Monday: Hili dialogue

42 thoughts on “Monday: Hili dialogue”

1. A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
   All that separates, whether of race, class, creed, or sex, is inhuman, and must be overcome. -Kate Sheppard, suffragist (10 Mar 1847-1934)

   1. (Bold added):

      “The positive transcendence of private property as the appropriation of human life, is therefore the positive transcendence of all estrangement – that is to say, the return of man from religion, family, state, etc., to his human, i.e., social, existence.”

      -Karl Marx
      Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

      (Bold added):

      “But there would be no sense in my writing this book at all if I did not believe that women can affect society, as well as be affected by it; that, in the end, a woman, as a man, has the power to choose, and to make her own heaven or hell.”

      -Betty Friedan
      in The Feminine Mystique
      W. W. Norton & Company
      1997, 1991, 1974, 1963

2. Great start to the work week with a strong Hili Dialogue to get me going!

3. To an outsider, the last US presidential election had a downside with both candidates, one was very woke, and the other was Trump. The situation in Canada is untainted by the latter, and amounts to a woke side (Liberals) versus an anti-woke side (Tories). Consequently, Trudeau would have been easy to crush, but Carney will be tougher, largely because he is an unknown, and people can project onto him whatever they hope he will be. Certainly dyed in the wool Liberals will be able to vote for him, whereas with Trudeau they may have stayed home or held their noses and voted for someone else. Nonetheless, I’ll be surprised if he wins power, as we are more than due for a change. We may end up with a small majority Tory government, or a minority Tory government, and that last option just means nothing much gets changed and a further election would have to be held soon.
   Carney is a technocrat, who has been an investment banker, and governor of the central banks of Canada and the UK. He was strongly anti-Brexit in the UK (and became known in the British press as ‘Mark Carnage’), and made part of his policy at the Bank of England a net-zero initiative amongst large banking institutions. He knows this is unpopular with voters and has said he will ditch Trudeau’s carbon tax, but I suspect it will return in another form if he does this.
   As I’ve said before, I don’t so much vote for a party, but rather vote out those who have become stale and corrupt, and I accept that whoever I vote for will eventually have to be removed when they go that way. If Canadians do vote in Carney, I think they will have a similar experience to the British with Starmer. The Liberals need a period in opposition to rethink, and then perhaps I will vote for them again.

   1. The only thing we’ll be thinking if the Liberals spend some time in opposition is that we should never have voted the CPC in.

   2. Agree 100%. The Liberals need a timeout.

4. While I am sure that there are some abuses in the government credit card system, and abusers should be properly trained if the abuse were inadvertent or disciplined if that abuse were purposeful, the introduction of the system decades ago made for huge new efficiencies and effectiveness in my NASA research organization. A couple of simple examples: On travel (to conferences, other government or industry labs, university research labs) they significantly reduced paperwork by automatically creating and maintaining a record of expenses and eliminated the time and human resource consuming and paper laden system of receiving cash advances. In our labs, our engineers and technicians could simply order small equipment such as electronic transistors, resistors and capacitors without filling out paper purchase requests, having accountants in central-purchasing on occasion decide that a 5% tolerance was good enough as opposed to a requested 1% because it was cheaper, and after several weeks or more receive a totally inadequate component that had to be returned back up through the purchasing infrastructure….aaarrgghh! All employees who received government credit cards also received mandatory training in their proper use…usually a half-day with shorter annual updates. As of my retirement in 2008, it was a great system….at least at our NASA field lab.

   1. As Heather Cox Richardson says in her daily newsletter, “…Musk and his team of tech bros at the Department of Government Efficiency are not actually promoting efficiency: if they were, they would have brought auditors and would be working with the inspectors general that Trump fired and the Government Accountability Office that is already in place to streamline government. Rather than looking for efficiency, they are simply working to zero out the government that works for ordinary people, turning it instead to enabling them to consolidate wealth and power.”

      Any government or corporate spending system can and will be abused. That’s why there are or should be strong internal and external audit systems in place.

      1. YesRick, and as I recall, there were (both internal locally and at the agency level, external audit audit systems in place)

   2. That’s a good example, Jim, in gvt service. Predictably I’ve noticed the same in the corporate world with credit cards – they’re just damn efficient and transparent to the people who need to know expenses.

