(USA) I've been a lifelong sci fi fan, and have been disappointed at the devolution of the entire genre into dystopian nightmares. Turns out, we're in one. Day after day is a constant drip drip of the latest loonacy from a parade of ass clowns... the latest; a WWE style take down of a California Senator at a press conference in LA. Saddest of all? I fear we let our secondary educational outcomes slip away unnoticed over several decades, to where we are way down the list in terms of STEM outcomes in the world among advanced economies. I am not sure we can ever get it back. Are we going to enter an insular dark ages in the USA because of it? I mean, you have to have a whole lot of sub par graduates to elect something like the current clown show. Now that morons outnumber the rest of us, who's going to vote for rigorous outcomes that may, in time, lead to the critical mass of critical thinking necessary to maintain a bulwark against another lowest common denominator reality show takeover of the country? Keep fighting the good fight, Mari.
Thanks for this comment, Robert. Those goons who tackled Senator Padilla after he identified himself and asked a question civilly, look a lot like brownshirts to me.
And the loss of funding for medical and other scientific research is such a dumb, short-sighted decision. I’m in the cohort that may have only gotten one dose of the measles vaccine (my mom, understandably, can’t remember). So now I have to make an appointment with my doctor to have my antibodies measured and possibly get another vaccine. It’s so stupid and wasteful.
Oof. I so want to agree with you in theory, but based on what I've seen I'm 100% with Ronnie on this one. I believe there are some small, high-trust, homogeneous countries where this kind of government service works well and is trustworthy (Switzerland, probably Denmark and Norway, maybe others), but I think it's just a pipe dream for a place as big and diverse as the US or (even worse) just low-trust and as big as Italy.
We live in an area similarly given to random landslides and unstable terrain in general, but no one ever sounds the alarm beforehand in Italy as far as I can tell. If you're lucky and survive, they might evacuate you later and put you up in a hotel for a while (this happened in our tiny hamlet of <800 people in 2003/4, before we moved here, but while I lived not far away), but you better have your residence officially registered there (many landlords won't let you, despite the fact that it's illegal). Friends of ours lived in a house here they owned, but technically kept their residence at the mother-in-law's house in the agacent town because it was above their business and easier to manage the mail. They had to foot their own bill. We've had dam disasters sweep away multiple entire towns (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vajont_Dam, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Val_di_Stava_dam_collapse), mostly attributable to government corruption or poor maintenance, to say nothing of countless earthquakes, bridge collapses, and I'm going to stop here because I'm depressing myself.
I can't say FEMA has that great a reputation either -- we've seen some pretty terrible failures of management, response times and distribution during any number of disasters in my lifetime (Katrina, Helene and Maria, just to name hurricanes). The poorer you are, the less likely you are to even qualify for FEMA assistance. I'm not saying fixing all this is impossible, but it's definitely much more complicated than just funding them more (or at all). With 330 million people, I'm not even sure a federal agency for disasters even makes sense. Seems like we'd be better off with state-level entities that can maybe apply for federal grants in a pinch (although if that comes with boot-licking and sworn fealty now, I'm guessing it might not be worth it 🙄).
Thanks for this comment—and you are right to note that I was a bit too dismissive of ronetc’s comment. (Sorry, Ronnie!)
Your comment is reminding me of a terrible cable car crash in Italy a few years ago that killed more than a dozen people. Shortly after it happened, I was hiking with a Swiss man I had met on the trail. As we got in the cable car to head back down, he very sweetly reassured me that I shouldn’t be worried, because the kind of crash that happened in Italy would never happen in Switzerland. (This is indubitably true.)
So I admit that Switzerland is a special case, and that it is unfair to make comparisons. At the same time, though, I continue to think that government scientists who monitor conditions to predict disasters, and FEMA workers who help Americans recover from them, are exactly the workers whose jobs we shouldn’t be cutting right now.
I'm probably more theoretically supportive of the idea of cuts in general, but definitely with you on being leery of the slapdash, hypocritical way they've been carried out so far. I only really have enough bandwidth by now to freak out about the HHS stuff.
BTW, I was actually backing up "Ronnie" Reagan (something I never thought I'd say!) -- that's one of my favorite quotes 😂 Another is “Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.” (PJ O'Rourke) (Happy to exempt Switzerland on that one, too, though 😉)
Absolutely! These services benefit all Americans instead of a fortunate few. Thanks for the good wishes about the graduation! Isabel Wilkerson will be speaking, and we’re taking Casey out to our favorite Chinese restaurant afterwards, so it should be a lot of fun!
The essay would be correct about government services if the situation was in the perfect world of Schoolhouse Rock. However, we do not live in that perfect world where governmental agencies are lean and efficient, all employees knowledgeable and competent. In the world-as-it-actually-is, government agencies are bloated, inefficient, and politically-weaponized—with FEMA as a prime example, see recent North Carolina flooding and most any disaster at least since and including Katrina—and indeed do need to be cut down to size. Of course, the difficulty is determining which employees are knowledgeable and efficient and which ones are only taking up office space. But keeping the bloat, or, even worse, just throwing more money at the current incompetents is not actually helpful.
I don’t deny that there is government waste, but I think it’s nowhere near as bad as it is cracked up to be. Besides, I would rather waste a bit of money rescuing people and helping them recover, than have to pay a lot more later on to deal with people who have lost their homes and livelihoods after a natural disaster.
