#public services inefficiency

[insightfultake]

Middle-Class India: Stuck Between Subsidies and Taxes

India’s middle class continues to bear the brunt of the nation’s economic policies, finding itself trapped between heavy taxation and inadequate public services. With fewer than 5% of the population paying income tax and an even smaller fraction contributing a meaningful portion, the government relies heavily on this demographic to finance its plans. In the 2023–24 fiscal year, personal income taxes accounted for 19% of India’s ₹45 trillion budget. Yet, despite their significant contributions, middle-class taxpayers see little relief, with expectations of meaningful tax cuts remaining unmet year after year. Expand

[mariacallous]

Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has spent the first six weeks of the new Trump administration turning the federal government upside down. It has moved from agency to agency, accessing sensitive data and payment systems, all on a supposed crusade to audit the government and stop fraud, waste, and abuse. DOGE has posted some of its “findings” on its website, many of which have been revealed to be errors.

But two federal auditors with years of experience, who have both worked on financial and technical audits for the government, say that DOGE’s actions are the furthest thing from what an actual audit looks like. Both asked to speak on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t permitted to speak to the press.

“Honestly, comparing real auditing to what DOGE is doing, there’s no comparison,” says one of the auditors who spoke to WIRED. “None of them are auditors.”

In September, in a speech during the presidential campaign, then candidate Donald Trump said that he would create a government efficiency task force, headed by Musk, which would do a “complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government.” Musk initially said that he wanted to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget, more than the entire 2023 discretionary budget of $1.7 trillion. Musk has since tempered his ambitions, saying he’d aim to cut $1 trillion in government spending. Still, he has alleged that much of this money can be cut by identifying waste, fraud, and abuse, and has continued to claim DOGE’s cuts of agency staff and resources are all part of an audit.

While there are certainly instances of government money siphoned off to fraud—a Government Accountability Office study published in 2024 estimated that the government loses between $233 billion and $521 billion to fraud each year—even recovering all that spending wouldn’t amount to the $1 trillion Musk hopes to cut from the budget.

The auditors who spoke to WIRED allege that not only is Musk’s claim not true, but also that DOGE appears to have completely eschewed the existing processes for actually rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse.

“An audit that follows Generally Accepted Government Auditing Standards (GAGAS), also known as a Yellow Book audit, is conducted in accordance with the standards issued by the US Government Accountability Office,” says the first auditor. Audits can focus on the finances, compliance, or performance of an agency. “That is the gold standard for how you audit the government.”

There are generally five phases of a GAGAS audit, the auditors tell WIRED: planning, evidence gathering, evaluation, reporting, and follow up. Auditors work to define the scope of an audit, identify all the applicable laws and standards, and come up with an audit plan. Next, auditors conduct interviews with staff, review financial records, and comb through data, reports, and transactions, documenting all the way. From there, auditors will assess that information against policies or procedures to figure out if there’s been some kind of alleged waste, fraud, or abuse and issue a report detailing their findings and offering recommendations. Often, those reports are made available to the public. After an audit, the auditors can follow up with the agency to ensure changes are being made.

There are also very technical definitions for what constitutes waste, fraud, or abuse. Waste could mean that there are inefficiencies in a program that might lead to purchasing more of something that goes unused, or paying more for a service than is necessary. Fraud involves intentional deception—for instance, bribery or falsifying business records. Abuse means doing things that aren’t necessarily illegal, but that are unethical. This could look like nepotism or favoritism in hiring, or spending excessively on travel.

In a recent interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, Musk said he believed that the government was “one big pyramid scheme” and alleged that “entitlements fraud” is a “gigantic magnetic force to pull people in from all around the world and keep them here.”

The two auditors told WIRED that going through the technological and financial minutiae of even just a single project or part of an agency can take anywhere from six to 18 months.

“You can’t coherently audit something like the whole Social Security system in a week or two,” says the second auditor. It’s exactly this rush to crack systems open without full understanding, the auditors say, that has led to Elon Musk’s false claims that 150-year-olds were receiving Social Security benefits. “It could be that DOGE didn’t de-dupe the data.”

