Wow this comes as a surprise and is so so sad. When I was getting into programming a decade ago Mikeal’s twitter was a huge resource in keeping me up to date and learning things about Node.
I never met him IRL, but you form a one way relationship with people you look up to online and Mikeal is one of the people for me. May he rest easy.
This is a really cool study—finally shows that dopamine isn’t just about reward but actually acts as the “all-clear” signal that lets the brain unlearn fear. By watching dopamine neurons light up when an expected shock doesn’t happen, and then using light to tweak that pathway, they prove dopamine release in the amygdala actively drives extinction rather than just tagging along. It’s exciting because it hints at new ways to boost therapies for PTSD and anxiety by tweaking that VTA→BLA circuit or D1 receptors
Wow, this is exactly what I’ve been missing—juggling a dozen kubectl logs windows and still losing context. Seeing all container logs merged in real time is a game-changer for debugging multi-pod workloads. Love that it runs locally against the API—no more sending sensitive logs offsite. Big thanks to the author for saving my sanity here!
While the search offered is handy, I watch logs on multi-pod workloads via:
kubectl logs -f -l app=api --max-log-requests=50
This follows along all pods with the given label (app: api) for up to 50 pods or however many you want. Quite useful when I'm looking for specific output such as ERROR logs to just pipe it to grep like this:
Thanks! Your comment made my day! It sounds like your use-case is similar to mine when I started working on the project. Now we have a community of contributors working on Kubetail so if you have time, stop by our Discord and let us know what else we can do to help (https://discord.gg/CmsmWAVkvX).
This will surely get some skepticism as it's a Waymo study, but it's nice to see a real‐world dataset this large at 56M miles. An 85 % drop in serious‐injury crashes and 96 % fewer intersection collisions is a strong signal that Level 4 ADS can meaningfully improve safety in ride-hail settings. Still curious about how much of that comes from operational design versus the core autonomy, but it’s a big leap beyond “novelty demo.”
Really excited for autonomy to become more and more common place. People drive more and more like distracted lunatics these days it seems
There was a study a few years back that showed male uber drivers earned more than female drivers. How could this be so, when the dispatch algorithm doesn't discriminate? Turns out men just drive a little faster in the aggregate so they made iirc around 3% more money.
I think the problem is a general one about drivers, not just ride-sharers. I live in a fairly busy area and I am beset by aggressive drivers any time I need to cross a busy road. So many drivers simply ignore pedestrians by default. Not that many of them have Uber or Lyft signs in the window, if anything commercial drivers tend to be a bit more careful in my experience because the downside risk is being unable to work any driving job.
About half of commercial drivers is my conclusion. (though I'm not collecting statistically valid data) Just judging by the number of commercial vehicles who drive into the crosswalk I use often.
Good point: Part of Waymo's safety stats comes from settings that are probably tuned right now in favor of safety stats even if it means a longer or less-profitable ride. It doesn't care if you're going to lose your job if you're five minutes late.
So a fairer comparison would be contrasting Waymo rides to trips conducted by the Ultra Safe Even If It's Slower Chauffeur Company.
>a fairer comparison would be contrasting Waymo rides to trips conducted by the Ultra Safe Even If It's Slower Chauffeur Company.
no, comparing them to real alternatives is the fair comparison. that they've got their settings tuned in favour of safety stats is the whole point, not something that you should be trying to factor out of the comparisons.
> they've got their settings tuned in favour of safety stats is the whole point
For now, yes. My point is that there's very often big gap between "how safely does it work in a lab when the people running it are trying to play up its safety" versus "how safely will X actually work once we start using it everywhere."
Manually-driven vehicles could be a lot safer if they were being prototyped under strict guidance as well!
If we want self-driving cars to retain the same safety later, there needs to be something which prevents humans from flicking the safety-versus-speed dial a little bit over and over in order to make quarterly earnings projections.
> But they [manual vehicles] aren’t [being operated by a corporation with a very strong incentive to publicly demonstrate safety]. These [automated vehicles] are.
Uh, yes, you're kinda repeating my thesis, and two copies don't cancel each other out.
> Planes could be less safe if pilots flew them into cliffs on the regular, but they don’t and so are not.
I don't understand what you're trying to convey with this tautology.
_________
Imagine two fleets of cars/planes/whatever with utterly identical equipment and expertise. The only difference is that for one of them, the management is being pressured by politicians to demonstrate a high degree of safety.
For that scenario, wouldn't you agree that the better-safety comes from temporary external cause? And also agree that the better-safety is unlikely to persist long after the incentive disappears?
[TLDR] Some portion of Waymo's safety-stats are due to the investor/regulatory context in which it currently operates, rather than the underlying technology; the effects of that portion will not be permanent; this should affect how we do comparisons.
Isaac Newton: "Did you see that apple fall? Now imagine that both an elephant and a feather were to begin falling at the same moment, in a place where the atmosphere was--"
Your ancestor: "No, we don't need to. I could also imagine them underwater. Those are suppositions. You're comparing actual and hypothetical falling."
*headdesk*
____
How about this: Which parts of the final TLDR do you disagree with?
I disagree that "the effects of that portion will not be permanent". The safety level can be set to whatever is desired by governments, since governments control how much liability Waymo has. We haven't seen cars get less safe, we've seen governments force car manufacturers to make them more safe. (As well as institute seatbelt requirements, speeding cameras, etc.) I expect the same to happen with self-driving tech. The benefits to driving more aggressively are also likely to be pretty small to the company - I don't think I've ever been in a Waymo ride that's spent more than a minute waiting for pedestrians. So even if they were twice as aggressive, that's saving 30 seconds per ride. Probably not going to have a huge impact on the bottom line.
Also, if you want to include the speculation that they'll make their cars drive more aggressively, you should also include the speculation that the technology will become better and the driving tech will become even safer than they are now.
Ultra Safe Even if it's Slower Chauffeur company doesn't exist and doesn't have data that can be compared. This is a comparison against the thing Waymo is actually replacing.
> It doesn't care if you're going to lose your job if you're five minutes late.
Good. I don't want my kid who's crossing an intersection to be endangered by an Uber driver that you paid $30 to go extra fast. Nothing like externalizing your poor planning skills onto others.
I may be out-of-date here, but I had thought the accelerometers in the phone detected if drivers were too jerky in the movements of the car and that the drivers would be informed of poor service
Humans drive in all weather conditions on all types of roads and also many types of personal vehicles of varying ages and conditions.
Waymo is limited to few specific locations with decent roads and does not drive in poor weather and is limited to a relatively large and safer expensive SUV that is maintained professionally in a fleet.
Studies like this rarely account for such factors , they are compare optimal conditions for self driving to average conditions for humans.
Even if waymo was better when accounting for these factors , if it was much worse in the conditions humans typically are expected to drive [1] they self driving is still less safe than humans on average .