      Imagine Lawrence Livermore Labs having to pay bundles of cash for the sexy isotopes (? or whatever) they need. hehehe

      This credit card idiocy is emblematic of DOGE and deeply stupid, performative.
      DOGE also assumes more corruption in the system than is there (I believe).

      D.A.
      NYC

   3. Your example sheds some much needed light on this. The reporting on all this DOGE stuff is so biased and sensationalized on both sides.
      I made the mistake of turning on NPR (I know better) this morning and the story I caught was how awful it is for DC that Trump is clearing out the homeless and beginning to instruct police to cite crimes that have been largely overlooked since the BLM riots/protests (whatever you want to call them). They interviewed mayor Bowser who was talking out of both sides of her mouth. First she said that the city has more than enough beds for all the homeless and immediately connected that to DOGE cutting all the government jobs and how negatively this would affect all the businesses in DC. Connecting the crime and homelessness to the federal job cuts is an illogical stretch, in my opinion (I should add that I’m not pleased with the manner in which DOGE is being applied. I agree with Jerry that it’s like cutting steak with a plastic knife). It was a disjointed bit of moaning and groaning by Bowser, though. Last month all I heard were federal employees crying about the time and money it would cost them to be forced back to the office. From the right we’re given the most flagrant examples of wasteful spending. It is tough getting to the facts that no doubt lie somewhere in the middle.

   4. Yes, all payment systems are open to abuse; however, tight controls limit that abuse. I’d like to know what controls are in place when the buyer (the CC holder) is also the individual who signs off on delivery of the product (the CC holder).

      In my experience, an obvious indicator of abuse and a complete lack of controls is when 4.6M credit cards have been issued to a total civilian workforce of something like 1.87M people. But that 1.87M understates the abuse. No company issues a CC for every employee. My guess is that half have reason for a CC. So the federal gov’t has issued ~5 times more CC than required.

      From the WSJ, we learn from a federal employee that the CC are used for “cellphone plans, office security, Microsoft 365 licenses and a $619 monthly fee for Amazon Web Services, which hosts the office’s server.” And from a Yahoo article, “The cards handle $30 billion a year in transactions for basic supplies and services—from legal fees to gas—that federal workers use in the course of business.”

      Payment of office security, MSFT and AWS licenses and legal services are evidence of misuse.

5. One reason there are so many govt cards is everyone who travels has one (that’s tied directly to name). On top of that, there are the purchase cards: At my old job, that could be one for each project (different projects have different lines of funding, and all that accounting needs to be tied together). And there are fuel cards issued from GSA for each vehicle we have too. Not sure if that’s part of the count, but I’m honestly surprised the number of reported cards isn’t higher.

   I’ll echo the above sentiment that if fraud is found, it should be dealt with harshly. I’ve always felt that. There are methods we have to follow to prevent it, but there are always ways around that. Being said, whatever DOGE is doing is impacting all our programs and making everything far LESS efficient: no surprise.

   1. Yep. I had forgotten about the separate gas charge card that accompanied the gov vehicle I would drive to meetings in DC because it was a cheaper mode than mileage reimbursement for using personal vehicle, rental car or flying. Our travel budget was held pretty dear.

   2. I wonder if it will be less efficient short term but more efficient long term. As mentioned, ideal state would have been a proper audit of the card and card users, with policy enhancements for the future.
      In our company, we have to justify each card within our department once a year by providing the cardholder name and card purpose. If not used for a year, it’s automatically turned off unless the director can provide the reason why to keep it. We have fuel cards (for fuel only), travel cards (travel expenses + fuel), and purchasing cards (purchased goods under $10k + travel + fuel), so each cardholder only has one at his/her disposal. We used to have separate fuel cards, but abuse was rampant.

      I too share concerns with DOGE’s methods. At the same time, I also wonder about the scare stories. An opposition tactic when it comes to budget cuts is to cut something really important instead of the intended target. For instance, if I have $100k in staff party favors in my budget, and I get told that I have to cut $100k, I can scream that I’ll have to fire a senior engineer to meet the budget, especially if the person I’m talking to is a friendly. Not saying this is what’s happening in all of these reports, but I’m not sure it isn’t for at least some of them.

6. Thanks for coverage of Chicago Principles and the Kalven Report again. I can see of no reason why an institution of higher learning would not adopt, at least guidance, from both. I regularly read both the Maroon and The Harvard Crimson online to get some feel for the zeitgeist at two representative elite universities, though I do not know how much they represent the student editors as opposed to the student and faculty bodies. A recent article in the Maroon on a talk by what I think is a Kalven family descendent left me confused.

