DOGE was absolute nonsense from top to bottom. I was convinced it was purely a scam, but some exit interviews seem to indicate they really believed their own hype. Musk saying they'd find $1-2T in savings just by looking at stuff with AI was preposterous. And they brought in a squad of pathologically optimistic kids who believed him. They were so grossly inexperienced and irrational that they really thought they could put budgets into a spreadsheet type "Find the fraud" into ChatGPT and find anything useful and were surprised when they didn't. Then they repeatedly lied about their progress. You can't expect any level of operational sophistication or political savvy from a team that inept.
Of course, everything is just something boring. The chances of us espying extraterrestrials in our atmosphere by chance are essentially nil. People looking for secret photos and buried evidence will absolutely positively never find it. People inside the DoD are just as crazy and irrational as the general public if not moreso. If a flying saucer lands in your front yard and little green men come out and say "take me to your leader" it's still infinitesimally likely that it's actually aliens. Meeting aliens will be nothing like any movie or book ever written (except maybe Contact).
If we are being visited we would never see them unless they decided to show themselves, and if they did it would be absolutely unambiguous.
Someone with the tech to travel the stars (or something weirder like between dimensions) could make probes the size of bugs, sand, or dust. They could also image us at incredible resolution from afar, receive all our signals, and so on. They might be able to do even weirder and crazier forms of surveillance we don’t even understand yet, like high resolution imaging with neutrinos or gravity waves.
They could study us all they wanted and we’d never know.
Look into how advanced some of our spy tech is, and we have barely left our planet.
In my experience, companies never value transparency. And it's doubly true for companies that boast about transparency. Obviously, it's within their authority to cut head count, but they've also obviously made some kind of major strategic shift either to cut costs or abandon some lines of business and they are not being upfront about it at all. The stock is up 111% over 12 months. They don't seem to be in any danger of crashing or collapsing.
Progress has been incredibly rapid. Solar power in particular has gotten exponentially cheaper and more widely deployed. We are in an incredibly deep hole and are aiming at a rapidly moving target (energy demand is growing rapidly due to AI) but we've already hit our first inflection point in terms of renewables making up almost of our added capacity and it's within reach for fossil fuel usage to peak and start falling. Of course, that's still only early milestones since we will continue to add GHGs even as the pace slows. But right now it actually really seems like we have a grip on the problem and are moving in the right direction. It's really not the time to despair, but to double down.
That's not really relevant. Even if you look at countries like Norway that have gone all in on EVs and decarbonizing rapidly, they still export oil faster than ever. So long as no one interrupts the global trade of fossil fuels, they don't care.
Getting rid of middle managers has been the game plan for every headcount reduction for the last 50 years. They always seem expendable until a few months later when senior managers get overwhelmed and staff get confused and they end up making the same org they just destroyed.
How many player-coaches have their actually been in any major pro sport in the last 20 years? Zero give or take? The last one I recall is Pete Rose and that was like 1985.
I retired recently in my late 40s (FIRE). Work was occasionally fulfilling, but mostly just a drag and when I didn't need it anymore, I was more than happy to stop. I've been raising my kids which is stimulation enough, but they are teens now and don't need such constant attention. Most of my other interests got swallowed up by career and kids and I don't really have the urge to go back to them. Actually thinking about going to grad school.
Last time I tried using real-time chat support for a technical issue, I spent 30 minutes explaining my problem to a human only to find out they were a sales rep whose only solution was to sell me more services. Once I said I didn't want that, they transferred me to tech support who gaslit me and left me on read long enough to make my session time out.
I think of support channels are just there to deflect customers and not really support anything. An AI bot will have infinite patience for that kind of interaction. Empowerment is never part of the equation.
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