A better comparison could be with professional taxi drivers for the same city (not Uber or Lyft).
I wouldn’t be surprised if Waymo is either on par or poorer than this group .
[1] no study will ever show this as they wouldn’t be able to trial it under those conditions if it is not safe enough
> A better comparison could be with professional taxi drivers for the same city (not Uber or Lyft).
> I wouldn’t be surprised if Waymo is either on par or poorer than this group.
If you've been in both a human drive cab and a Waymo, you'd definitely not say this. I see cabs have accidents all the time. Never seen a Waymo have one.
Also, being in a Waymo feels much safer than a human driven car, even my own when I'm driving!
I highly doubt taxicabs are safer than Waymos.
In fact, here is some data:
Over every 1 million miles driven, there are 4.6 cab crashes, 3.7 livery car crashes, and 6.7 crashes with private cars. And according to Waymo, they have 2.1 crashes per million miles.
> 4.6 cab crashes, 3.7 livery car crashes, and 6.7 crashes with private cars.
> Waymo 2.1 crashes
The numbers become much less 80+% plus claim in the article as you remove factors. It comes closer to 30% with professional drivers.
Livery car is still not always well maintained a high sitting SUV with better visibility[1], perhaps with all these factors included if it is 20% better it is impressive technical achievement for sure, but not going to create headlines anywhere.
The point is the methodology is not as objective as it could be, and this is biased/selective claim, not that self driving cannot be better than humans.
[1] Also there is major difference in the price point between Waymo and Livery cars, I cannot say how it will influence rates but the different rates means different class of clients using at different times of day/night to different locations that needs to be normalized for.
The percent improvement doesn't really matter though. The fact that it is better than even just professionals still means that there are fewer crashes, and therefore they are improving overall road safety.
* In a better car, serviced much better than the average professional vehicle.
The % matters because it is close enough excluding these factors, so we can not definitely say it currently better than humans yet, close but not conclusively so.
That is not a argument against them. It is a simple function of economics, i.e. as long as it better than Lyft/Uber(they are already) that is the price point that Waymo operates at, so it is safer for most users and easy choice to make.
However if you can afford and regularly use high quality private livery car services then the data has to be lot clearer to make the switch.
> Waymo is limited to few specific locations with decent roads and does not drive in poor weather
the study is comparing Waymo to accidents occurred in the same cities where Waymo operates, and my understanding is that Waymo drives 7 days a week, 24h a day in those cities, so same roads, same weather. Seems a legit comparison
Also there is some sort of bias not accounted for: People drive when most people drive and most people are stuck in the most dangerous area: traffic. Waymo driving at night on empty streets is not a good indicator for accident prevention when measured against the average human, who is stuck mostly in traffic.
Why do you believe Waymo's miles are from driving at night on empty streets? They drive when there's rideshare demand, a majority of which occurs during daytime and in the busiest areas of a city. They are no less stuck in traffic than the average human.
Waymo ( and self driving programs as well) have been careful not to go for public large scale deployments in any city with difficult weather and for good reason focused on cities like Austin, Phoenix, Los Angeles, SF[1] so far with easy driving weather.
There have been promising progress and there have been hints of a New York trial soon, but it it well known that self driving cars have not done large scale trial in cities with bad weather.
[1] Yes, I am aware SF gets a bit of bad weather with fog and rain but not nearly not as much to make driving quite unsafe like somewhere that gets a feet of snow in 24 hours in winter, and likely promixity to engineering HQs and favourable regulatory climate influenced the SF choice.
They only compare to human accidents in the areas they operate. It doesn't matter where they don't operate today as they don't try to include human crash numbers from those cities either for the comparison.
Every time someone thinks this is some gotcha, but it isn't. Their methodology clearly attempts an apples-to-apples comparison.
This isn't even true because the dataset compares against conditions IN THE CITY they operate in. They operate year-round in SF and in the same conditions human drivers do.
I am very curious where waymo is at in adverse conditions. Do the cars totally lock up and become useless? Or are they at the level of your 65 year old mother driving in a thunderstorm at night? Passable, but nothing they are gonna put their name on.
Seems they intend to come to Washington D.C. next year, which does get a pretty wide gamut of weather.
It may not be option to most people in the US (most self driving use case is built around the US market)
In America driving is a economic necessity, from going to work to even the grocery shop needs cars and dependency increases inversely with affluence [1]
Mass public transit is non existent barring very few regions.
So car (for commute) and flight (for long distance) are the only two viable transit options .
People cannot choose to not work because weather is bad, and remote work / work from home applies to only some jobs.
[1] food and other service deserts are more likely less affluent neighborhoods meaning you will need to drive and for longer for food , pharmacy or any other services if you are low income .
This is a chicken and egg scenario. Before we had cars, people got to work fine. Now we're OK with killing 40,000 people a year and injuring many more so that people can "get to work".
I saw a Waymo completely freeze in road construction and then pull off into a different lanes through cones.
This is all low speed so wasn’t a safety issue (aside from road rage it might trigger in someone), but focusing only on safety also ignores incidents like this.
Aside from the criticisms about the safety methodology outlined in another chain, I think there’s a bait and switch here where they don’t talk about negative impacts to traffic, freezes, inability to handle situations and don’t evaluate their performance against other drivers.
Don’t get me wrong. I think Waymo is doing well to being the first to truly autonomous, but they’re intentionally putting their best foot forward and trying not to draw attention to any of their shortcomings.
Man this is so awesome. I do really think they need to consider the fold down bed sides like the kei trucks have.
The bed being plastic doesn’t give me much confidence either. The payload may be similar to a mini truck, but a mini truck’s metal bed will take a significant beating over plastic.
This is very, very close to what I want, but I worry that those two things may prevent me from actually pulling the trigger. While all of the modular features are cool and neat, I don’t really consider them very useful for what I would actually use this truck for.
The purpose of this seems to be a fleet or Personal utility truck, but I still feel like I would be leaning towards a used old Ford Ranger or similar.
I think my concern here would be people weighting their ideas/opinions far too much on mathematical models that may, or may not represent the complex economic reality.
We already see this with people arguing with near 100% confidence of X happening because of Y and Z…in a vacuum.
I want to see something similar to what you’re asking, don’t get me wrong. But the underbelly of that is a broken clock being right twice a day and far too much weight and decision making being put into some model that doesn’t actually reflect reality
Although also responsive, the solution to incorrectly applying models _isn't_ to get more models, it's to understand the mistakes being made in applying them.
- Statistically, more models tends to be better (in the same sense that more information is better) under the assumption that people can tell better from worse.
- I like how you talk about _applying_ models instead of _using_ models. It is an easy one word change that (to me at least) emphasizes the choice points of: (a) selecting the model; (b) selecting parameters; (c) interpretation.
- All models (by definition) are unrealistic in some way. If a model operates at a useful level of abstraction, inaccuracies at lower levels may be acceptable. In fact, such inaccuracies may be the key to making the model tractable and efficient.
