Most businesses over a certain size also waste a f**kton of money. The larger the organization, the harder it is to avoid doing so.

I told you exactly how this practice creates waste. At the end of the year, unspent budget goes away, so the people to whom the budget was assigned look for ways to spend it. Most of that spending was not specifically budgeted for, or else the stuff would have been bought earlier in the cycle. And if it were strictly necessary, it would have been explicitly budgeted, rather than being bought because there just happened to be money left over.

What percentage of that spending provides a real benefit? There's no way to know, because they didn't have to provide a formal justification and ask for more funding to cover it, since there was money left over from something else that didn't cost as much as expected.

The problem is that you can ALWAYS get around rules. It isn't possible to make perfect rules for anything above a minimal level of complexity - that's just a variant of the Turing-Church Halting Problem.

So you are forced to invert the dynamics. There's no real alternative. Instead of you creating a high level of complexity that the departments will work their arses off to avoid, you force the departments themselves to create the regimens that they're prepared to live with. But you have to do so cleverly. They will always create regimens that mean they do the least work necessary (because that's cheap on resources and they will ALWAYS consider this sort of extra work to be an imposition) and have the least amount of culpability.

So you need to meet three conditions:
1. The department can't evade the bits they're actually able to do
2. The department CAN pass on work they're not equipt to do, but ONLY if it's their responsibility to oversee the department they pass it onto
3. The department IS inescapably culpable for failure to either do the work OR ensure that others do it

You do NOT need the frameworks for each department, and should not attempt to draw those up. Those will be departmentally-specific and timeframe-specific. Far, far better have people who actually know the specific context do that work. No department likes to look like it's being forced to do anything, so making the actual detailed specifics internal, you're utilising their psychology. They're not being "forced", they're defining their additional responsibilities and duties. From a psychological angle, they're much more likely to be receptive to this perspective.

But because the departments are all internally writing their own management protocols, YOU DON'T HAVE TO. You only need to have a framework which obliges them to write up what they will request. This is MUCH lighter and, because it is much lighter, it is far less prone to have failure points where generic ideas don't work for a specific type of work.

If we want to look at this in software terms, only an idiot would write an overly-restrictive langauge that imposes a strict model of thought regardless of the type of work. If you want to provide a high level of confidence in correctness, you don't try to impose it through a myriad of complex hurdles and rigorously controlled APIs. You achieve it by incorporating contracts (function X is guaranteed to take in data meeting these requirements, and is guaranteed to deliver data meeting these other requirements). Contract programming is much, much lighter on the development process, doesn't impose on the programmer, and yet creates a very high level of assurance. Mostly because programmers aren't working to try and cheat with irritating APIs.

In Linux terms, you want a lightweight virtual layer handling filesystems in general, the filesystem policies should be handled by the filesystem not the main kernel. You want the main kernel to be doing as little of the work as possible. As soon as it is heavy and micromanaging everything, you're going to end up with something slow and unstable, that really can't do a whole lot.

You want to push the complexity to the edges, that's where complexity belongs. The bit that changes slowly, can't handle special cases, has least visibility into what is needed, and is really a very blunt instrument wants to be lightweight. One reason for having things like Common Law and Case Law is precisely because the legal system figured all this out centuries ago.

Yes, but for a wealthy person, this is a much tinier fraction of their wealth.

The fact remains for someone under the threshold of the standard deduction, the property tax is something they have to pay that they cannot deduct, but a landlord could.

As I said, it's deductable without regard to the standard deduction. You can take the standard deduction *and* the property tax deduction but only if you are a landlord. I don't know how you decided to say "No you can't deduct that, it gets deducted"

A common person is somewhat potentially in posession of hundreds of thousands in house value. They are relatively less likely to have that much in stock except maybe their 401k, which is totally different.

Yes, there's sales tax. Ordinary income gets taxed that way on top of income tax. The leveraging unrealized gains as a loan is the most famous loophole, re-upping through re-borrowing at payoff and juggling that until death where there's a much more favorable estate tax.

The fact that you can't see government waste tells me that either you're not looking closely enough to see the problems or you're benefitting from the waste.

One of the core problems with government waste comes from the budgeting process itself, wherein money that is not spent a the end of a budget year must be given back, and your next year's budget will likely be cut based on the fact that you didn't use your entire budget that year. This sounds like a good idea in theory, until you realize that managers see that as a risk to them being able to do what they need to do the next year, which means they will find ways to spend any unused budget at the end of the year (or worse, the quarter), even if it is for things that could easily be deferred until a later year, or for things that they don't strictly require. And this is how budgets bloat.

