You don't even have to change the laws. Just changing the social norms would be enough. At the moment our social norms are that the ends justify the means. If you make money, or produce something that looks like a breakthrough, that is all that matters. How you did it, or whether the thing you did has actual value, matters not at all. As long as you've provided yourself with plausible deniability, that's good enough.
I know this because I've been the beneficiary of this system on multiple occasions, and it makes me sick. This is not the kind of world I want to live in.
No you can't legislate morality. But operationally we want accountability commensurate to control. As others have pointed out, there must be consequences to bs. With that in place, we don't have to legislate other than point out consequences. Now to be a pedantic, consequences are a kind of legislation, but at least it's about behavior and outcomes not intent. It would elides certain issues out of scope.
Just yesterday I fixed a broken wireless N64 controller receiver with the help of ChatGPT. I tried looking for YouTube videos, but didn’t find the exact thing I needed, and since I’m such a newbie I needed a lot of hand holding.
Anyways, I took pictures of the components and described what I was seeing. It walked me through things really well and asked me to do tests and report back. It even told me how to use my specific multimeter after I took a picture of it. I ended up soldering a jumper cable from the console power supply line (not working) to the micro usb power line (working).
It actually works now and really saved me 30 bucks buying a new controller.
> As someone whose lost a grant award under the current administration's attack on science, I can tell you with assurance that this is more about political power and revenge than it is about improving scientific rigor.
I'm sorry to hear this, but curious what makes you certain of this? Revenge for what? I ask, because I hear this same template over and over with this administration. eg. DOGE isn't about government efficiency its about revenge.
Literally nothing about their approach resembles an attempt at efficiency. Efficiency is a ratio of input resources to output. No part of the DOGE program I've seen or heard of even considers that relationship. Simply firing people at best results in reduced output, or hiring more expensive contractors. And you've flushed institutional knowledge down the toilet. It's like turning a car off and pretending you've boosted its fuel efficiency because nothing is burning. Except that the car saved you time on other tasks, oops. Firing people and then immediately having to rehire them is hilariously inefficient. Rewriting legacy software like they're attempting at Social Security is a classically inefficient blunder.
I don't know if it's all about revenge, but it's absolutely not about efficiency. It's an edgy teen's idea of tough governance. It's the epitome of penny wise, pound foolish. It's false economy all the way down.
How much more straightforwards do you need it to be? How about this?
> “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can't do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.
You don't have to be paying that much attention to get the vibe that a lot of these guys do, in fact, enjoy cruelty for its own sake. Trump and Vance enjoy humiliating Zelenskiy in the Oval Office and insulting the entire country of Canada, threatening to annex them etc. They enjoy making heads of companies and nations come to them and beg (https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1086367432957...)
Noticing these things isn't an "emotional crutch", it's understanding the actual reality of the situation.
In my regular smallish suburban city I have a sidewalk stamped from 1922. However, they just redid all the roads, sewer, and certain side walks (bad sections). They are now running municipal fiber tubes throughout the whole sprawling city. As far as I can tell the city is still operated as a self-financing entity and has been since the 1800’s. Is this a facade or just an anomaly?
In some of their other material, they go over this. Many of the bigger projects (not something like the two examples you picked, more like redoing intersections, making new roads, fixing highways, etc.) are financed by the state and federal governments, so they end up being able to keep their budget afloat as long as they get pulled up occasionally by the state/feds. This is still bad, mind you, which is why they're not wrong per se.
I put in my information and I find it really interesting that 2 parents who both work need a combined ~$63 an hour living wage, but a couple where only a single parent working needs only ~$47 an hour.
My wife is a stay at home mom and her monetary contribution comes from saving us money (not paying for childcare, not paying for restaurants, etc, etc, etc). Makes me think that in a lot of ways saving money is really tax efficient compared to slogging for more ordinary income.
Having a wife at home also could help lower costs since their entire job is to efficiently and cost effectively run the household, acting as a sort of domestic accountant. Over time she'll learn the best products to buy for the price, the most cost effective nutritious food, how to handle various household activities effectively (efficient clothes/dish washing by reducing cycles), among various other matters that can either lower costs or increase utility.
+1
If your kids are old enough to be in school, that's one thing. But if your kids younger than 4 or 5, paying for daycare during normal work hours is expensive! Easily over $1,000 a month.
I would argue the liability is on both sides, not just on the person who pays alimony. Society has exceptionally little ways to welcome stay at home parents back into the workforce. If a stay at home parent's spouse is disabled or killed in an accident (unfortunately common in car-centric societies) the entire family is now in serious, serious trouble.
"common" seems erroneously high there. For any given household with a stay at home parent, the working parent's lifetime risk of dying in a car accident is less than 1 in 100. The risk that they'll do it in the years working to provide for the household is likely less than 1 in 200. Meanwhile, the risk to divorce is around 2 orders of magnitude higher. (I'd agree that "divorce is common"; something that happens about 1% as often, I don't think of is common.)
If you're making relationship decisions based on statistical chances of separation you're already operating on a level of fundamental distrust. If you're planning an "out" in what ought to be a lifelong relationship then you're already not in it for the long run. Risk is part of what makes a marriage meaningful, you're mutually accepting that risk and embracing it for the good of the other.
> Makes me think that in a lot of ways saving money is really tax efficient compared to slogging for more ordinary income.
It depends on how similar your wife's income would be to the cost of childcare really, which also depends on how many kids you have, etc. Also, what happens when your kid's don't need childcare? There's some huge(maybe) opportunity costs to account for from putting her career on hold.
Working moms (parents) can do most of the other stuff with a job so it's not really "savings". My wife does anyways. Only extra we spend is a couple hundred a month for biweekly housekeeper so we don't have to do the deep/detail stuff. I take care of all the house stuff and finances and spend roughly the same on outsourcing lawncare. It's not worth my time and effort compared to the cost and never ending hassle (I'm in Texas and it's 110F outside and grass grows 9-10 months out of the year)
My spouse was a sw engineer who became ft stay at home parent shortly after our second child. Yes it's not how much you make but how much you can save after that counts. Certainly she saved us a lot of money. In my case the intangible benefit of never worrying about my kids cannot be overstated. I really think it made a huge difference. I live in a community property state and I feel sorry for stay at home spouses who don't have this safety net. For the most part I think they deserve it.
