https://www.pnas.org/doi/epub/10.1073/pnas.2501605122

I've got zero problem going after W, F, & A.

However, it is often (and especially now) is a mere cover for a LOT of other even more massively wasteful concepts.

In ANY large organization, and in ANY organization doing innovative work, there will ALWAYS be significant literal waste, especially when viewed in hindsight. Trying to root it all out is merely a straight-up recipe for different kinds of waste — a dense bureaucracy of requirements but the waste is predictable and "accepted". I do work as a 2nd- or 3rd-tier military supplier, and working with "CUI" (Confidential Unclassified Information) has a very significant overhead, and every single contract comes with a list of huge "flow-downs", literally pages of lists of federal regulations that apply to the contracts — and that is just the list of regulations, reading the actual regs is hundreds or thousands of pages — and that is all to prevent WF&A.

Start talking innovative weapons systems, hardware and software, and we have ALL of the issues of any kind of hardware and software development, sometimes the need to very rapidly develop, and all kinds of constraints, and when a program that looks good doesn't pan out, people screaming "WASTE!!!". Often it happens even when the program works in the end.

Even in bog-standard stuff with a long lead time, such as artillery shells, the cries of "WASTE!!" are a problem. The situation in Ukraine is showing that we have very low and inadequate artillery shell production capacity and inventory for fighting an actual war. Startup time for new production lines in measured in years. Yet, to prevent ""WASSTE!!" almost all of it was shut down. And now we cannot supply enough for even a tightly constrained active hot war. But, if the USG had done the right thing and paid contractors to keep active those lines and stockpiled millions of rounds, everyone would be screaming bloody murder about the "WASSSTE!!".

And what happens when you do go after it without being careful? Just look at DOGE: In an early example they fired the people in the energy department responsible for safety of our nuclear weapons stockpile because the "efficiency" people literally did not know what the DOE did; they had to scramble to hire them back when the press called it out. Or, this week, it turned out that the NOAA employee in central Texas responsible for coordinating severe weather warnings with local officials had taken the DOGE early buyout, so was not available to help. NOAA still did the best they could with what they had, but we're now picking hundreds of dead bodies out of river banks and trees.

How efficient is that?

Yes, there are always problems of efficiency at scale, and you can always find somebody scamming something. But even some of the DOGE employees that quit publicly expressed surprise at how actually efficiently the govt ran. So, I must say I'm a bit skeptical of the $2T unaccounted funds (and over what period?). That said, we could definitely do better in terms of budget rules, and the "use it or lose it" rule creates problems. The question is whether or not it creates more problems than other sets of rules.

My take isn't cynical, it is what I've seen first hand. I've worked for the US government (and others) and NGOs off and on since Clinton was President. The standards were pretty mediocre when I first got involved and they've only become worse.

The standards were probably higher before the 1990s. All of these organizations have a few true believers in the mission but those are the old guard. They've slowly been replaced by the equivalent of DMV bureaucrats, even in the more science-y parts of the government. People interested in doing science have known those organizations are not where you go to do science since long before the current administration, which has been a long, vicious spiral.

What’s especially alarming is that they’ve learned they don’t have to do anything in the dark. Epstein may be a small blip in that, but we’ll see how the story goes in the coming weeks.

My evidence for this is Mamdani. He won handily, and he crushed it with young men. And young people in general, but also among middle age people.

Mandani is strongly pro trans. But he's also putting forward a platform of values that people actually care about. Housing, affordability, wages, access to food and healthcare. He's not just "not the other guy", he's focused on painting a picture that resonates with many people.

And he didn't have to abandon trans people to do it.

Conservatism isn't an ideology unto itself, but merely a pointer to some other ideology based on a prioritization of caution and stability over first-principles thinking. There's nothing wrong with that, per se; at an organizational or societal scale, more conservative influence just means higher activation energy to move forward with major decisions. Excess conservatism can ossify a suboptimal status quo, but too little can lead to major mistakes, regressions, or whiplash between governing philosophies and policies.

Even if aspects of a particular status quo are obviously bad (e.g. slavery), there's a difference between defending such aspects on a first principles basis and doing so based on "tradition" or "this is how it's always been". Of course the latter can result in ordinary people staking out positions that look monstrous in hindsight, but on the flip side sometimes Chesterton's fence is there for a reason. For every good thing conservatives have opposed (e.g. American democracy and emancipation), one could just as easily rattle off a list of bad things they've opposed (e.g. French Revolution, end of the Weimar Republic, Cultural Revolution, Challenger launch, Arab Spring). We also have no idea how many other historical disasters simply never occurred as a result of conservative resistance.

Of course, the modern popular bastardization of these terms into "whatever I think the [blue/red] guys support" would make my comment endlessly confusing to most Americans. It will never not be amusing to me that half the population of the land of freedom has somehow turned an etymological cousin of "liberty" into a dirty word.

this sentence is ridiculous. he did not "make" $36 billion.

Also, I don't really like to portray people as evil. That tends to dehumanize them and try to separate them into something entirely different, and something distant. Much has been said about this post-WWII, and I agree. Those are people like us, just from a different psycho-social background, which could have been our own; and there is always the possibility of change, if not from leaders from followers. To me the greatest danger of claiming evil is when you stop (or try to get people to stop) thinking there; when you try to find the exact source of harm and carefully explain your reasoning, that's less bad. I didn't know what else to write instead...

The reason we're seeing it happen now is the peak user saturation of social media and because the machine has proven its formula works and can be translated across languages and cultures.

I think a different ruling cohort would have tightened the screws of neoliberalism, but might have felt the need to keep up the facade of the legitimacy of the system they run and their own leadership, throwing us a bone every once in a while.

The sleazy (edited - shouldn't call this standard) playbook for old oil wells is for the operators to sell them to a shadier operator company and transfer the risk. The shady firm then siphons the money out and declares bankruptcy.

The standard cycle is that they pump while the money is good. Then when commodity prices crash, those shell companies are insolvent. Industry lobbies for easements on their cash reserves as a favour during the "temporary downturn". The shady guys just walk away with their pockets stuffed full of money, and the regulator is left holding the bag.

Most operators are responsible, and decommission the wells. But the industry has to maintain a whole insurance policy for "orphan wells", and it is always under-funded. Alberta alone is going eat a couple of billion in orphan cleanup.

This process only gets harder when the satellite is "owned" by a shell-company domiciled in Mauritius.

The actual solution is a series of international treaties. The USA government has signed a global promise that they are directly liable for any object launched by any actor in the USA . All treaty signatories are on the same hook. The government in turn then has to track them all, else how do they manage their liability?

How could a private company possibly play this role in a global treaty process? Over decades?

https://www.unoosa.org/oosa/en/ourwork/spacelaw/treaties/lia...

…but also I think NINBYism is the wrong metaphor for the point you make: if everyone NINBYs housing, we have an end to housing and all suffer the shortage; if everyone NINBYs war, we have an end to war.

But I get your vibe.