(USA) I've been a lifelong sci fi fan, and have been disappointed at the devolution of the entire genre into dystopian nightmares. Turns out, we're in one. Day after day is a constant drip drip of the latest loonacy from a parade of ass clowns... the latest; a WWE style take down of a California Senator at a press conference in LA. Saddest of all? I fear we let our secondary educational outcomes slip away unnoticed over several decades, to where we are way down the list in terms of STEM outcomes in the world among advanced economies. I am not sure we can ever get it back. Are we going to enter an insular dark ages in the USA because of it? I mean, you have to have a whole lot of sub par graduates to elect something like the current clown show. Now that morons outnumber the rest of us, who's going to vote for rigorous outcomes that may, in time, lead to the critical mass of critical thinking necessary to maintain a bulwark against another lowest common denominator reality show takeover of the country? Keep fighting the good fight, Mari.
Thanks for this comment, Robert. Those goons who tackled Senator Padilla after he identified himself and asked a question civilly, look a lot like brownshirts to me.
And the loss of funding for medical and other scientific research is such a dumb, short-sighted decision. I’m in the cohort that may have only gotten one dose of the measles vaccine (my mom, understandably, can’t remember). So now I have to make an appointment with my doctor to have my antibodies measured and possibly get another vaccine. It’s so stupid and wasteful.
Oof. I so want to agree with you in theory, but based on what I've seen I'm 100% with Ronnie on this one. I believe there are some small, high-trust, homogeneous countries where this kind of government service works well and is trustworthy (Switzerland, probably Denmark and Norway, maybe others), but I think it's just a pipe dream for a place as big and diverse as the US or (even worse) just low-trust and as big as Italy.
We live in an area similarly given to random landslides and unstable terrain in general, but no one ever sounds the alarm beforehand in Italy as far as I can tell. If you're lucky and survive, they might evacuate you later and put you up in a hotel for a while (this happened in our tiny hamlet of <800 people in 2003/4, before we moved here, but while I lived not far away), but you better have your residence officially registered there (many landlords won't let you, despite the fact that it's illegal). Friends of ours lived in a house here they owned, but technically kept their residence at the mother-in-law's house in the agacent town because it was above their business and easier to manage the mail. They had to foot their own bill. We've had dam disasters sweep away multiple entire towns (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vajont_Dam, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Val_di_Stava_dam_collapse), mostly attributable to government corruption or poor maintenance, to say nothing of countless earthquakes, bridge collapses, and I'm going to stop here because I'm depressing myself.
I can't say FEMA has that great a reputation either -- we've seen some pretty terrible failures of management, response times and distribution during any number of disasters in my lifetime (Katrina, Helene and Maria, just to name hurricanes). The poorer you are, the less likely you are to even qualify for FEMA assistance. I'm not saying fixing all this is impossible, but it's definitely much more complicated than just funding them more (or at all). With 330 million people, I'm not even sure a federal agency for disasters even makes sense. Seems like we'd be better off with state-level entities that can maybe apply for federal grants in a pinch (although if that comes with boot-licking and sworn fealty now, I'm guessing it might not be worth it 🙄).
Thanks for this comment—and you are right to note that I was a bit too dismissive of ronetc’s comment. (Sorry, Ronnie!)
Your comment is reminding me of a terrible cable car crash in Italy a few years ago that killed more than a dozen people. Shortly after it happened, I was hiking with a Swiss man I had met on the trail. As we got in the cable car to head back down, he very sweetly reassured me that I shouldn’t be worried, because the kind of crash that happened in Italy would never happen in Switzerland. (This is indubitably true.)
So I admit that Switzerland is a special case, and that it is unfair to make comparisons. At the same time, though, I continue to think that government scientists who monitor conditions to predict disasters, and FEMA workers who help Americans recover from them, are exactly the workers whose jobs we shouldn’t be cutting right now.
I'm probably more theoretically supportive of the idea of cuts in general, but definitely with you on being leery of the slapdash, hypocritical way they've been carried out so far. I only really have enough bandwidth by now to freak out about the HHS stuff.
BTW, I was actually backing up "Ronnie" Reagan (something I never thought I'd say!) -- that's one of my favorite quotes 😂 Another is “Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.” (PJ O'Rourke) (Happy to exempt Switzerland on that one, too, though 😉)
We should definitely fund FEMA, and Medicaid, and the FDA, and the NIH...the list goes on and on. Hope the graduation is fun!
Absolutely! These services benefit all Americans instead of a fortunate few. Thanks for the good wishes about the graduation! Isabel Wilkerson will be speaking, and we’re taking Casey out to our favorite Chinese restaurant afterwards, so it should be a lot of fun!
That cow-on-a-helicopter footage is fantastic.
It cracks me up! The cow is so blasé!
The essay would be correct about government services if the situation was in the perfect world of Schoolhouse Rock. However, we do not live in that perfect world where governmental agencies are lean and efficient, all employees knowledgeable and competent. In the world-as-it-actually-is, government agencies are bloated, inefficient, and politically-weaponized—with FEMA as a prime example, see recent North Carolina flooding and most any disaster at least since and including Katrina—and indeed do need to be cut down to size. Of course, the difficulty is determining which employees are knowledgeable and efficient and which ones are only taking up office space. But keeping the bloat, or, even worse, just throwing more money at the current incompetents is not actually helpful.
An update: Lyra has persuaded me that I was unfair to you, so I hope you’ll read my comment to her, above. 😊
I don’t deny that there is government waste, but I think it’s nowhere near as bad as it is cracked up to be. Besides, I would rather waste a bit of money rescuing people and helping them recover, than have to pay a lot more later on to deal with people who have lost their homes and livelihoods after a natural disaster.