Shocking. Never happened to anybody else ever. Getting fired is a completely new invention. At least, there’s a news program to inform us that losing one’s job is unpleasant. We’d never find out otherwise.
Unexpected Revelations
Opinions, art, debate
Clarissa's Blog 
What does one say to any of that?
I mean, not just the government employees shocked, shocked to be faced with something like the real, normal job market, but… the fact that they got an hourlong sympathetic TV slot to opine about it.
That’s a whole ecosystem of people (TV and bureaucratic) who’ve apparently never had any contact with the world the rest of us live in. How did they manage that?
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The weirdest thing is the abundance of weepy posts on social media of people who seem more preoccupied with these individuals’ mortgages than their own.
Yes, being fired is very unpleasant. But why is it so much more shocking when it happens to these people than to everybody else?
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It’s like some weird cross between aliens and children raised in a cult. Or a closet.
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How many stories did 60 minutes do about businesses who were fined/shut down for opening their stores during COVID, or about people who were fired for not taking the vaccine? Or about coal miners who were told by Biden to learn how to code?
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They can’t stop lying. Couldn’t even be bothered to interview actual career civil servants.
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Today’s maybe-not-so-unexpected but very amusing revelations:
The US has over a hundred thousand people with active social security numbers, in excess of 160 years of age.
And! The number of active social security numbers exceeds the US population by more than 64 million.
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…this reminds me of a fun study I read about. They wanted to look at all these pockets of population where there were high numbers of centenarians, and find out what was making them live so long. Was it diet? Healthy lifestyle? Good medical care? Genetics?
Once they looked at it… it turned out to just be pension fraud in every case.
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I do not know if this explains 64 million, but as far as I can judge from my own experience, everybody who ever lived legally in the US have those SSN. My family has them, and I guess they are “active”, as we paid into US social security when we lived in the US…
Somebody on the other (meaning left) side claims that 1875 is the birth date for everybody for whom the date is undetermined in the SS software…
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Aren’t they supposed to deactivate them when people die, though?
The real question is, how many of those 140+ year-olds are still drawing a social security check?
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Yes, I’m pretty sure that international students usually get a SS# even if they are only here for a few years before they go home. That alone would be several hundred thousand per year.
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The government still uses programs written in COBOL. COBOL’s default fill-it-in figure for missing data is 1875. I think you can do the arithmetic.
IOW, the problem is that the government is using outdated software, and the people looking at it now don’t know how it works.
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A default to 1875 would put all those at 150yrs currently. Look at the dang chart already, it’s not hard to find:
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1891350795452654076
You’d expect a very large bulge in the numbers at 150 if that were the sole problem. There’s a sizable dropoff *after* that bracket, but we’re still looking at nearly 4 million between age 130 and 139, which would not be explained by the 1875 default.
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They speak from the few remnants of solid modernity, hence their surprise. It is like TT faculty who think that they have a job forever. Of course, you and I know that this is not true and naive. I will live at work what you are living now by the end of the decade, and I have been thinking about B-plans for a couple of years now.
Thinking of you, as always.
Ol.
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“Unexpected Revelations”
Since no one else is mentioning this, I thought I might as well….
The intention of Musk and company is _not_ to weed out waste or separate the wheat from the chaff or any other nice metaphor.
The goal is to wreck as much as possible without regard for how well it works or how necessary it is.
That’s neoliberalism in its full blossom…. all destruction all the time.
I’m sure there are massive amounts of chaff that could/should be discarded but a lot more is going to be discarded to and it will be weeks or months before the damage starts showing up and it mostly won’t be fixable. The 300 fired nuclear safety experts are the tip of the iceberg and even if they can get them all back (If I were fired that way and had any other options I’d tell them piss on an electric heater if they tried to get me back).
Modern life is really complex and everything is related and there are going to be unpleasant real world effects from what is happening right now.
If people realize this and are okay with it as an acceptable price to cut a few programs that amount to very little…. then fine. Just don’t complain later.
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I’m deeply skeptical about the “Trump and Musk are gonna save us all” take on things.
Not sorry to see the cuts. Who knows what else they’ll do?
But…
We weren’t given any better options.
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I don’t think the point of these cuts is to save money. That is just an extra. The more important thing that DOGE is accomplishing is to starve their ideological enemies of funding. Their policies have ZERO support among regular people which is why they need to have armies of full-time employees to transmit and enforce their wretched message (open borders, trannyism, black worship, white hate, DEI etc.). Methyl’s church may burn down tomorrow but that will not prevent her from believing in her religion, because her belief is pure. These careerists and parasites have fake beliefs that only depend on whether they’re getting paid.
And that needs to stop. It may be 0.0001% of the federal budget, but that’s enough for their operations to discontinue, and that’s all I care about. Let them compete in the marketplace of ideas instead of getting fat off our taxpayer $$$. Fuck teachers unions, fuck federal worker unions, fuck them all. Using our money to build a pipeline to the democratic party is suicidal for us and I’m glad Trump is doing something about it.
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Yeah, I can appreciate that.
I sincerely hope that the money being cut is not being reallocated: it’s deficit spending and it needs to be disappeared, wiped of the bank-balance of the government, like it never existed.
That would at least start chipping away at inflation, which is what’s suffocating the rest of us.
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…not that I think that’ll happen. Too many rich people out there have been making out like bandits on the inflation thing, and actually owing money back that wasn’t declining in value all the time would tank an entire strata of society (including government) for whom debt is simply operating expenses.
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Plus, you’ll notice, even though Orange Man Bad is back in office… no protests.
Imagine that.
Pretty sure it’s because their subsidized travel/bail/stipend/lawyer fund just dried up.
When you sit back to think about *our own government* funding violent protests to burn down businesses in big cities, *in our own country*… yeah that absolutely needed to stop. And the organizers and funding-authorizers need to be prosecuted.
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“The intention of Musk and company is _not_ to weed out waste or separate the wheat from the chaff or any other nice metaphor.
The goal is to wreck as much as possible without regard for how well it works or how necessary it is.
That’s neoliberalism in its full blossom…. all destruction all the time.”
Fully agree with all this. I’ve been saying it for a while, and for some time deluding myself that maybe I’m wrong, but when you try to do all sorts of mental gymnastics to fit a narrative, maybe the narrative is totally wrong and your initial impressions are right.
A while ago I called Trump postmodernist leadership embodied in a man. The man has not real values, morals, loyalty, etc. Just a never ending need for power and attention to fill whatever vacuums a lack of morality or religion leaves behind.
Borrowing Clarissa’s words, I think Trump sees a lot of himself in Musk; something along the lines of Musk may be what Trump wishes he could have been all along. This still relatively young uber rich, uber successful, uber influential, amoral man that does what he pleases without any constraints of family or morality.
I could still be proven wrong, but every day that seems more and more unlikely.
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