“In no uncertain terms is this an audit,” claims the second auditor. “It’s a heist, stealing a vast amount of government data.”

Federal workers who have spoken to WIRED say they are worried that their own data could be used to surveil and target them for firings based on their identities or political views. There are also concerns that DOGE could access contracts and procurement data that contain sensitive information that companies provide in order to work with the federal government. DOGE has also deployed an AI chatbot within the General Services Administration (GSA) and appears to want to expand the use of such tools, bolstered by access to government data. New court documents also indicate that Marko Elez, the former DOGE representative at the Treasury Department, shared a spreadsheet with personally identifying information outside the agency.

And without time spent for auditors to understand a new data system—like interviewing agency staff or learning the coding language—the first auditor believes it’s likely the DOGE team is flying blind. “When they collect a dataset, they don't get it with any sort of description, I imagine,” they say. “There are no terms of use for any government systems … There's no supporting testimony from data system owners, from data system experts. They don't even know the language and the database systems that they're working in. That’s why they keep messing up.”

The auditors described a lengthy vetting process that allowed them to get the permissions necessary to dive into an agency’s data and systems. In addition to going through the initial vetting process, the auditors say that they are required to engage in continuing education.

“None of them have any auditing background, none have any certifications, none have any clearances,” says the first auditor.

Federal workers who have spoken to WIRED expressed concern that DOGE’s operatives appear to have bypassed the normal security clearance protocols in order to access sensitive systems. WIRED found that many of DOGE’s youngest members, all of whom were 25 or younger, have very limited work experience, and none in the government. One, Edward Coristine, who goes by “Big Balls” online, appears to be a 19-year-old high school graduate. Despite this, they were given high-level access at places like the GSA, the Social Security Administration, and the Treasury. Others, like those at the Federal Aviation Administration, come directly from Musk’s own companies and were not fully vetted before their start dates.

The auditors also noted that even canceling contracts, as DOGE has done, can add to costs, rather than reduce them, in the long run. For instance, often the government negotiates deals on large purchases where it gets discounts for bulk purchases. Canceling a contract likely not only means the government needs to pay some kind of fee to compensate for the contract cancellation—maybe 10 to 15 percent of the contract amount—but if some or part of that purchase needs to be reinstated later, that initial bulk discount will likely be gone, making it more expensive overall. This was the case with many of the software licenses that DOGE said it wanted to cut.

Since sweeping through the government, DOGE has canceled thousands of government contracts, including 10,000 specifically for humanitarian aid. According to reporting from the Associated Press, 40 percent of those canceled contracts through late February will likely not save the government any money.

“They'll end up costing more in some way, whether it's time, inconvenience, or money,” says the second auditor.

But the auditors say that there are ways DOGE could get it right. “If DOGE wanted to be the good guys, they could,” says the first auditor. “I’d start by looking at existing Inspector General recommendations.” On the website for the Inspector General for the Department of Health and Human Services, for instance, there are more than 1,200 recommendations that have yet to be implemented that could potentially save the government hundreds of millions of dollars.

In an interview on FOX Business with Larry Kudlow, when asked about how his team was identifying what to go after in the government, Musk replied, “We look at the president's executive orders, and we also just follow the money.”

The auditors say they aren’t necessarily against bringing in people from outside the government to help streamline government processes—something that the government was already doing before Trump was sworn in for his second term. For instance, 18F, the digital services agency within the GSA’s Technology Transformation Services, was explicitly designed to serve as an in-house consultancy that would allow federal agencies to leverage private sector expertise. As part of DOGE’s sweep of the government, however, it has gutted the group, putting a pause on several ongoing projects to make government services more efficient for users.