Can we stop building communities in non-indexable locations? The death of forums and hence “google-ability” for problems and solutions is so depressing. The UX is worse in every way
I think this is largely a consequence of the escalating commoditization of human attention, political polarization, marketing yadda yadda.
Communities disperse, and are drawn to solutions that make them a little trickier to bot into and be absorbed by the marketing apparatus. A little friction that makes it harder for sock puppets / gpt bots carpet bombing your communities wholesale is an ephemeral competitive advantage right now. Not a perfect defense, but what is anymore? Is it even possible to build an effective captcha now?
Tell you what would really gum them up, make some communities require people buy a physical X$ RSA token. Sure you could make bots for that, but how long to automate the unboxing of those tokens? It could become an arms race where the packaging becomes the captcha.
Some humans are going to always try to keep moving ahead of the noise wavefront. I'm rooting for them.
Wanting all things to be index-able these days kind of feels like asking early 90's internet kids to be normal and go hang out at the mall.
Bingo! I changed my mind about this after AI. (Specifically that they are allowed to train & commercialize any IP they want without license - I have nothing against AI itself)
Negative. Communities need not be findable by bots on the public web, in fact many should not be. Nobody has a right to read, index, analyze, or resell my conversations with friends. Anyone who wants to has plenty of options for posting in public forums, and the movement away from that behavior indicates a growing awareness of its problems.
Not arguing with what you said (not agreeing either) but i want to add a perspective.
Not all human discussion can happen in forum-like format. Quick disposable chats are also usefull for when you're in a state of "figuring things out" where quick and short feedback help you navigate a problem rather than reading long well-researched well-formatted replies.
There must be room for both modes: the "thinking about it now" is in chat and the "having thought about it" is in SO, forums, documentation etc etc.
Thank you for your work on Marker. It is the best OCR for PDFs I’ve found. The markdown conversion can get wonky with tables, but it still does better than anything else I’ve tried
It is really really concerning to me how seemingly thoughtless these cuts are to the actual stated goals. As stated below, this org ran at a $0 cost from full cost recovery through consulting services to other orgs. Sure you could argue that's not truly $0, it's not. But it is not a bloated cost-center that needs to be cut.
Just today on the All In podcast I heard Jason Calcanis suggest that the USPS go down to one delivery day per week because no one uses it? The unbelievable part is he was genuine and thought it was an intelligent thing to say. For reference the USPS delivers over 100B, yes billion, parcels per year.
The disconnect between the people who are running the show, and those who are in the ear's of those running the show is scary.
The goal isn’t to make financial cuts. If it was… well, you wouldn’t start here. I bet 18F easily pays for itself in shared eng resources, reduced support and similar things.
The goal is to destroy the US government, so it can be privatized and sold off. Same as what happened in Russia.
The goal is to dismantle the system (of checks and balances) so that it's not in the way of becoming an authoritarian regime. When this is your goal, you realize Russia is not your enemy, it's your biggest ally.
There’s no “checks and balances” within the executive branch.
What we have now is an undemocratic regime where the executive branch is permanently controlled by a city that voted 91-6 for the losing candidate. It’s like those crosswalk buttons that aren’t connected to anything. No matter how people vote, the government just gives us more immigration and more globalism.
E.g. No presidential candidate has ever run on a platform of more immigration. Support for increasing immigration hasn’t topped 35% in decades. Yet the foreign born population has grown from 5% to 15% since 1970. Nobody voted for that. Who did it?
What do you mean by "an executive branch that is controlled by a city" ? I thought the executive branch was headed by the president who then has most of the say about who heads up the departments. I don't think the president or the people he appoints to run positions have anything to do with the city, they can come from outside of D.C.
I don't think a presidential candidate has ever run on adding more debt either, but that has increased at an even higher rate. How about birth rate? I don't think any candidate has campaigned on lowering the birthrate either, but that has dropped from 17.6 per thousand in 1970 to 12 per thousand in 2020.
I would really like to understand why you believe that the executive branch doesn't have the ability to govern because people that would be carrying out the laws must also be politically aligned with the laws. I also would like to hear why you think that just because something wasn't part of any presidential campaign it somehow supports your opinion that the people who carrying out the instructions in the laws - is an explanation for how the president and cabinet don't have any real power.
> What do you mean by "an executive branch that is controlled by a city" ? I thought the executive branch was headed by the president who then has most of the say about who heads up the departments. I don't think the president or the people he appoints to run positions have anything to do with the city, they can come from outside of D.C.
There are almost 700,000 federal employees in DC and its suburbs. The President appoints only about 4,000 people. Many of those people are the ones in agencies making rules that have the force of law.
> I don't think a presidential candidate has ever run on adding more debt either, but that has increased at an even higher rate.
They have—they all run on cutting taxes.
> How about birth rate? I don't think any candidate has campaigned on lowering the birthrate either, but that has dropped from 17.6 per thousand in 1970 to 12 per thousand in 2020.
The federal government directly controls the immigration rate, unlike the birth rate.
> I would really like to understand why you believe that the executive branch doesn't have the ability to govern because people that would be carrying out the laws must also be politically aligned with the laws.
Because politics has become polarized along moral dimensions. E.g. people don’t think immigration is merely a knob to turn, but instead is a moral issue, with a more “diverse” country being a moral good in and of itself. You can’t trust those people to work hard carrying out mass deportations when the public votes for the guy promising to do that.
> I also would like to hear why you think that just because something wasn't part of any presidential campaign it somehow supports your opinion that the people who carrying out the instructions in the laws - is an explanation for how the president and cabinet don't have any real power.
The knobs that control the immigration rate are turned by people who as a matter of ideology believe diversifying the country is a moral good in and of itself. So they simply ignore what the public thinks and continue to turn the knob in favor of increased immigration.
okay? DC doesn't vote for the president. Your premise is bizarre from the get-go.
>They have—they all run on cutting taxes.
That's never how they market it though.
By the same logic, they run on "creating new jobs", but businesses love to prioritize those who can pay below minimum. I don't think Immigration is th end-all be-all problem that we should be looking this deeply into right now. Even H1b's and offshoring impact skilled labor more than that.
> There’s no “checks and balances” within the executive branch.
My comment was more general.
> What we have now is an undemocratic regime where the executive branch is permanently controlled by a city that voted 91-6 for the losing candidate.
The alternative will be an undemocratic regime where the executive "branch" controls all the other ones in perpetuity.
EDIT: Sigh... To me, this is obvious, as I've personally witnessed it happen in several different countries, not to mention historical examples. Worrying about H1B and similar right now is like worrying about hanging the family portrait in the best way possible while the house is on fire.
Note: I would be happy to be proven wrong and I hope you revisit these threads in a few years to see if you have changed your opinion about MAGA (I will surely do).
