Posted by zulln 5 hours ago
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/11/13/us/ground-stop-natio...
And then "journalists" "feel" like they have to report on things because as long as they say they're reporting that "someone else had a feeling" they're not technically wrong, and they have bosses breathing down their necks to make the business work, to grow their monetizable audience.
And then no one knows what's true anymore, because we chose to be entertained instead of choosing to be informed.
Mr. President, there's been a second timeline-split.
We detached this flamewar subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50491500.
People talk about competition driving the private sector into total efficiency but when you actually start working in it you start to notice how inefficient they actually do things (and how hard they try to avoid competition).
So how much is Zuckerberg personally responsible for after wasting what, 90 billion on the stupid metaverse?
> That ain't true of the government, and all that "care" and "budgeting" could just as easily be called administrative overhead and bloat.
So just to be clear; if the government tries to do accounting and budgeting, that’s administrative bloat, and if it doesn’t, that’s wasting money with no accountability?
Not that either scenario describes any part of the government I’ve ever seen I'm just illustrating clearly that you’re operating from the perspective of “the government spending money on anything is always waste” irrespective of what the money is being spent on.
I've worked on government contracts. Yes, there are piles and piles of administrative overhead heaped onto everything that gets done (with a material budget).
Can we even call what the government runs on these a ... "budget" with "accountability"? LOL
But I have to say, given what I see online in almost every forum available to me, there is zero "tolerated" discourse around limiting governments. I've been banned all over for suggesting such evil, hateful, ideas. If you take a look at government spending relative to receipts the planet over, you'll quickly see that this problem is growing. I think we can agree it's important.
If nobody anywhere allows government to be managed down, held responsible, how's it ever going to happen? I'll suffer endless bans. I'll eat the you're a racist stupidity forever if it means I can hand my kids a world that isn't teetering on the brink because our elected officials can't do basic math.
Goalpost shift. Your original point was that leadership of the private sector is responsible for waste. I’ve shown an example of a CEO wasting unconscionable amounts of money and not being responsible whatsoever.
> I 've worked on government contracts. Yes, there are piles and piles of administrative overhead heaped onto everything that gets done (with a material budget).
I never said there wasn’t. I said the private sector wastes more, with less accountability and shittier justifications.
Also, the only reason you even know that the government wasted any money at all is exactly the bloat you’re complaining about.
> Can we even call what the government runs on these a ... "budget" with "accountability"? LOL
Not really. The debt ceiling is legal wordplay introduced by republicans so they can bitch about democrats spending the country into debt (which is hilarious given debts reliably go up far, far more under republican stewardship). But a state that can print money for the cost of paper (of which the US is basically the only one) simply isn’t subject to a lot of traditional market forces. As we’ve seen with our debt now what, 40 trillion? With only now some meaningful effects on on-the-ground economics.
That’s not to say it never will, of course, but at least through history if you look at how the US operated when it was a functioning state, it’s pretty clear the money is made up and the rules don’t matter to Uncle Sam. His checks always cash and huge swathes of the global economy are constructed in a way that reflects that reality.