And it’s these actions, the second auditor says, that best show that DOGE’s intentions may not be geared toward “efficiency” at all. “It’s a con,” they allege.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

[centrally-unplanned]

This was a good post, and I see it is making the rounds it deserves - Statecraft is a pretty top notch publication after all. It nails the many weaknesses of what Doge is doing from the lens of a center-right writer who could be inclined to sympathy, while also noting the places fake news on the "critique" side have spread, which is valuable to do.

I do like the point it crystalized that a lot of people were viewing DOGE from the lens of what Vivek Ramaswamy was saying about it, because pre-launch he did 80% of the coherent, long-form talking (while Elon shitposted). Now, unlike Ruiz I understand Vivek to be an intellectual lightweight, the 2020's Paul Ryan in putting a thinking man's sheen on the aged scrap metal that is the typical Republican talking points. But those talking points are at least somewhat a coherent philosophy, an actual action plan identifying real weaknesses in government. I wouldn't expect Vivek's DOGE to *be* a net good, but I completely agree it *could* have done a lot of good. But then he was forced out at the 11th hour, and the DOGE we got is unconcerned with all the parts of that vision that had any merit.

Something I do want to critique the post about, and this connects to my Tepid Critique of Tanner Greer post, is this line:

But I should also point out that we've covered the failings of USAID in depth: for instance, our conversation with Kyle Newkirk, who ran procurement for USAID in Afghanistan. If you dug into the story of American aid involvement there, what you found was report after report from inspectors general and the Government Accountability Office blasting USAID for the same issues: inability to track where money was going, refusal to subject itself to Congressional oversight, and a lack of long-term planning... ...Readers can come to their own conclusions about who is politically or morally responsible for the aid pause. My point is that the dynamics that led us to this moment have been a long time brewing.

In between those lines is a bunch of other failings of USAID. And to be clear, those failings are legion - many government projects in USAID (like many government projects generally and many private corporate projects as well because life) have been anything from inefficient to boondoggles. So what Ruiz sketches out is that USAID has both stacked up failures, making it earn the ire of some Congressional Republicans and think-tank skeptic types, and those failures have a political bent, often angering Republicans over things like abortion services. And that these failures culminated in the org being attacked; something a better run org, a more bipartisan org, could have avoided.

This is a sketch of a form of intellectual history that is, alas, almost certainly false. Elon Musk, Donald Trump, have never read a USAID accountability report about Afghanistan reconstruction operations in their life. They probably do not know that USAID was even there. The critiques of USAID generated by the alt-right twitterati do not, in any way, stem from academic critiques of its bureaucratic inefficiency. They stem from hating foreigners and deep state conspiracy nonsense. The "argument" Elon musk was setting up for taking down USAID was that it funds ~The Cathedral~ in the US via grants to left media orgs taken from misreading and lying about spreadsheets. There is almost zero intellectual lineage between these strains of thought outside of a generic anti-state libertarianism (that the movement otherwise completely rejects when it is convenient for them).

The idea that USAID could have "saved" itself with better internal management is an illusion center-right types want to believe in because it "both-sides" the issue and gives them hope that there is reasonable critiques at the center of all of this, that the center-right ideological space is still "in charge" but perhaps afflicted with an overzealousness one can temper. And it isn't wrong in the sense that many individual Republicans are those people, who is "dominant" in an admin can shift, that could happen. But it is, fundamentally, a plead trying to justify a sort of "here is how Elon can still win". He can't, the things he is doing are not a "step 1" to better ideas. They are simply destructive waste with a dash of pretty-much murder.