There are quite a number of checks and balances within each branch, executive included. Some backed by law and others backed by tradition. Do you have some expertise in this that you're drawing from?
That’s like saying “general and special relativity” is a “theory.” Technically correct but misleading.
Articles I, II, and III, have nearly identical clauses vesting the legislative, judicial, and executive power, respectively, in Congress, the President, and the Supreme Court.
Does anyone think Congress can create a law that enables the legislative or judicial powers to be exercised by employees independent of the control of the constitutional actors in which those powers are vested? It would be madness to say that Congress can create a law creating an entity in the judicial branch that can adjudicate cases without oversight from an Article III judge. Nobody thinks that’s true.
> Does anyone think Congress can create a law that enables the legislative or judicial powers to be exercised by employees independent of the control of the constitutional actors in which those powers are vested?
Yes.
Apart from the specific enumerated executive powers in Article II, Sections 2 and 3, the "executive power of the United States" is whatever the Congress says it is. If Article II Section 1 had been intended as a preemptive, unitary-executive grant, there'd have been no reason to enumerate specific powers.
As has been remarked, there's a reason Article I (concerning Congress) comes first.
Article II says: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President.” Congress can give the executive more or less power through law, but whatever executive power it does create must ultimately be invested in the president, not someone else.
The Force is also available to both Jedi and Sith alike. The use of a 'the' nomenclature is not indicative that the subject is solely available to a singular individual, only that the power is available.
In Commonwealth Nations "the Crown" has ultimate deciding power, however "the Crown" simultaneously refers to functions of the executive, legislative (parliament), and judicial (Supreme Court and others), governance and the civil service. A Crown Prosecutor is equally known as "the Crown", as the monarch. Both are two very different individuals, but possess the same power, and use "the" nomenclature.
> The Force is also available to both Jedi and Sith alike. The use of a 'the' nomenclature is not indicative that the subject is solely available to a singular individual, only that the power is available.
In your construction, all the work is being done by your use of the word “available.” But the constitution doesn’t say “the executive power is available to the President.” It says: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” The word “vested” means “secured in the possession of or assigned to a person.” So the executive power isn’t merely available to the President. It’s assigned to and given to the possession of the President.
Your Crown example actually proves the opposite of your point. That phraseology reflects the traditional british notion that all executive power is vested in the king, who is the chief prosecutor but may act through delegates: https://digital.sandiego.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?params=/con... (p. 1707).
> In your construction, all the work is being done by your use of the word “available.”
In your construction, all the work is being done by "the." OK, let's play the same game, this time with the word executive: Suppose that Congress, using its authority under the Necessary and Proper Clause, creates separate governmental agencies — not subject to plenary presidential supervision — and gives those agencies the power to carry out specified tasks. You're complaining that this falls within the definition of "executive" power and thus must be presidentially supervised. The obvious response is: OK, we won't call it "executive" power, we'll call it something else. Word games? Sure, but that's what you're doing.
But, someone might respond, the term "executive power" must be interpreted today as it supposedly was understood by the Framers in 1787. That ipse-dixit contention is purely a matter of what Justice White aptly referred to in Roe as "raw judicial power" — and recall that after Dred Scott, a more-extreme version of such a contention was finally resolved at Appomattox as the culmination of four years of bloody civil war.
In my construction, all the work is done by an alternative interpretation of "the".
The Crown example still works as the Parliament is not selected by the monarch. It is not elected by the monarch. The monarch does not possess the power to reject them. Yet, the Parliament are still referred to as "the Crown", and possesses the executive power of the Crown.
Equally so, the Governor General of any Commonwealth Nation is free to reject the orders of the monarch, as they possess the executive power of the Crown. The monarch is also free to fire them for doing so, as the monarch also has the power of the Crown. Both are on equal footing. In the words of Whitlam "Well may we say God save the Queen, because nothing will save the governor-general."
Multiple people have possession of the executive power in such systems, even though the word "the" is used to refer to it. That alone is not enough to indicate that a singular individual controls it.
The term “checks and balances” refers to the constitution. The constitution says, as the first sentence of Article II: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.”
Article I and Article III have nearly identical language. Nobody thinks Congressional staffers or judicial law clerks impose “checks and balances” on the elected or appointed officials that hold the constitutional office. Why is the President any different?
I think you are right that the US constitution, as originally written, doesn't provide any internal "checks and balances" on the executive branch, other than the President. Congress and the judiciary act as external checks and balances on the President (and also inferior officials, since Congress can impeach inferior officials, and the courts can rule against them). The President acts as an internal check and balance on the executive branch (powers to fire inferior officials, direct them, demand information from them)
Not to say that I think this good policy or constitution design – it grants the President an essentially monarchical position. As The Knoxville Journal once said (9 February 1896), "Great Britain is a republic with a hereditary president, while the United States is a monarchy with an elective king". I think the more collegial form of executive branch leadership found in the Westminster system – in which a Prime Minister has to continually keep the confidence of their party, since they can be removed at any time for any reason (no allegations of misconduct required); in which Cabinet makes decisions by majority vote (and the PM sometimes loses the vote), unlike the US Cabinet where no votes are taken – leads to better governance.
Maybe, one day, "Prime Minister of the United States" will be a real job title
> There’s no “checks and balances” within the executive branch.
The check and balance within every branch is the law, one which many state AG and court officials believe or have ruled is being violated.
The law is quite literally a limit on arbitrary uses of power. It is a check on concentrated power, and balances competing interests.
> Who did it?
Oligarchs.
H1B visa/undocumented labor are an anti labor power policy. Not only does it increase the supply of the workforce suppressing wages, but it gives companies coercive power over foreign laborers, preventing them from ever going on strike or asking for rights. Worse, when things start going poorly, oligarchs blame these people who just wanted a better life and then use the oligarchy controlled media to deflect people's rage away from the people hoarding wealth and power onto someone weaker than them, which gives them a sense of agency.
> the check and balance within every branch is the law
“The law” is it enforced and interpreted by humans. And the fundamental axiom of the constitution is that nobody can be trusted. Do you think the framers went to all that trouble to create this tripartite system, and then assume that all three branches would be checked by unelected prosecutors? If what you said was true, why does the constitution not mention an attorney general that could enforce “the law?”
Trump basically is Russia. He's a paper billionaire who likely gets direct funding from Russia. He just opened up the Green Card system that makes it trivial for Russian oligarchs to get a U.S. Green Card. He even mentioned them in the announcement.
All of this stuff is directly out of Russia's playbook. It's also Trump's, but Trump is too much of an idiot to accomplish this himself. He knows almost nothing about anything. I can near guarantee that he is being coached.
> According to the White House, the Russian reporter’s presence was unplanned.
> “TASS was not on the approved list of media for today’s pool,” a White House official said. “As soon as it came to the attention of press office staff that he was in the Oval, he was escorted out by the Press Secretary."
