Why frame it as ideological though? That doesn't explain which agencies get protected and which get cut. The NTSB stays funded because rich people fly on planes too. But Medicaid gets cut because wealthy people don't need it.
Look at weather service cuts. They're gutting the National Weather Service while Trump's appointees have ties to companies like AccuWeather and Satellogic that would profit from privatizing weather data.
It's about class interests. Agencies that serve everyone or that rich people depend on stay funded. Programs that only help poor people get cut, or get privatized to benefit specific wealthy interests. Make the wealthy better off through tax cuts and new business opportunities, make poor people worse off through service cuts.
You're right that a lot of the NOAA cuts target climate research specifically. But think about who benefits from attacking climate science. Oil companies and existing wealth structures that profit from fossil fuels. Climate research threatens those business models, so gutting it protects those interests.
The cuts go way beyond climate though. They're cutting 107,000 federal jobs across agencies while defense spending increases 13%. Framing this as ideological makes it sound like an abstract battle of ideas, but it's not abstract at all. Real people are losing health insurance, real hospitals are closing, real communities are losing weather warnings. Meanwhile wealthy people get tax cuts and connected companies get business opportunities. It's about material interests, not ideology.
Can you point out what aspects of the bill relating to Medicaid are most concerning? I don't just mean the DNC talking points, but rather specific provisions. When I read through the actual provisions[1] they are far less scary than what I hear being used as DNC fundraising fodder. For instance, I can't just show up in the UK without any legal status and automatically have all free healthcare from the NHS[2]. But the provisions removing federal tax money support to provide free healthcare to the undocumented is one of the things being pointed to by opponents of the bill as being especially evil. If you feel that way, why is the US the only country that ought to do that?
The work requirements force people to file paperwork proving 80 hours of work monthly, and Arkansas showed this paperwork maze caused 18,000+ people to lose coverage even though 95% already met the requirements or qualified for exemptions. Arkansas spent $26.1 million just on administration with no increase in employment, and Georgia has spent over $40 million with 80% going to bureaucracy, not healthcare.
For rural hospitals, the bill cuts $58 billion in Medicaid funding over 10 years but only provides a $25 billion rural fund that covers less than half the losses. This puts 300+ rural hospitals at immediate risk of closure since they're already operating on thin margins.
For elderly people, the bill blocks nursing home staffing rules until 2034 and freezes home equity limits at $1 million permanently, plus adds more verification requirements.
The evidence shows these aren't about efficiency. They're about creating barriers that cost more money to administer than they save, while cutting care for people who already qualify.
It's not about whether they can work 20 hours. Most already do. Arkansas found 95% of people either met the requirements or qualified for exemptions, but 18,000+ still lost coverage due to the paperwork maze.
The requirements are designed to create barriers through bureaucracy. You have to report every month through a specific online portal, track your hours precisely, navigate exemption processes. Miss one monthly filing deadline and you lose healthcare. It's the most socially acceptable way to kick people off coverage without saying "we don't want poor people to have healthcare."
And it's not just work requirements. The bill also adds income verification twice a year instead of once, more asset checks, and cuts the actual funding. Each new hoop is another chance for eligible people to fall through the cracks. The goal is reducing enrollment through administrative friction, not promoting work.
> saying "we don't want poor people to have healthcare."
I don't really think it's about 'poor people' at all. I think most people agree with me that poor people who do their best deserve plenty of help.
From ABC News: "Pew found that around half of Americans would favor creating work requirements for Medicaid, with 32% opposed." [1]
Polling shows (and Trump's popular vote victory also suggests, arguably) that American voters largely are not in favor of freeloaders who don't work and rely on government benefits paid for by those who do work. Given that this country still operates on democratic principles, it's a democratic move to give those voters what they want, even if it isn't the most efficient. I think if you asked those voters why, they'd say that they're concerned that training people to expect a welfare program to pay for you without you having any obligation back is bad for us as a society, and could encourage more and more 'dropping out' leaving a larger burden for those who work, who our society does need to keep working.
If you want universal healthcare, tell the DNC to run on a platform that includes that instead of running a terrible candidate and a bunch of culture-war stuff that's deeply unpopular with moderates. Or abandon that worthless party and start one that can win.
> Pew found that around half of Americans would favor creating work requirements for Medicaid, with 32% opposed.
To me, this is sad. Culturally, we need to stop attaching morality and nobility to “work.” You’re not better and/or more deserving of life and health than others simply because you have a job.
What's the point of making requirements even stricter if they cost more to administer than they save and don't increase employment? The Congressional Budget Office estimates 5.2 million people would lose coverage by 2034, with savings primarily coming from eligible people losing coverage due to paperwork barriers rather than increased employment.[1]
The new bill allows states to verify monthly instead of every three months, so people lose coverage faster. Even working people get tripped up because 43% of workers would fail to meet 80 hours in at least one month due to variable schedules common in low-wage jobs.[2] People with multiple jobs have to submit paystubs from each employer monthly. Seasonal workers and food service workers are especially vulnerable because their hours swing wildly due to factors beyond their control.