If they stop doing destructive waste and proceed to try to fix the damage they dealt, many will go "ah, see, this was the plan the whole time". Which is 100% going to happen and is very much going to piss me off. It is a lie, and I do wish people like Ruiz (who again is otherwise a great writer and thinker) would have the clarity to see that trick ahead of time.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Degrowth scholarship notes that capitalist growth depends on the creation of artificial scarcity. Human needs can typically be satisfied either by means of relatively resource-efficient, non-commodified need satisfiers (for instance, public transit; food from a community kitchen), or by means of relatively scarce and resource-inefficient commodities (a privately owned car; a meal from a home-delivery service). Under capitalism, essential goods (housing, healthcare, transit, nutritious food, etc.) are commodified and access is mediated by prices that are often very high. To obtain the necessary income people are compelled to enter the capitalist labour market, working to produce things that may not be needed simply to access things that clearly are needed. Artificial scarcity of essential goods thus ensures a steady flow of labour for capitalist growth. It also creates growth dependencies: if productivity improvements (or recessions) lead to unemployment, people suffer loss of access to essential goods and growth is needed to create new jobs and resolve the social crisis. This dynamic explains why, despite capitalism's high levels of production and resource use, many basic needs remain unmet even in high-income countries. In this respect, capitalism is deeply inefficient and wasteful.

How to pay for saving the world: Modern Monetary Theory for a degrowth transition

[girlactionfigure]

(1) The Axis Powers’ concentration camp network extended past the borders of Europe.

The Nazis and the Axis powers created a network of 17 concentration camps in North Africa. Some prisoners were also taken to concentration camps in West Africa. Jews were forced into slave labor, starved, tortured, and murdered. Many died from diseases. Many prisoners in North African labor camps were tasked with the completion of the Trans-Saharan Railroad, a project that was never completed. Though it was a French project, the Nazis were highly supportive of it.

(2) The Mountain Jews of the Caucasus were ultimately saved from extermination because the Nazis considered them “religious,” rather than “racial” Jews.

When the Nazis occupied the North Caucasus in 1942, the Mountain Jews of Na’alchik, Russia, were quick to think on their feet. With the help of their Muslim neighbors, with whom they had good relations, the Mountain Jews promoted the lie that they were ethnic Tat converts to Judaism. 

The Nazis took the issue to the Reich Genealogical Office, which ultimately ruled in their favor, and thus the Mountain Jews were left alone. 

That said, before the Reich Genealogical Office reached their final verdict, the Mountain Jews were treated just as poorly as their Ashkenazi counterparts. On August 19 and September 20, 1942, a total of 850 Jews were executed point-blank with machine guns in Menzhinskoe and Bogdanovka.

(3) The Catholic Church could’ve possibly put an end to the Final Solution. Instead, Pope Pius XII chose silence – and, at times, complicity.

In August of 1941, the Nazis put an end to their Aktion T4 “euthanasia” program – a euphemism for “eugenics” – in response to public uproar. The Catholic Church, in particular, was at the forefront of the protests against the Aktion T4 program. The effect of these protests was enormous, especially within Germany. In Hof, Germany, an angry crowd openly jeered at Hitler over his eugenics policies, the only time this ever happened during 12 years of Nazi rule.

By contrast, the Catholic Church refused to publicly condemn the German persecution of Jews, even after the Nazis’ plans for the Final Solution had long become public knowledge. Claiming “neutrality,” Pope Pius XII rejected the desperate pleas of the Jewish community and even refused meetings with rabbis. This despite the fact that the Vatican was well-aware of the Nazis’ plans for the Final Solution as early as 1942.

(4) The Nazis primarily targeted the Scientific Humanitarian Committee because Magnus Hirschfeld was Jewish.

There’s recently been an attempt to reframe trans individuals as the “first victims” of the Holocaust because the Nazis burnt down the library and archives of the Scientific Humanitarian Committee in 1933. The Scientific Humanitarian Committee provided a plethora of medical services for LGBTQ folks, including contraceptive treatment, gynaecological examinations, treatment for STDs, marital and sexual therapy, and other treatments, such as treatment for alcoholism. Most significantly, the organization pioneered gender-affirming surgeries, including one of the earliest sex-reassignment surgeries in 1931. Other surgical and medical services included facial feminization and masculinization surgery and early forms of body hair removal.

What’s imperative to understand is that the Committee was targeted, above all, both because Hirschfeld, its founder, was Jewish, and because the Nazis associated homosexuality and “sexual deviance” with the “Jewish race.”

(5) The Nazis devised of the gas chambers because Nazi soldiers found it too “psychologically taxing” to execute millions of Jews face-to-face.