> The White House did not address how the unapproved reporter was able to gain access to the Oval Office.
Only what's supposed to be one of the most secure sites in all of America, with one of the most difficult rooms to access anywhere. "We're not really sure how Russian media got in."
I seem to recall that Tesla alone has set the record for the largest number of active investigations with the NLRB and EEOC. The sheer number of incidents of blatant racism alone are shocking. At one point Telsa factory employees were spraying racial slurs on the walls and management ignored it.
Do I think the ripping apart of the federal government will further entrench the Oligarch class? Yeah. But honestly Musk seems to just be doing this because he's just getting vengeance on all the departments and people who he thinks won't let him be his very best genius self.
So tell me, how do you start a business in the US?
If you have Transportation, Justice, Labor, Interior, and Agriculture departments, as well as the National Labor Relations Board, EEOC, EPA, SEC, FCC, FTC to answer to, how do you do it?
How do you start a business in the US?
That fucking pisses me off. I know that's not the intent of your post, but that really does piss me the fuck off.
One could start by not violating every labor, environmental, and financial law all at once. Does it make more sense that every business in the US has the constant attention of every federal agency? Or that Elon has done some particular things - for instance, things he's constantly bragging about on his own social media sites - that would tend to arouse suspicion, if not serve as direct evidence, that he's in violation of obvious regulations?
Reducing what? Reducing why? Reducing where? The choices have meaning, and your neglecting to address that show your wilful ignorance.
My insisting you lose weight in your GUT is not the same as losing weight in your SKULL. Where, when, how fast determines whether fitness, torture, or murder.
The truly horrible thing is, that it might not be possible. That the federal government has grown so complex, that it is no longer possible to maintain a modicum of control or to stop its further growth without destructive action. Simply because it is beyond anyone to refactor the thing is a more constructive manner.
Congress needs to be responsible for restructuring the government. Even if you support what President Trump is doing, it'll all be reversed on day 1 of the next Democratic administration. Avoiding this kind of yoyoing every four years is one of the reasons the Founding Fathers made all proposed major changes to the government receive public debate and approval at least five times (House+Senate committee then House+Senate floor then president).
Maybe there are valid reasons to go after Musk, but the propensity of the previous administration towards lawfare clouds all of these investigations.
There are no real checks and balances when it comes to launching investigations into your political rivals for political purposes.
Considering the barrage of regulatory, reputational and legal attacks Musk faced, it shouldn't be surprising that he seeks to neuter the ability of the bureaucracy to weaponise the government again in future.
You disagree with “lawfare”, as in the biased application of the law to further individual interests?
Having presented no hard evidence for your claims, I can only assume the standard you demand is the scrupulous separation of interests, conflicts, and bias to demonstrate the absence of bias beyond a reasonable doubt which is a laudable standard.
Yet, you applaud to the clear, unabashed, unapologetic, intentionally biased application of the law to further individual interests. By an entity whose interests, conflicts, and bias are so thoroughly intertwined that the presence of bias is beyond a reasonable doubt.
Can you please explain why you apply diametrically opposed standards of evidence based on their alignment to your in-group?
The problem with the lawfare argument, is that people can claim 'lawfare' even when the investigation is fully warranted. The classified documents in the Trumps bathroom, for example. This wasn't lawfare, this was a guy breaking the law and being investigated for it.
In Elon's case, he is not a truthful person. He was recently caught lying and cheating about being good at video games of all things. Just for cred. Imagine what he's capable when the stakes were higher.
'Lawfare' is just a way for the out-of-power party to cry victim even when they fully and absolutely did the crime. It means that when they get back in power they not only get a free pass but also an excuse to crush anyone who had the gal to even try and hold them accountable.
Innocent people can be genuine victims of lawfare, just as easily as guilty people can claim to be victims of lawfare.
The previous administration is widely regarded to have engaged in lawfare, so I would prefer to assume that their political rivals are innocent until proven otherwise, rather than guilty by default.
Trump is widely regarded as having committed crimes. It is the persons actions that make them guilty. And in Trumps case, his actions are public record so no assumptions are necessary.
And for a hypothetical, if he was in fact guilty and the investigations were warranted. And then he used his presidential power to punish and fire everyone remotely associated with those cases. Would this be a good or bad thing in your opinion?
> The previous administration is widely regarded to have engaged in lawfare
No, it wasn’t. That was claimed by a specific subset of people who wanted to evade consequences for the crimes they committed, but that wasn’t backed up by even a cursory review of the facts.
You can see a similar example with claims that Eric Adams suffered from “lawfare”, which might be an effective political tactic but are clearly contradicted by the evidence against him. Lots of criminals claim they’re innocent but that doesn’t mean they’re right.
Let's look at a single example of Elon Musk's alleged crimes. He bought Twitter stock in 2022 and did not follow disclosure laws, which led to him getting an extra $150 million. It took the SEC more than two years to investigate him and decide to proceed with charges. That's more due process than most people get.
https://www.sec.gov/enforcement-litigation/litigation-releas...
You're completely right. If it was truly about financial cuts Trump wouldn't be trying to shutdown the Presidio Trust which is required, by Congressional Act, to be self-sustaining and made $58 million dollars last year on $182 million in revenue.
Don't threaten us all with a good time - there are too many big government people on the right wing of politics for an attempt to destroy the government to be made. They're trying to shrink it. Damage, possibly, if you want an emotive word.
On the scale of US government reforms it doesn't seem like anything particularly notable has happened so far. Executive policy doesn't have a lot of staying power.
I would agree with you, except for NIH/CDC/NSF. That and a repeat of the hostility of the US towards scientific visitors and phd students we saw in the first incarnation of this administration is going to have a major effect on the momentum of scientific research for quite a long time.
Don't forget the DOE. The pipeline for training nuclear physicists to work at national labs industry and medicine is already being wrecked. Undergrad summer research funding is mostly gone this year where I am. Very bad for the country, very bad for US scientific leadership.
If you discount education, healtcare, nukes, foreign policy, and national security, sure. Nothing is directly harming your day to day life except the looming recesion trump is accellerating. Even then, if you're rich enough that still won't impact you.
They are trying to shrink it with a sledgehammer. In my head the ends do not in fact justify the means. It's like solving famine by killing half the population. It would indeed work and give more resources to the remainder.
The head of the office of Management and Budget said on video, that you can watch:
We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.
It's most startling to me that there seems to be this implicit assumption that people working in the bureaucracy are the ones making the rules. The rules are being requested by Congress. One can like it dislike the rules but if we want fewer of them it's Congress who most remove them. It also should be possible for any reasonable person to see that if we ask the government to do something we should want to do it well. The worst outcome is creating lots of rules and regulations that then get badly implemented and I need to wait years for my permit, passport renewal, tax return etc or our national parks turn into fire hazards and similar.