The cost of government subsidies isn’t in just the subsidies or the administrative overhead alone. It’s in training people to rely on the government, in effectively subsidizing employers that pay less than a living wage, etc.
You're right that Medicaid subsidizes employers who pay poverty wages rely on taxpayers to provide healthcare for their workers instead of paying living wages themselves. But the solution isn't to eliminate Medicaid and leave workers with nothing. The solution is to raise the minimum wage or have universal healthcare so employers actually have to provide real benefits.
Most Medicaid recipients already work. They're not choosing dependency, they're working jobs that don't pay enough to afford healthcare. Taking away their healthcare doesn't suddenly make employers pay more, it just leaves workers desperate, which is exactly what those employers want.
You're essentially arguing we should eliminate the safety net that keeps our low-wage economy functioning. That would either force employers to pay living wages (unlikely) or create mass suffering among workers (more likely). Which outcome are you hoping for? Because right now it sounds like you'd rather have sick, desperate workers than challenge the employers who created this system.
Seasonal workers are explicitly protected in the final bill as long as their average amount of work makes sense, so that argument is out.
Also, this "verify monthly" sounds like fearmongering. All I see is "requires individuals who are enrolled meet requirements for 1 or more months between the most recent eligibility redeterminations (at least twice per year)." Also: "Requires states to conduct eligibility redeterminations at least every 6 months for Medicaid expansion adults."
The Medicaid expansion is not everyone on Medicaid, just a subset who before expansion were presumed not to be entitled to a government subsidy since they don't have any dependents or any disability and could just work.
I do think it's probably not the worst thing if people who have no dependents or disability are motivated to go get a full-time job because it's kind of a hassle to have to prove eligibility.
The DNC is now advocating that taxpayers not only must pay for all the healthcare of people who don't want to work at all, but we also need to make it a maximally convenient experience. The reason Democrats keep losing elections is that they can't read the room -- most people who work and are not upper-middle-class levels of comfort don't like the emphasis on maximizing the comfort and convenience of groups like the voluntarily unemployed and undocumented immigrants when it comes at the expense of working taxpayers who follow the rules. This is why the Big Beautiful Bill passed: It actually throws a bone to people who work via things like tax breaks on overtime pay and tips, and via restoring the SALT exemption. Between these 3 policies, you can see a benefit to people across the wealth spectrum who share one thing in common: people who work hard. I know the Dems are still doing fine in rich areas, but there are two problems which are intertwined:
1. There aren't enough of those rich Democrats who just want to open the tax money spigot, the ones who wouldn't mind paying an extra $30,000 in taxes next year to put their money where their mouth is.
2. Even when there are enough to win, the rest of the population still pays most of the actual tax dollars and they are increasingly resentful of what they see as rich Democrats helping themselves (via the government) to everybody's money to bestow as favors on people who don't seem to need it. I know your heart is in the right place, but the policies are not connecting with the people, as evidenced by the fact that the Democrats keep losing ground among the non-wealthy working demographic (which, in the Democrat narrative, ought to be their strongest base).
Note: I certainly don't agree with everything in the "OBBB," but there are some good ideas in there.
You're technically right about ERCOT's limited role in gas pricing and the regulatory distinctions. But ERCOT did have some direct failures beyond just being a scapegoat, like ignoring federal winterization warnings, the $16 billion overcharging scandal where they kept prices at maximum for two days after outages mostly ended, and poor crisis communication. Even if PUCT and the Railroad Commission should have mandated better reserves and winterization, ERCOT still mismanaged what was within their control.
I never said ERCOT did not have failures. I'm in the industry and have been massively critical of ERCOT for caving to politics rather than following market rules when they arbitrarily decided to keep the market at the cap. PUCT actually had final say on repricing those hours and chose not to.
ERCOT also didn't have the authority to implement winterization recommendations from the 2011 report outside of the already existing NERC standards. You can blame the PUCT for that or blame FERC for not actually updating those standards until 2023.
However, you still seem to have missed (and demonstrated) my point by referencing Energy Transfer -- they are a midstream company who made 99% of their profits off of NG not power. Conflating their profit with ERCOT's power prices is the problem. People refuse to educate themselves on the difference between gas and power markets, so the TRC and its massively influential O&G lobbyists have made zero changes to the intrastate gas network since the winter storm. Why? Because every layman who has read a few articles and thinks they're an expert is solely focused on ERCOT.
I'm not sure why you're focusing on PUCT having “final say”. This Texas Tribune article shows ERCOT kept market prices too high for nearly two days after outages ended when their own market monitor said they should have reset prices the following day. It was clearly within ERCOT's control to fix.
The entire point of Texas having it's own grid is to ignore Federal guidance. If we were going to follow it, we'd just add more areas of the state to the east & west grids. Which Texas is already connected to, just in limited areas.
> More than half of excess U.S. health spending was associated with factors likely reflected in higher prices, including more spending on: administrative costs of insurance (~15% of the excess), administrative costs borne by providers (~15%), prescription drugs (~10%), wages for physicians (~10%) and registered nurses (~5%), and medical machinery and equipment (less than 5%). Reductions in administrative burdens and drug costs could substantially reduce the difference between U.S. and peer nation health spending.
