5% for quite a while.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/is-government-too-big-ref...
Every publication I've looked at has the overall spending for federal employee salaries as around 280 billion. The total budget is around 6 trillion.
If the Impoundment Control Act is thrown out, no institution will be safe, including the military, social security and medicare. Every program will be at the whim of whatever administration is in power at the time. $50B effective military budget will finally be possible under the next democratic administration--no matter if congress disagrees.
And that's a very radical take on government. Even if that sounds good to you, the vast majority of americans do support at least some government programs. Social Security has significant support, for example.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impoundment_of_appropriated_fu...
Do you think there will be a next Democratic administration? The way things are going, the Republicans seem to be determined not to lose another election ever again. Sure, there will be elections, but there are elections in Russia, Belarus, Cuba, China and even North Korea too...
Great idea, sadly co-opted by other interests.
FAANG - You can have sky high compensation with moderate job security and roll-your-own (401K+savings) retirement. Note you mention 40-50% taxes which would imply you are in the sky high compensation bucket. You can also job shop and switch to any of a dozen competitors doing similar stuff.
Fed - You can have moderate compensation with sky high job security and good retirement benefits. Some of these jobs cap out at what FANG pays new grads in cash comp. You can't go work for a competing government like China or Russia, legally.
https://dodsoco.ogc.osd.mil/DoD-Personnel/Ethics-Topics-for-...
Feds can also be limited on who they work for or the kind of work they do after they leave government in the US private sector.
One other difference is that in tech we watch companies get mismanaged into the dirt and shrug it off. There'll be another one to replace it soon enough.
But I want to take a little more care with the government. Yes, there's inefficiency, but that doesn't mean the best approach to optimization is to just start shotgunning holes in the machine.
Maybe that approach works (?) for Twitter, but that kind of upheaval in the government will have serious repercussions that I don't think I want to be on the receiving end of.
I work for a state government, but I'm on a contract. They choose every year whether or not to renew it. So I get to enjoy the lower pay and the lack of job security. I don't know how many government employees are contract, but it's something to consider.
Also do you realize that only 1% of the federal budget is for government workers?
And there is no way that 50% of your income goes to the Federal government. Even if you did make over $609K, only the money you made over that would be taxed at the 37% rate and Social security would have stopped way before that at $165K (?).
Also, when I got my Amazoned, I was relatively sure that they could keep their promise of paying my 3.5 months severance + paid out PTO that gave me 4 months pay.
Musk can’t even promise the people who sign that they will get paid past March.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/is-government-too-big-ref...
If his goal is to cut 10% of the employees That 10% is less than 1% of the budget.
It was a very professional environment. I ended up going to the private sector after (they had a RIF (reduction in force)) the year I graduated. But the government employment pitch was more stability, less compensation, better work life balance.
Honestly the engineering process wasn’t too different. The government projects were strictly funded, and used these cost codes where you had to bill every hour to a project. This was a PITA. The quality of the engineering designs wasn’t different.
The government job had some inefficienies because of a lot of process. Eg we got a plotter running and wanted to try a few different pens, so we ordered a small sampling. It got held up while they looked for cheaper prices, a process that probably cost more than the pens my boss pointed out. but I can see why they would try that process for big ticket items. When I ended up at a big company it was frankly similar.
One of my first engineering jobs in the private sector was capping a landfill that went privately managed, then when the management left they found 5 drums on site. Any savings by having the government turn over that contract were wasted by having us deal with that (turned out the drums were all rusted out, the contents long gone).
When I was looking again last year it all took 3 weeks to get the offer I have now. It only took that long to get scheduled for all of the interviews from an internal recruiter reaching out to me.
The UK civil service "fast stream" graduate training programme actually requires people to change roles every six months. I believe there are similar rules with a longer timeframe that cycle people through job roles later on in their career. These play a similar role to bank rules which require people to take two weeks contiguous holiday every year: it tends to expose any fraud that requires continuous coverup.
The libertarian anti-government position denies the possibility of these roles improving anything, which is why this conflict arises.
Honestly, similar to software engineers and software.
America seems to have flipped from exporting the ‘American Dream’ to the ‘American Nightmare’, so it’s a lot more in people’s face right now, but frankly every country has significant issues right now.
one of those ‘hard to see the mote in one’s own eye’ type of situations usually. except in some third world countries, it’s often pretty obvious then hah.
If anything, history shows that ruling government officials by means of fear is very good sign for the nation, but tends to be harmful to the rulers.
Pol Pot confined his cruelty towards the intelligent, Mugabe, North Korea mostly terrorizes the peasantry, Mugabe's victims were a revolving door of ethnic enemies.
It's quite a different thing to shoot an admiral to encourage the rest.
As Sam Bankman-Fried learned, only certain people have political cover to commit crimes.
Protests are legal; they still require organizing, and keeping bad-faith folks out of that planning process.
But I suppose that's the problem. People stopped believing in democracy.
Sleazy government officials illegally order sleazy Facebook employees to censor people. Predictably, the government was caught because large groups of people conspiring to do something nefarious for extended periods of time ("conspiracies") are difficult to hide. When the government is caught illegally and unconstitutionally censoring its own people, the people get mad. And after all that, the sleazy media reports this as "poor, pitiful government workers just can't trust Facebook as a paragon of virtue anymore."
It is but not for the reason you think it is.
The twitter files are about a period of time where _Donald Trump was president_!
People go on-and-on about how twitter shadow bans people and lies about it. They never did any of that! "Shadowban" has a specific meaning and by that meaning they weren't shadowbanning. It'd be like saying a missed field goal is a "roughing the receiver penalty". It's just not what the words mean. When Twitter was asked, by Congress, if they artificially lowered the rankings of posts Twitter said yes. There is nothing hidden about this besides that fact that nobody watches congressional testimony and your hivemind doesn't surface any highlights opposing the hivemind's view.