> there seems to be this implicit assumption that people working in the bureaucracy are the ones making the rules
Most regulations come about due to agency rulemaking under vague or broad statutes, so this implicit assumption is likely generally true.
Given that power, it doesn't surprise me that Republicans would be uncomfortable with organisations like 18F that had zero ideological diversity, in much the same way that I would expect Democrats to be uncomfortable inheriting an agency composed entirely of MAGA types.
Regardless of their technical prowess, as a government organisation, they should have taken more care to avoid becoming completely partisan, and shouldn't be surprised at this outcome.
> it doesn't surprise me that Republicans would be uncomfortable with organisations like 18F that had zero ideological diversity
Ideological diversity within the federal bureaucracy is exactly what the war against the permanent civil service is directed against, in favor of partisan patronage and Führerprinzip.
That's one of the side effects of hiring on merit rather than voting patterns
The best of the best that actually want to take part in making effective change for the better within goverment services will tend to have a progressive outlook.
I love how it's "We KNOW diversity makes us stronger" kinda stuff right up till it's all people you agree with then we don't need diversity any more and it's all merit.
I've known this was true forever but it's interesting seeing it said out loud now.
> W̶h̶i̶t̶e̶ m̶e̶n̶ DOGE can't be ideologically diverse?
In theory DOGE could be diverse. In practice, at this specific time there's no real indication they're age diverse, gender diverse, or even messiah diverse.
You would first have to ask scarab92, dragonwriter, and hypothesis if they ' really mean "ideologically" ' and then address the question of why did you substitute DOGE with White men .. which is all getting a tad meta for me.
As for that part of "there" ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43228187 ) which is all me .. I very much meant that the DOGE operatives do not appear to suffer from any form of diversity by any metric.
> Are you assuming that the current makeup of the civil service is ideologically diverse?
On the whole. Yes. Given the lengths of careers, the structure of the civil service system (both the formal structure and the way it has, until last month, been applied in practice), and the different and (in some areas more than others regional and occupational-area biases in who is attracted to it, that would be hard to avoid.
> There were no conservatives at 18F.
Even if that were true, the mass firings of federal civil servants haven't been limited to 18F.
How do you legislate "ideological neutrality" into an agency? There's nothing left-wing about 18F's mission.
If Republicans are unhappy about how agencies use rulemaking power, they have had many opportunities over the past few decades to pass bills more clearly defining the powers of those agencies.
He’s a Christian nationalist. He thinks the Feds doing normal things like science, environmental protection, etc, are not “Christian” enough, or at least somehow are in support of an anti-Christian movement. He therefore wants to dismantle the government so as to reduce the anti-Christian elements of government.
A
If that sounds like conspiracy level crazy, it’s because it is.
> If that sounds like conspiracy level crazy, it’s because it is.
Stating the facts of this situation makes one sound like a conspiracy nut, which is strategic. It's part of the fascist project of reshaping the perception of reality. We're all supposed to (and over time we will, if it's left unchecked) question our own lying eyes and begin believing it when they say things like "the sky isn't blue in fact it's green".
My most prominent memory of Jason was seeing him park his Tesla in the “no parking” zone in front of the building where his startup conference was happening. My boss at the time thought it was “so badass”, but it was so obviously an arrogant elitist LARP by an insecure man.
The older I get, the more I see through this awful behavior.
I attended a bigwig event where Jason gave a speech; I’d heard of him but hadn’t followed his podcast or seen him talk before. I was dumbfounded by the arrogance and lack of concern for people. It left me with a very negative impression of the tech bro scene and Musk (who he mentioned he was buddies with this) and this was pre MAGA-Musk.
Exactly the same reaction. I realized these kind of people don’t actually care about technology. They’re not engineers. They don’t love the industry or the impressive human achievement. They see tech as a vehicle to power. It’s all a power game.
The way to square this is to realize that the stated goals are not the real goals. USDS and 18F were doing the work that DOGE purports to want to do. Less than 2 months into the administration, they have been gutted and terminated, respectively.
They both brought in great private industry talent to make digital services better. 18F in particular did this in a cost-recoverable way. So killing 18F saves literally $0
Federal worker salaries make up around 4% of the entire federal budget. On your stated figures, if you eliminated the entire government workforce, you would only be saving around 40 billion every 3 months. You would still be spending 960 billion. And you wouldn't have a functioning government.
USDS and 18F took people with experience in industry who were also politically savvy, and placed them where they could help the existing government and their contractors (which has grown absolutely terrible at building things) cut costs while increasing service.
DOGE will do worse, in service of bringing about the oligarchy.
That's mostly from benefits, defense, unfunded tax cuts, and entitlements, not the type of spending DOGE claims to be addressing. Go look at a broad summary of Federal spending categories, then look at the history of the deficit under the last four or five Presidential administrations.
DOGE is about conducting an ideological party purge of the government bureaucracy. Overall I predict it will cost money, since it'll cause a lot of things to break and/or be replaced by more expensive contractors.
This is so true. I recently listened to Lex Fridman's Marc Andreessen interview and all I could think was, this guy doesn't actually know how government, laws, and regulations work. Like _totally_ clueless and he's pontificating on the subject like he's a founding father.
I found Marc to be totally insufferable in that episode too. It was blatantly obvious that everything he said was a weak, nonsensical attempt to justify his (and Elon’s) obvious goals of destroying government infrastructure to enable privatization, and removing any and all regulatory oversight so the billionaire class can further exploit America’s labor and natural resources. Both of which do nothing to help the ordinary American but do a lot to enrich the billionaires.
Marc is extremely intelligent, and he is an idealist.
Idealists can run into implementation difficulties, but having listened to his interview, I don't recall anything that would be impossible to implement given the current make up of the three branches.
Can you elaborate on a proposal of his that you think is unworkable?
The thing is they aren't intellectually deficient. They are deliberately spreading propaganda, to try and make an oligarchic takeover of the United States seem more palatable to the masses.
They are working to secure the conditions for themselves that the French royalty and elite had in 1788, while preventing the masses from reacting how they did in France.
So, no, I don't believe that they're intellectually deficient. They're just liars.
I think they’re intellectually incurious rather than deficient. They’re not dumb people. But they’re so convinced of their own genius that despite knowing nothing about how government actually works they are still convinced they know how to fix it.
I've too been thinking along these lines lately. A month ago I would think it's an alarmist/overblown to frame the situation in such a way but simply looking at the actions and ignoring the "justification"/propaganda must result in updating the model - it's indeed oligarchic takeover.
Yup. They’re as out of touch as any other willfully arrogant rich guy. It’s pretty depressing because tech billions seem to be the king makers now so we gotta listen to what they have to say. SMH.
Only people who have never read history sign up to be kingmakers. Just about every single time in history, the made king when he has consolidated enough power will turn against the “kingmakers”. It is inevitable
You only have to look at a high level breakdown of the budget to know that DOGE is not serious. You are not going to get trillions in saving by cutting administrative overhead in various departments.
