>I fully acknowledge that it will result in mistakes,
The people arguing the other side are not talking about reversible mistakes with minor fallout. They are claiming that taken as a whole the damage will be very difficult to undo. Countering this simply by accepting that there will be mistakes doesn't quite suffice. As pg tried to remind Musk on twitter (I'm paraphrasing): Countless startups come into being and die within the system. But this is the system we're talking about. There is only one.
I take it you want the others to believe this administration geniunely cares about providing the public efficient services without fraud and corruption by establishing highly-efficient meritocratic institutions. There's overwhelming evidence in the events of the past few weeks that this not the case. Just looking at the Eric Adams fiasco and, say, the cabinet picks of Hegseth, Gaetz, Bondi (straight of the movie Idiocracy) show this administration does not care about fighting corruption or hiring people that are most qualified for the job.
I've never witnessed pg screaming about anything ever frankly, maybe people close to him have. He would be the last person I use the verb for.
A lot of people and Democrats in STEM fields who voted for Kamala in the elections, including pg who publicly stated he was voting for Kamala, thought the corporate DEIA initiatives were counterproductive to their stated goals. It's not a extreme minority position in the tech crowd, nor is there a complete lack of criticism of corporate DEIA in the progressive media either.
I also give pg credit for being one of the rare VCs who posts "pro-Palestinian" viewpoints on occasion. So he does buck the trend from time to time. Calling David Sacks, Musk's unwavering eternal sychophant, possibly "the most evil person in Silicon Valley" was also a great line in the sand for him. But the basis for this opinion was more from his knowledge of how terrible Sacks treated founders as an investor rather than from Sacks being a Musk acolyte.
> Yep, but as opposed to a startup those "mistakes" will be deadly.
Well, these mistakes are also deadly if it’s a move fast and break things startup in medtech. And these mistakes are deadly in healthcare.
I am calling this out because I see this complete myopia of abstracting people’s lives as OK to ever lose on purpose.
Statements like “no one thinks that!!!” “Most people are XYZ!!!” are thrown around because computer scientists start being computer scientists - we try to solve problems the way we do at work. Big O notation is not an acceptable way to manage other people’s lives.
In computer science, 100,000 people in the global population converge to zero. If you are counting DAU… OK.
If you are estimating the number of people you might accidentally kill… not OK.
If you are trying to reduce corruption and you don’t actually know if you will kill people or not, and you do it anyway… I don’t see how anyone can consider that ethical.
> While you might not like his methods, you can't blame him for not wanting to wait 2 years for these issues to be addressed, data to be collected, and then action to be taken.
Yes, I definitely can blame him and anyone who wants to 180 the government in that time - that's stupid, childish, short sighted, and suicidal for keeping the lights on.
> you can't blame him for not wanting to wait 2 years
I do blame him. What harm of 2 years of status quo could be greater than the risks of completely breaking safety organizations?
> Elon who has to get rid of underperformers without credible data
No, this is not a valid solution to the problem, if there even are significant performance problems. “We don’t know exactly who the problematic people are, so let’s just fire every probationary employee, you know the ones who haven’t even been around long enough to be chronic underperformers?”
It’s either a very foolish attempt to solve the problem, and/or he actually just wants to destroy government.
> the real blame for this is with the previous administrators who neglected this problem for years
Trump was in charge 5-9 years ago, does he get some blame too?
>The lack of effective performance management in the federal workforce.
>Resulting in poor service provision and wasteful allocation of taxpayer funds.
Alleged. Not proven, alleged.
>No large private sector workforce would have gotten away with such broken processes.
What broken processes? You havent shown them to exist.
Large companies are built to maximixe profit. Governments are not, so why should their organizational choices be similar?
You have clearly never worked in any sizeable workforce, and I can assure you your basic presumption that large private sector workforces does not have broken processes is childishly naive. The "problem" is you, making assumptions of waste where there is none to speak off, unless you can provide some actual data to back that up. The average federal employee earns about $60k/y, they are not there for the money. Firing all federal employees will same about 7h of borrowing.
I'm sorry but the narrative you have invested in so deeply is not founded in reality, not that I expect anyone explaining facts to you will make any appreciable difference.
Enjoy the pain you elected to bring upon yourself, you deserve the government you got.
You can’t generalize about the entire public sector from a couple anecdotes. Of course there are going to be badly run groups inside an organization of that size. I can tell you there exists management inside the federal government that runs performance management and fires underperformers.
Since you fall victim to such an obvious fallacy, it makes sense that you would wind up hired into low-performing groups.