IIRC they had PTO days which were apportioned pretty generously, but they didn't have sick days broken out separately. This doesn't mean they had less time off in general than the prevailing compensation packages. It was a great talking point for the media. However, TBH having a 'here's a bunch of time off, do what you need to with it' is kinda better than 'here's some time off for you to vacation, but then this other amount is only usable if you're sick, and if you're not sick it's money left on the table.'
Nothing crazy about that. It's mostly European countries that have mandatory paid sick leave by law for everyone, as they fought for that right in the post-war times when the economy was booming and the world outside the west less safe from outsourcing, and importing cheap labor less easy, so the perfect storm giving labor most power over employers, something that's not gonna repeat again in the globalized world of today.
It was the temporal global exception, not the rule, as the worldwide norm was working people to death for most of history. Companies would gladly give their workers zero benefits if they could get away with it.
Compensation packages are just that - a package. Complaining about one individual component in isolation is disingenuous.
Unions sent a couple of the big car makers into bankruptcy. They've sent all kinds of companies into bankruptcy - the idea that anything they are suggesting is good by nature is about the same as suggesting communism is good by nature. Sounds pleasant, doesn't work.
> Unions sent a couple of the big car makers into bankruptcy.
It goes both ways, unfortunately. Industry in general couldn't exist without laborers, and it has a long history of brutal abuse and horrific, dangerous working conditions that killed and maimed many.
I think it's a cultural problem. We aren't far removed from a time when the general business model was to coercively work people to death to extract every penny of value from them, and that mindset hasn't completely been lost. Workers are callously discarded, not at the doorstep of bankruptcy, but at the first hint that profits might not grow as fast as they could.
Yup, it goes both ways. It's not a given that what a company is proposing is good or bad, and it's not a given that what a union is proposing is good or bad. And they negotiate and it is what it is.
Businesses that can't stay afloat without underpaying workers have a failing business model. Blaming unions for their eventual demise is foolish.
Communism and Capitalism are actually quite similar in a sense. Neither of them works well in their purest form, both lead to formation of an oligarchy (party elite,billionaires). Most livable countries in the world mix them in form of free market social democracy.
>Businesses that can't stay afloat without underpaying workers have a failing business model.
Yet companies have flourished under that model for decades/centuries. Employers and governments have plenty of levers to make sure workers have no choice but to work while being underpaid.
This article seems not bad, but I’m skeptical of the Dynomight author because he previously downplayed the recent rise in homelessness as just returning to 2011 levels. Newer data from late 2024 shows homelessness actually surged 18% to a record high, driven by housing costs, migration, and ending pandemic support - so his earlier analysis missed important trends.
That post (https://dynomight.net/homeless/) uses HUD's counts from January 2023. There's a long delay with these—the counts are done each year in January but usually only published in December. The January 2024 counts are now available and do indeed show much higher levels: A total of 771k on Jan 2024 as opposed to 653k in Jan 2023 or 582k in 2022. But that post was done in July 2024, when that data wasn't available yet. (And was, I hope, clear that it was using the Jan 2023 counts.)
A lot of important devops tools like Kubernetes and Grafana are written in golang, and it’s often handy to be able to import their code to use in your own code to automate those things.
And I'm asking who are these developers using IaC tooling? It seems to me like it was made for ops.
All power to you if you take on both roles, but that's a good way to get burned out. I'm a devops person so the devs can focus on just code, and I can focus on making the best and safest infrastructure for them to run their code in.
I feel like the distinction between the two is fairly contrived these days. I'm an SRE, and we're constantly building tooling to help us better manage infrastructure, improve reliability, improve DX, etc. On the flip side, we also push a lot of the responsibility for infrastructure management to our devs: we maintain the modules and IaC pipelines, and the developers hook up the building blocks they need. It can actually help avoid burnout because our team doesn't become a bottleneck for infrastructure provisioning.
Say what you want about IaC in Go or other programming languages, but it can definitely help strengthen the whole "developers own their infrastructure" since they don't have to learn an additional language syntax.
Those developers are working on “Internal Development Platforms” and building their own abstractions on top of tools like Kubernetes and Grafana to simplify things for developers. This page explains it pretty well: https://internaldeveloperplatform.org/what-is-an-internal-de...
Allowing the Sprint-T-Mobile merger in an already competitive-limited market was a mistake, especially when we see how these companies react to regulations meant to benefit the public and data breaches.
Surely AWS is the worst choice for this given that bandwidth is the main resource that VPNs consume, and AWS bandwidth is ludicrously expensive. For the €5/month that Mullvad charges for unlimited bandwidth you can only get about 60GB of EC2 egress even in the cheaper regions.
According to vantage comparator, t4g.nano (the cheapest) is $3.50 monthly, but you (probably) need to factor in public IPv4, which is $3.60 if I calculate correctly, unless you do funny hacks with port forwarding via SSM. But this is irrelevant when you factor in data transfer.
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