Early during the Holocaust, Jews were predominantly murdered via machine gun execution. However, the Nazis considered the method too slow and inefficient. Frustrated with the “inefficiency” of shooting Jews, the Reich Security Main Office soon ordered the use of gas vans for murder on a mass scale. The first extermination camp to use gas vans was Chelmno; by June of 1942, there were 20 gas vans in operation, with many more being prepared. Some gas vans could hold up to 60 people, while others held around 30.

Soon the Nazis found that gas vans, too, were not efficient enough. A big problem was that gas van operators experienced high levels of mental distress due to their proximity to the victims. Sometimes gas vans broke down due to bad roads. Ultimately, they simply couldn’t exterminate Jews quickly enough, so the Nazis built permanent gas chambers.

(6) Before the Nazis’ rise to power, Jews in Germany were the best-integrated in continental Europe.

One of the most historically shocking facts about the Holocaust is that it was devised of in Germany as opposed to somewhere like Eastern Europe, where Jews were much less assimilated into general society. Before World War II, Jews elsewhere in Europe often joked that German Jews were “more German than the Germans.”

In 1929, for example, Dr. M. S. Melamed wrote for The Jewish Criterion, “The German antisemites have a much deeper hatred against the Jew than the Russians, but the German antisemites do not pogrom the Jew. They write articles and books to prove that the Jew has no right to live, that he is wicked, that he is dishonest, and that he should not enjoy any rights and privileges but it would not enter his mind to embark upon a policy of murder, loot and rape.”

Yet by 1945, the German antisemite had exterminated 2 out of every 3 Jews in Europe.

(7) The international community did not assign a day for Holocaust remembrance until 2005.

The Jewish community began memorializing the Holocaust yearly as early as 1949. The Israeli Knesset officially observed a Holocaust remembrance day for the first time in 1951; by 1958, the observance of Yom HaShoah had been codified into Israeli law. 

By contrast, the United Nations did not assign a day to Holocaust remembrance until 2005, when it passed Resolution 60/7, establishing International Holocaust Remembrance Day to coincide with the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on January 27th.

(8) There was one group of Jewish partisans that sought revenge after the Holocaust.

As the Allies closed in on Germany, the German population listed “Jewish revenge” as their biggest fear, owing largely to over a decade of Nazi antisemitic propaganda about how Jews were a threat to Germany. In reality, Jewish acts of revenge in the aftermath of the Holocaust were extremely rare, especially in comparison to vengeful acts from other groups like Poles and even the Allied forces. Jews were far more concerned with finding family members and rebuilding their lives. 

There was one group of Jewish partisans, however, that did devise a plan for revenge. The group was named “Nakam,” meaning revenge in Hebrew. Their plan? To murder six million Germans. 

In the end, the plan was obviously entirely unsuccessful. Only about 2000 SS members got ill with food poisoning, but none died. Many Nakam members reflected many years later and were thankful their plan failed, calling it “a Satanic concept” and “an utterly lunatic idea.” Simcha Rotem said in hindsight that he guilt of murdering so many children would've driven him to suicide.

For a full bibliography of my sources, please head over to my Instagram and  Patreon. 

rootsmetals

please support my fundraiser for Holocaust survivors living in poverty, especially today as it’s Yom HaShoah 🙏🏼

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Walter Einenkel at Daily Kos:

Another day, another judge handing another defeat to Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency. U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang released a 68-page decision in favor of unnamed current and former U.S. Agency for International Development employees and contractors who challenged Musk and DOGE’s efforts to illegally close down the department. In his decision, Chuang wrote that the defendants “likely violated the United States Constitution in multiple ways” and that “they deprived the public's elected representatives in Congress of their constitutional authority to decide whether, when, and how to close down an agency created by Congress.”

Chuang ordered Musk and DOGE to:

Restore “access to email, payment, security notification, and all other electronic systems, including restoring deleted emails, for all current USAID employees and personal services contractors ("PSCs"), whether in active status or on administrative leave”—within seven days.