   And on another note: Do different beak lengths mean different species for the little sheltered birdies?

   And with that, per Da Roolz, I am pretty much done for the morning.

   1. I think it is just the angle of the beaks in the photo that makes them look different.
      I’m just reading “Winter World” published 2003 by Bernd Heinrich about animal evolutionary innovations to survive winter. In it he talks about the importance of cover from rain being important to prevent insulating feathers from becoming wet and lose their insulating properties. He wonders if flight feathers in dinosaurs evolved originally to shed water and cold wind. The book is full of the ingenious ways animals use to stay warm in winter, like huddling in a rose.

      1. That’s fascinating. I’ve forever wondered and worried about birds in downpours.

7. Via Perplexity:

   The scale of federal spending growth since 2019 has been remarkable by historical standards. Federal spending jumped from $4.45 trillion in 2019 to $6.21 trillion in 2023, representing a 40 percent increase in just four years. The growth continued into 2024, with spending reaching approximately $6.8 trillion, averaging about $19,900 per person in the United States. When measured as a percentage of GDP, federal spending grew from 20.9 percent in FY 2019 to an estimated 23.9 percent in 2024, a 14 percent increase relative to the size of the economy.

   Clearly, something needs to be done. All I have heard are relentless attacks on Musk for doing it wrong. But at least he is trying. Have the Democrats made any concrete proposals as to how they would do it better? Does anyone believe that the Democrats even want to trim the size of government?

   1. You would have to curtail social spending for programs like Medicare and Social Security for a real difference.

   2. Anyone who seriously believes that the federal deficit is a major problem that needs to be addressed should always vote Democratic. That is, if they are using verified, accurate data on what the growth of the national debt has been over the past 5 decades.

      Over all that time every Democratic administration has reduced the rate of the federal deficit compared to the Republican administration before it, and every Republican administration, with one exception, has increased the rate, sometimes dramatically.

      Trump vs Biden is an excellent example. The first Trump administration presided over a growth in the national debt of 40.43% while the following Biden administration held it to 16.67%. Trump 2.0 has just started so we will have to wait and see. However, in January 2025 the deficit increased by $129 billion, while in January of 2024 it increased by $22 billion. Tell me again how Trump, and or Musk, are reducing the deficit? I should take their word that if we just give them a fair chance they’ll actually do it? When all the evidence indicates I’d be a fool to believe them? No thanks.

      Anyone who doesn’t believe that the Democrats have concrete proposals as to how to do better is out of touch with reality. They’ve allowed themselves to be conned. The Democrats have always had such proposals and have significantly outperformed Republicans on that metric. For decades.

      1. Deficit reduction needs to be bipartisan or else you will get ads about pushing Granny and her wheelchair off a cliff.

         Until then, DOGE is the best we can do.

         And can you provide a link to the Democratic debt reduction plan?

         1. If you feel it needs to be bipartisan then you really need to take the Republican Party to task. Back during the Obama administration they are the ones that decided to declare that henceforth they would stop doing the business of government and simply oppose anything the Democrats proposed. And they’ve stuck to that with very few exceptions since then. Meanwhile the Democrats have continued to try and reach across the aisle routinely, almost always to their detriment. To be clear, the Republicans don’t do their job not necessarily because they oppose Democrats policies. They don’t care about the policies. They oppose them because they don’t want Democrats to be perceived as having accomplished anything positive. And the Republican party has said that out loud many times.

            If DOGE is the best we can do then we are screwed. For starters, DOGE is operating illegally. There is only one legal way to close down federal government departments, significantly restructure them, delete them, withhold their funding or defund them. And that is by legislation. Our government is not supposed to be like a monarchy or a dictatorship where whatever the president decrees is the law. If Trump via DOGE, or any other route, wants to do those sorts of things the legal process is to introduce legislation to Congress, and then it is their job to pass it into law, or not. And the budget is a product of the legislative process. It is law. And the executive’s authority does not include withholding or in any way changing the budget, but only in upholding the law, i.e. executing the budget as it is.