In its governmental guise, Patrimonialism is distinguished by running the state as if it were the leader’s personal property or family business.
Trump is the capo di tutti capi, the overboss of all overbosses, the Godfather.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/02/corruption...
The point of the cuts is not cost reduction. It’s to punish the federal bureaucracy, which the populist right perceives as ideologically opposed to themselves.
<< We’re better off with more power in the hands of the bureaucracy and less in the hands of populist politicians.
How is it dishonest? Parent says "beauracracy" is better, but this is not what the system is set up for and not how it is designed. The reason for current preference for "beauracracy" as 'better' is partisan at best, hence my reading is not only not dishonest, but disturbingly accurate. And this is all before we get to the part of how we got here and the more interesting part of previous federal workforce purges ( and the resulting rise of "beauracracy" ).
It is not partisan at all. If left-wing populists took over the Democratic Party and tried to radically upend the system, I'd also hope the professional civil service resisted them.
You think Citizen’s United was a good ruling. You think the Voting Rights Act hasn’t been gutted despite thousands of polling stations shutting down. You think there was some bureaucratic state plotting against the executive despite no evidence. Your link is an article about people taking Project 2025 and Trump at their word and trying to plan accordingly. You have no objecticity. Your logic is horribly flawed. You are the problem.
> You think there was some bureaucratic state plotting against the executive despite no evidence.
What more evidence do you need than a WaPo article talking about federal workers that declared they would resist Trump’s policies?
> Your link is an article about people taking Project 2025 and Trump at their word and trying to plan accordingly.
The article is from February 2017. And “trying to plan” what?
> You have no objecticity. Your logic is horribly flawed. You are the problem
Let me ask you a question. You agree that, since Trump won the election, federal employees should work just as hard implementing Project 2025 as they did for Biden, including coming up with creative legal theories like Biden did for student loan forgiveness. Right?
> It is really really concerning to me how seemingly thoughtless these cuts are to the actual stated goals.
That's because the actual goals are not the stated goals; the whole thing is part of a well-documented plan to destroy the federal civil service and much of the government so it can be rebuilt as a partisan patronage operation.
Jason probably means he doesn't use it for large deliveries, which isn't reality, since I believe they move the most parcels in the US (and probably the world).
Because of this, suggesting a single delivery day doesn't scale at all, even if you regionalize these days, unless USPS moves to delivery hubs, which would further erode quality of life for rural people (many of whom have limited mail service as it is) and probably make deliveries to really remote locations (some parts of Alaska; mountainous areas; etc.) impossible.
If he suggested this to make it easier for his FDX and UPS stonks to go up, he probably isn't aware that these carriers often use USPS for last-mile delivery because they are the ONLY carrier that have the infra to deliver to the aforementioned destinations. No private company will attempt to replicate this infra, as doing so would require billions of dollars of investment for very little ROI, and why spend big money improving the lives of citizens when the AI furnace needs more fuel?
USPS is fucking incredible for the value, and it sucks that conservatives are so invested in destroying it.
It's also directly constitutionally mandated. Given how important free communication has always been understood to be, I would argue the intention behind that would extend to telecom/internet as a utility as well. Yet we keep getting collectively burned by gifting for-profit companies taxpayer money to build infrastructure that should by all rights be public.
Okay, now that these are clearly against the stated goals, you must then ask and answer for yourself: what are DOGE's unstated goals?
By looking at Musk's tweets about it being a "far-left" group (plus his two Nazi salutes) and DOGE's emphasis on cutting DEI/sexual and racial minority programs, the unstated goals are clear and loud. If you don't look for the unstated goals and only listen to people's words rather than their actions, you're going to be blindsided by a lot more cruelty and not see it coming.
If you have dealt with countries like Russia, one idea that can be useful for understanding them is oligarchic capitalism. That the purpose of the economy is to benefit the elites. That the share of wealth that goes to the common people is an overhead necessary to keep the system running. Which, like all overheads, should be kept to a reasonable minimum.
Oligarchic societies do not try to maximize the overall economy. They try to maximize the wealth the elites can extract. If there is an alternative where the overall economy is 2x bigger but the elites receive 10% less in absolute terms, it's clearly a worse outcome from their perspective.
From that perspective, government services should not be evaluated based on their outputs or their impact on government efficiency or economic growth. They should be evaluated based on their impact on the elites. If they don't benefit the elites, they are overhead that can be cut if necessary.
Oligarchs do not care about the economy in the sense it is traditionally understood in the West.
> Jason Calcanis suggest that the USPS go down to one delivery day per week because no one uses it
It seems like there are two possible reasons he could've made a statement like this:
- He is utterly detached from reality and how the world works, shocking for someone who is at such an elevated position in industry. Borderline disabled.
- He is stating this dishonestly, not because he believes it but to signal to other right-wing reactionary zealots in his peer group that he would support dismantling the most critical institutions in his society in order to enrich members of his tiny class at the expense of everyone else.
You ever wonder if it is a specific ...I'll call it "business" culture for lack of a better term, like the one around posting on this site, that leads you to have to give credit to these people presuming good faith?
Its almost like to exist in the tech space is to cultivate an intentional naivety about how power works and who has it that is being exploited to run cover as truly bad actors accomplish their goals.
> For reference the USPS delivers over 100B, yes billion, parcels per year.
This must be pieces of mail per year? To me "parcel" means more like a package.
Some web searching confirms this and also says a little over half of that is marketing mail. 60B pieces of spam per year. And I don't know about you, but excluding marketing mail, I'd say about 90% of the remainder still goes directly in the bin for me. And even though I open probably less than 5% of what is sent to me, maybe less than 1%, STILL much of that could have been an email.
I don't doubt the USPS provides a whole lot of value and I don't want them to go down to 1 day per week or anything. But that 100B number looks like it includes a whole lot of negative, zero, or low value items.
As an American adult, I find your list extremely ucompelling. For the average person, that entire list probably accounts for a handful of pieces of mail per year on average. Several of those items are things I've never received by mail and several others are things I'd prefer to receive by email and immediately throw away if I do get them in the mail.
Several of those items are things I've never received by mail and several others are things I'd prefer to receive by email…
this is how government should work, we get one person’s opinion on how they operate and how they use said utility and that ought to do it - problem solved
Is there anything on this list that is so time critical that it would be hurt by postal delivery being dropped to, say, twice a week? I'm not seeing anything obvious, but might see it differently.
Does any of that mean we need to lie and pretend that there's 100B pieces of useful mail being delivered? Just because there's a lot of useful mail doesn't mean there's 100B of it. That number shouldn't pass anyone's sniff test.
Does the postal service only have value to you if it delivers 100B pieces of "useful" mail a year, according to some metric of useful? Even if I somehow thought the same way there is no version of a plan where I trust someone in government (or not in government) to decide what mail has value to me. This seems like such a dead end take. Yes junk mail is crappy, just like lots of other worthwhile tradeoffs when designing massive scale policy.