To be fair, the same thing happens in businesses, academia, etc.; it is not specific to government. But it is very, very common in government. And while those expenses might not look like a lot at an individual team level, they add up to a lot by the time you look at the organization as a whole.

But no, the hilarious thing is that you're telling me I'm wrong without actually rebutting a single point that I've made, which means you're likely arguing based on blind faith in an ideology or political group, rather than based on an actual understanding of how government budgeting works, which makes your opinion largely irrelevant in practice.

Just saying.

I disagree. It actually needs less regulation.

The siloing of knowledge and duties is why it was always somebody else's problem. So you simply take out all the regulations that obligate siloing and replace all of that kerfufle with a single rule: "If it's on your plate and nobody else has published that they've done the work so far, it's your responsibility, silos be damned, and failure leaves you liable".

That's it.

That's all we need. A removal of siloed thinking and a duty to complete all of the scheduled work regardless of whose toes it tramples.

That would have solved the problem. But, because departments never like to give up powers they obtain, a side-effect would be that departments would be proactive. They wouldn't walk down piers, looking for strange things. Rather, if they heard of strange things that are their department, if they don't want to be shamed, then they need to ask the company for more information. Because then it's on their plate and not that of a rival department.

The other benefit of using this approach is that it isn't about the special cases, it's about the general problem that underlies all of the special cases of this sort: nobody takes responsibility until it's already a disaster.

If a department is liable for pretending the problems aren't there, then the department wil CYA. If the only way to do so is to do all the outstanding work, regardless of title, then that work will get done. If the only way to get it done right IS to give it to the right department, and they're on the hook until that has happened, you're damned right it'll happen.

I've worked in the public sector, I've seen the paranoia and closed-mindedness first-hand. That's not going to go away. So you solve the issue by exploiting those traits, since you can't eliminate them.

I prefer Bruce Schneir and his co-author's plan. https://www.schneier.com/blog/...

You're an asshole.

Different American, that is, the 90% of us (I suppose I can assume you're a Russian troll), rather than 80 or so people who control it all.

Did the Kool-Aid (tm) taste good? Did yuo have to pay for it?

Let's try "paying the majority of employees starvation wages, such that some of them need food stamps (Walmart has an actual division to halp employees, many of whom they do not want to make full time, and pay benefits, to help them get food stamps). And then they pay *NO* taxes (Mu$k? Tesla?), but you're paying taxes...

Ghu, you're stupid. And you're no millionaire, since you're posting here.

Oh, yeah. How much in the way of assets does the DSA have (I should check, I need to re-up my membership)?

Billionaires, and trillion dollar companies paying *no* taxes, and you're a millionaire with a temporary cash-flow problem.

In other words, you're too stupid to live on your own.

Seems to me it's the GOP that is obsessed with this issue and with what's in kids' pants. They're the ones constantly stoking the culture wars.

s/giraffe/drain/

Where are the usual "think of the kids!" politicians? I guess accepting kickbacks from Meta...

A few sources including Wikipedia. Different values have been used over time apparently ranging from 450-493MWe. It is apparently three identical reactors but unclear if it is in a single location (presumably) or three different ones.

The counterpoint is that the valuation seems to be a fiction when it could represent a liability, and a real thing when they want to, say, take out a loan against it.

It's awfully convenient that it is selectively fictional.

Note that for more humble "wealth", folks are taxed. If you own the house you live in, even if you are not using it as a financial instrument but just a place to live, you get taxed on the unrealized "value" of the house. I don't get to say the market value of my house is a fiction since I'm not selling it.

So we have a double standard, rich people wealth is selectively fictional with respect to tax burden, common person wealth is very much considered real for taxation purposes.

Even wilder, if you live in your house, your property tax is subject to the standard deduction, which means folks generally don't get a deduction for it. If you own a house that you rent out to someone else, the property tax you pay is not subject to the deductible, and you can deduct it. The tax system rewards landlords more than homeowners.

It seems that either you assess a property tax on net worth analogous to what is imposed on common folk or at *least* tax loans against such assets that have nothing to do with paying for that asset.

What's next? Screwsharks? Shit usually exists for a reason, even if unclear and sometimes bad ones. Taking a chainsaw to all of it has caused havoc and probably cost more than it saved.

Screwworms prevention was a mission of USAID. The US was giving aid to many countries which meant that screwworms were being stopped in those countries before it came close to US soil.

The research into screwworms was part of the whole "trans mice" research they openly mocked as they proudly cut funding to. The "trans" refers to transgenetic - i.e., genetically modified mice. The kind of thing you use to do all sorts of research into (especially things like cancer).

The "FO" part of DOGE cuts is coming up. A lot of those programs were humanitarian, but also practical in keeping disease off US soil