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Joined 7 days ago
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Cake day: July 20th, 2025

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  • I have a different proposal

    The government needs to adopt tech. No, not just “we use Office and SharePoint”, but something like making 10-20% of the federal workforce tech workers.

    Why?

    In many departments there are maybe 1-3% of staff in IT and IT adjacent roles. I know of departments with less.

    That means we have a ton of tasks which frankly can and should be replaced by technology.

    Technology means systems, and systems decide how work happens. When the only option to evolve systems is to pay contractors (which we’re making harder) we see only stagnation and productivity declines — and we are seeing real productivity declines in the federal service.

    I’m not implying federal workers are dumb or lazy, I’m saying they’re stuck in a massively outmoded way of working. Management doesn’t have the tools to make changes that will really increase efficiency, and frankly most of them are tech illiterate and don’t even know those opportunities exist.

    And here’s an example of how tech can help. I write Model Context Protocols for LLMs to fetch specific files and documents for my work, which turn large data gathering efforts into short tasks. 5 years ago that was real work, but with cutting edge tools it’s an small part of my job.

    Imagine if we gave the exact same tech to the CRA, enabling them to do bigger and faster and more thorough investigations into tax cheats and errors. That would be big revenue increases without needing cuts. Cuts that reduce our effectiveness and will reduce revenue because as I said we’re stuck in the past.

    Every government agency needs teams working on internal tooling, relentlessly driving down the time spent on tasks, that way we can use more of our federal workers strengths. We don’t need contractors for this, they too are often behind the times and have perverse incentives to make departments dependent on them.


  • 90 year olds shouldn’t be voting on things that are going to affect 2 year olds for the rest of their lives without 2 year olds having a voice. That argument is kinda vague and baseless.

    And likewise, why does a 16 year old get to decide how an 80 year old that can’t get to the polls should live their final days? How much OAS they get, or which healthcare they get, etc.

    Those old people will die soon and the rest of that 16 year olds life they can vote for whatever selfish things they want to have too. It’s annoying to arbitrarily assume old people are just trying to fuck over the younger generation without a care when that would be wildly unpopular with basically all other age groups.

    Honestly I do not think 16 year olds should get to vote. They’ve barely had a chance to have a job (legally 1 year at most) and they haven’t even applied to university or college yet. They broadly don’t know what responsibility is, they don’t know what work is, and they’re not fully mentally mature.

    18 sure, life is starting to hit you then. 16 is simply too young and too inexperienced at life to put in a place to decide how we all live.