            Simple. Go to the Democratic Party website and look at their proposed legislation over the past 5 decades. Even better, to see the actual effect of their various legislative efforts look at the federal deficit over the past 5 decades, from primary sources, and correlate to presidential administrations. An easy project for anyone that wants to do it. Many experts have already done that and their results are readily available by a simple internet search.

      2. Please point out the spending authorized by Trump for the month of January 2025 that caused the deficit to balloon. Wasn’t any spending done in January the result of the previous administration’s budget?

         While I disagreed with most of the excess government spending during COVID, and I’m no certainly fan of Trump, it’s not quite fair to point to the increase in spending during the pandemic as evidence of the Trump administration’s deficit growth. Nor is it quite the story with the stat you cite for Biden, because that means that while Trump inordinately grew it by 40.43%, Biden then grew it another 16.67% on top of that. That’s adding to the bloat, not reducing it. “I put on 40 pounds last year, but this year I only put on 16”. I’m still fat.

         What are the Democratic Party proposals for today, other than to raise taxes on the rich? What are their proposals for cutting waste? Yes, they’ve studied it, and a lot of fraud was found as results of both Obama’s and Biden’s task forces, but I didn’t see any action.

         True, the only way to make a big difference would be to cut entitlement spending, but I’ll settle for first cutting as much waste as possible and then moving on to the non-entitlement spending.

   3. Why assume that government spending is bad? The rise of the automobile forced government to spend remarkable amounts on macadam, street lights, street signs, police cars, fire trucks, ambulances, registries of motor vehicles, salaries, training, publications, advertising, jails, radios, radar, and much more. The rise of the airplane, telephone, television, computers, the internet, file sharing, flash mobs, illegal designer drugs, and what have you has required even more government spending. This spending affects government at all levels. Blanket opposition to government spending comes from special interests like, say, polluters who want to pollute without taking responsibility for the deaths they cause.

      The clear thing that needs to be done is to stop repeating like robots “government spending is bad” and “we must trim the size of government” and realize that modern life without that spending and size is a descent into chaos. Each instance of spending needs to be separately audited and investigated for waste and fraud. Until we know why federal spending has increased since 2019 it is inappropriate to panic and demand spending be trimmed. We may be trimming peoples’ lives away.

   4. Those increases in Federal spending since 2019 were during COVID years and mainly due to three COVID fiscal relief programs which gave most Americans, parents, and schools supplemental income payments. The American Rescue Plan Act alone cost nearly 2 trillion dollars.

      So, it’s not exactly clear that “something needs to be done”. These programs were special cases.

      1. Then why did the budget continue to climb rather than return to baseline after the COVID programs expired?

         Rule of Bureaucracy #24935a: all special cases that increase one’s power or expand one’s piece of the budget pie will quickly become the norm. That is a subset of the overarching rule to never let a crisis go to waste.

         1. Your very comment could be considered an instance of “the overarching rule to never let a crisis go to waste.” Would it not make more sense to search for the reasons the budget continued to climb before taking action?

8. I’m not certain, yet those birds look a little like cedar waxwings.

   1. “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain by the false azure in the windowpane”

9. To segue from auditing credit cards, how about an audit of the voting data from the last election. I can’t say anything positive about this guy’s abilities as a presenter, but he’s a statistician, and I think that goes with the territory.

   What he presents is beyond hair-raising, and provides the details behind all of Agent Orange’s cryptic comments. Have a look and see what you think. The data do get more understandable in later portions.

   1. quick google check on your statement:
      Not a statistician
      Elon Musk is not a statistician. He is a businessman known for his roles in companies like Tesla and SpaceX, and he has shared statistical information in various contexts, but he does not have a formal background in statistics

10. Any Romanian readers here? Isn’t the whole point of a democracy that the people get to decide who will be president, rather than have unelected judges do that?

11. You can’t fight here—this is the war room.

    You can’t vote here—this is a democracy.

    1. Especially when the choice is between Tweedledum and Tweedledumber. (Assign the referents according to your political preference.)

12. About the slaughters of Christians in The Democratic Republic of Congo — I did hear those stories. ISIS and its offshoots have been plenty busy in Africa while most of the world has been focusing on Gaza and Ukraine. Those groups always find a place to operate.

    1. ISIS and friends have been very busy in Africa. For a long, long time, Debi.

       A decades long jihad in Nigeria, terrorism in the Sahel, Sudan, incursions and chaos and murder from Mozambique to Congo where there was a mass (100 heads or so) beheading lately. Religion of Peace.