I don't know if it's correct or not, but it doesn't fail my sniff test. It's an average of ~1 piece of mail per person per day. Most people probably don't get more than one piece of useful mail per week, but there are also people conducting business through the mail that might send or receive far more than that.
It would become substantially more expensive and thus substantially less in volume.
Which indirectly shows the efficiency and value of the USPS. The fact that they can get stuff to people so cheaply is something nobody else can replicate.
It's true that the average flat paper mail I get is probably trash, but the percent that isn't trash tends to be quite important, and when you add packages delivered to that, the number of days per week that "real" mail is delivered to our address has gone up over the last twenty years, not down. (Not saying that's normal, but lot of deliveries.)
It would be lovely if you could have the USPS scan and send all physical mail electronically (as a paid Mail + Pro fee) --and have it piped directly to a GPT who reads all the mail, logs the data into Sqlite3 and then have summaries, reminders, due dates, amount, budget hits, as daily summaries from your GPT of choice..
And then you can block marketing mail thats sent to you, and the USPS can encrypt the images that are sent to you...
But you still need to receive things that are physical (like credit cards)
There used to be mail services that people could have their mail routed to...
But yeah, we still need mail - but we need "Mail+Pro" Subscription - And now the "You have mail" guy can be replaced by AI...
The source is called open your mailbox and look at what’s in there. There is a massive industry designing, printing, shipping around pieces of paper that just get thrown away for no purpose. Some of them are outright scams (“Important Information! Open Immediately!” and it’s just an ad).
That’s what it’s always been. That’s what pays for you to have the ability to send a letter across the country to some rural area for 30 cents. That’s how it works.
I don't know what the actual share of junk mail is for physical or even e-mail, but let's suppose 90% of most people's e-mail in the entire world is spam, should all e-mail providers only deliver email, be it spam or not, once a day?
You can add yourself to the opt-out prescreen list to remove credit card offers for a 5-year period. If you change your mind, you can opt back in at any time.
He also had a good idea of making people who want USPS pay a very minimal surcharge (a few bucks a year) to stop the
hemorrhaging of tax payers money by the USPS.
Firstly, since 1971 the Postal Service has operated independently, receiving no taxpayer money (other than about $100 million allocated by Congress to offset the cost of providing free mailing for blind people, overseas mailing, etc).
Until 2006, the Postal Service was entirely self sufficient, with no debt and no need for taxpayer funding.
However, in 2006 Congress passed a law requiring the Postal Service to prefund future retiree's health benefits (75 years in advance), which costs $5.6 billion per year. By 2012, the Postal Service hit its $15 billion debt limit, directly because of this.
The Postal Service itself does not lose money, and does not require funding, because it sells postage-- mailing is not free. The insane policy that Congress has foisted on it does lose taxpayer money, by requiring it to do something as far as I know no other organization does or is required to do.
If you want to fix the budget deficit at the Post Office, simply get that law repealed.
80% of this hemorrhaging is due to the prefunding pensions requirement that Congress put upon the USPS.
And it’s a service! It’s not supposed to make money. The government is not an investment firm for taxpayers. You might as well ask when we’re going to scale back the military. We hardly use it and it’s running at a loss!
In 2024, the United States Postal Service (USPS) reported a net loss of $9.5 billion, an increase from the $6.5 billion loss in fiscal year 2023. So, who's paying for the losses then?
Not broadly a fan of what this admin is doing, but re: USPS: my family gets one, maybe two important pieces of mail a year. We get several pieces of worthless junk mail every day. Virtually everything the USPS delivers goes instantly into the trash.
The same is true for my company. In fact I'm not sure we received one piece of physical mail in the past year of any consequence.
Obviously this isn't true for everyone, but some reduction in frequency of delivery could save a lot of money. Either that or raise the cost and kill junk mail.
Why is your instinct, based solely on your observed experience, to reduce services for the entirety of the American populus rather than a less destructive route, like households opting out of mail delivery?
I suspect it's because you do receive "one or two important" pieces per year and because you cannot anticipate when someone will send them to you. That's the value provided to all Americans by this beautiful system.
If the USPS is delivering junk mail below the cost of delivery, that would be bad and they should immediately stop that. But I would be willing to bet that's not happening. I don't like junk mail one bit, but it's obviously a profit center and I assume that revenue defrays the cost of other services.
Junk mail is bad. But voters going around thinking that taxpayers are funding junk mail is much worse. If large fractions of the citizenry can’t apply common sense and develop a working mental model of how the world works, we’re all dead. And I don’t mean that figuratively.
In 2011, most of what the USPS delivered was junk mail[0] and it's only gotten worse[1]. Junk mailers pay less per item than first-class mailers (actual mail). The USPS operates at a multi-billion dollar loss every year. Intuitively, we're subsidizing junk mail.
If you get lots of important items 6 days a week via first-class mail then I can see you having the perspective of junk mail is actually subsidizing this important service.
However, my guess is that most people don't. This is based on my own lived personal experiences and those of the extended network of people in my social circle. It's not made in a vacuum. Therefore common sense is that we're subsidizing an errand of cleaning trash out of our mailboxes several times a week.
I get that people are sensitive to government services under the current political climate but there is no reason we couldn't cut back service to say 5 days a week instead of 6.
This is not intuitive. We're maintaining a service because we have made a democratic decision to provide that service. The junk mail is subsidizing that service. I hate junk mail too, but we don't get to claim that the sky is "down" just because we're standing on our heads.
We could make a decision to cut back service if we want, but we haven't. I strongly suspect that part of the reason we haven't decided to cut back the postal service is that many voters are elderly and find the postal service vastly more essential than young technical people on HN do. I'm not in a position to tell society that it's wrong.
(And frankly, given that we barely have a working electronic payment infrastructure in this country that can serve that audience, I'm not sure we're ready to do that.)
You understand that USPS is not sending you junk mail but some advertiser pays them to do so, right? So perhaps you are suggesting that USPS should increase the rates? Because otherwise your comment doesn’t make much sense.
My family receives multiple pieces of mail each week which are important and valued. Losing the USPS entirely or reducing to once a week delivery would be very much noticed here.
my family gets one, maybe two important pieces of mail a year.
Your experience is not the only experience.
There are another 300 million Americans with different needs than yours. And it's hubris to pretend that your way and your life is superior to everyone else.
Yep, same here, and it's bizarre that people seem offended and are downvoting this comment.
The only reason I can this being downvoted is people see this as a political discussion. It really isn't. As people have turned to email and bills get delivered online, we're subsidizing junk mail in a sense because the USPS operates at a loss.
I never met him IRL, but you form a one way relationship with people you look up to online and Mikeal is one of the people for me. May he rest easy.