cemerick

VOA/RFE operations were actually run by a separate non-profit org that got the vast majority of its operating funds from the feds. So, federal worker protections aren't relevant by dint of the org(s) being set up at arm's length.

That said, the current regime has had no problem acting outside of the law and existing federal employee union contracts. Tell people they're dismissed, cut off the email and building access, wait for the lawsuits, and then simply ignore the decisions weeks/months later and/or follow them with as much malicious compliance as they need to achieve their original aims.

tl;dr: No, employment protections fundamentally don't exist in the US, and doubly so for those employed by the federal government within an atmosphere of rampant lawlessness.

Insofar as you're tariff-ing everything that moves, the less you particularly care about internal revenue. The endgame is to eliminate the income tax entirely anyway, so why would one want the IRS at all?

"Effective for what?" is always the key question. Various unhinged "proposals" (invading greenland, invading panama, an iron dome-like system to cover basically all of north america to shoot down...whatever Canada and Cuba will launch at us??) suggest nothing other than full funding++, used in dumb ways (which I suppose is better than circa 2002 WoT defense spending?).

Until last November, Hegseth's "whole thing" was being a frat anchor / defense witness for Fox. Talking about him being anything like a serious figure is absurd.

Ah, indeed, I was sloppy in my wording in that prior message.

I should have said is that defense is the largest single category of discretionary spending, by a large margin. The thrust of the point remains.

A bag of leveraged real estate and casino holdings, plus a smattering of dollar store swindles is what denotes entrepreneurialism in the modern HN world? Wild times.

> Surely we all agree on medication and life-saving care for children.

That is absolutely not a given. The currently in-power minority earnestly believe that people are only due the level of healthcare they can personally fund and afford, period.

> These are real questions that Americans are trying to answer right now.

Which Americans? There's no grand debate happening right now, just a table-flipping tantrum.

It's a fun exercise to do the chin-stroking thing of asking about efficiency and tax rates and so on, but it's so disconnected from the reality of the federal budget that it's hard to believe it's anything other than a cynical tactic.

Military spending is the overwhelming majority of non-discretionary spending, and there are effectively no limits to it. Meanwhile, extremely high-leverage foreign aid (like the HIV-related treatments that have been mentioned) are always first on the chopping block, along with things like school lunches and early childhood education that have been demonstrated to be effectively free in terms of how much spending on remediating bad outcomes later in peoples' lives.

The redirect only happens if you aren't logged into to mastodon.social. (Which may well be a misconfiguration ofc)

It's impossible to talk about real numbers in this case of course, and speaking strictly about percentage points or bips doesn't capture the thrust of the change (or situate it accurately vis a vis stripe's continual fee inflation, i.e. see elsewhere others' comments ~"stripe has been nickel and diming us for years"). In an era where stripe has used its cache to capture certain business communities wholesale and then ratcheted up pricing in ways you wouldn't expect outside of a monopoly player IMO, I think it's helpful to be super clear about the relative change rather than absolute change.

Well, they have the organizational maturity to accommodate enterprise customers, and in contrast to much of this subthread, they don't say things like "just use curl".

As long as they're approximately the only "enterprise" option, that's a moat all by itself. No comment on the valuation, but it makes for a very resilient business.

I'm not comparing e.g. burglaries to car thefts, but the category of property crimes to the category of violent crimes. The former range from unfortunate nuisances to unpleasant material losses (depending on how well you've scoped your insurances); the latter can be life-shattering tragedies.