       But we’re all well aware of these facts of course. All that CNBC and NPR coverage and of course the campus encampments to protest Islamic murder all about.

       D.A.
       NYC

13. I thought she was exaggerating, but do you see a lot of news about the mass slaughter by Muslims of Christians

    Evangelicals do not care about Christians in these parts of the world and the Catholic Church is feckless too, I’m sorry to say.

14. How can there be an International Bagpipe Day with no mention of the Irish Uilleann Pipes and Finbar Furey? Hear him demonstrate his virtuosity performing “The Fox Chase.”

15. Canadian politics:

    TL;DR: Justin Trudeau is still Prime Minister of Canada.

    Mark Carney was not elected Prime Minister yesterday. The Liberal Party faithful chose him (in a landslide) as party leader in a private club function called a leadership convention. Only Liberal Party members voted in this selection.
    Justin Trudeau is still Prime Minister until he resigns his public state office as PM. Then the Governor-General as the King’s representative in Canada will invite Mr. Carney, as leader of the party with the greatest number of seats in the House of Commons to form a government (same as the old government except without Trudeau as PM.) This is the constitutional convention followed in Westminster Parliaments. There is no set policy that says how long Mr. Trudeau can hang on as PM. He is PM until he chooses to step down, permitting Mr. Carney to ask the G-G to appoint him Prime Minister. (Or until the government falls to a non-confidence motion.) There is nothing (except the G-G’s ceremonial horse guards) to stop Mr. Carney from banging on the door of the G-G’s residence demanding she make him PM right now. But she would never agree to do this until the current sitting PM endorsed the request. All this is by largely unwritten convention. This fusty old monarchial tradition does prevent the possibility of the two men coming to blows or fighting a duel as to who should be PM. “You promised you’d step down as soon as I got the leadership. Yield, scoundrel!”

    Mr. Carney is not a sitting MP. The convention (not enforceable) is that an unelected PM, as for any Cabinet Minister selected from off the street, must win an election to a seat without undue delay. In the current circumstances, Mr. Carney will likely wait until the general election which everyone thinks must be imminent but which doesn’t have to be held until October 2026 according to our Constitution. Having an unelected party leader as PM for all that time would be most irregular and politically ineffective because such a PM couldn’t speak on the floor of the House, or even enter it, but not illegal. (A PM in the 1980s held the office for 7 months as a private citizen, with all the powers as if he had been elected.)

    What most people think will happen very soon (within days) is that the G-G will appoint Mr. Carney as PM (with Trudeau’s blessing) and he will recall Parliament, currently prorogued on Mr. Trudeau’s doing. Then either he will dissolve Parliament off his own bat — the prerogative of the PM — or the Opposition will vote non-confidence. Either precipitates an immediate election. But we won’t know what happens until it does.

    Since President Trump’s inauguration and Trudeau’s decision to resign (eventually), the Liberals are enjoying a bump in the polls. They had previously looked to lose to Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives by a historic landslide but now it’s not at all sure. (Canadians need a strong reason to vote against woke leftist parties who mirror Canadian DEI values. For 10 years Justin Trudeau was that reason but they still elected him three times.) It would be a political calculation by both the new Liberal leader and the minor opposition party that holds the balance of power as to whether to go now or hold off. The Liberals have a chance to crush the third, socialist party into irrelevant oblivion — it has always been irrelevant except to cause, and prop up, minority governments. But it has always enjoyed a solid 15-20 % support in the popular vote, which is good enough for 20 seats or so, enough to make it important far beyond the appeal of its policies. Until now. The leader’s previous promise to bring down the government at the first opportunity now seems to have been made with his fingers crossed behind his back. He doesn’t want to be crushed and is hoping Mr. Carney, who has no elected political experience, will make a fatal mis-step and save him.

    In Canada, this is about as exciting as politics ever gets.

16. The pause (let’s hope only a pause) on gov’t credit cards also stops gov’t agency researchers from publishing anything (page charges), useful if someone want to minimize any information that might conflict with their preferred facts.

    1. Not that one ever sees delays in publication!

       Back when they issued credit cards to every member of the military, a lot of us said that was asking for trouble. I subsequently helped send one man to prison for fraud and later discharged another for unauthorized use. Musk is making far too much of the credit card “problem,” but the program does need to be tightened up.

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