Not disclose any personal information of current or former USAID workers.

Not engage in activities that would shut down USAID, such as firing employees. 

Chuang also gave Musk and DOGE two weeks to submit a plan that will let USAID return to its headquarters “in the event of a final ruling in favor of Plaintiffs.” The decision follows a federal court ruling that determined President Donald Trump did not have the authority to freeze the approximately $60 billion in foreign assistance funding Congress had earmarked for USAID and the State Department.  Musk and DOGE’s haphazard and destructive assault on federal agencies, starting with the firing of USAID’s inspector general, has been met with cheers from U.S. adversaries, all while creating the kinds of inefficiencies the GOP pretends to care about. 

Judge Theodore Chuang ruled in J. Does v. Musk that the so-called DOGE’s cuts to USAID are illegal and lawless, and stated that such cuts likely violated the Constitution.

[donjuaninhell]

Audio has been a solved issue for decades. I own a 1976 Sony TA-3650 amplifier. It's a powerful class-A solid state amplifier with very low (under 0.1%) distortion while pushing 55w per channel. It's great. I have absolutely no need to upgrade, my turntable (also a vintage mid-70s Sony model) sounds great hooked in through it, and it has an aux channel so I can hook up a CD player or my old DAP for streaming my music collection. If anything, it's maybe a little too powerful. When the -20dB switch isn't engaged it gets apartment shaking loud with the volume knob barely turned up. It's also so goddamn heavy that when I needed to have it serviced it was too unwieldy to lug around on public transit so I had to hail a cab. It's power inefficient, and it's massive. A modern class-D amplifier does everything my Sony does in a package that is a fifth the size and a tenth the weight. That modern amp is also much less expensive. In 1976 the Sony TA-3650 retailed for the equivalent of $2750 in today's dollars. You can get a fantastic, audiophile grade Fosi phono preamp and amplifier pair for around $300.

Speakers are a solved issue too, with DSP it's trivial to tune the tweeters and woofers to have fantastic crossover. This used to be exceptionally difficult to achieve and had to be done via a complex series of transistors and circuits and careful part selection. Woofers are better, tweeters are better, materials science has come a long way. As soon as you leave the "shitty wireless Bluetooth speaker" tier of the market it's easy to find stuff that sounds good. Look up a few YouTube reviews for the pair of "budget" speakers I use as my desktop monitors, the Edifier r1700s. People rave about just how good these things are (and not "fantastic for the price" but "fantastic period") and they cost less than $200. Ditto for headphones, if you really want to spend the money buy a pair of Sennheiser HD 650s for $600, treat them well, and never buy another pair of headphones again in your life. I don't like open-back headphones though, so I'll stick with the excellent Shure SRH-840As (which are $400 cheaper to boot). And meanwhile in IEM land, you can get really fuckin' good IEMs for $30 from one of the Chi-fi manufacturers. The 7hz Zero2s are exceptionally good, well tuned, single driver IEMs that retail for around $30. I bought Cate a pair and she loves them. I just wish they'd stop putting waifus on their packaging.

The guys who spend thousands and thousands of dollars on audio equipment that costs less than the equipment used to record the music they're listening to are genuinely the dumbest motherfuckers on the planet.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

A declassified World War II-era government guide to “simple sabotage” is currently one of the most popular open source books on the internet. The book, called “Simple Sabotage Field Manual,” was declassified in 2008 by the CIA and “describes ways to train normal people to be purposefully annoying telephone operators, dysfunctional train conductors, befuddling middle managers, blundering factory workers, unruly movie theater patrons, and so on. In other words, teaching people to do their jobs badly.” 

Over the last week, the guide has surged to become the 5th-most-accessed book on Project Gutenberg, an open source repository of free and public domain ebooks. It is also the fifth most popular ebook on the site over the last 30 days, having been accessed nearly 60,000 times over the last month (just behind Romeo and Juliet). 

“Sabotage varies from highly technical coup de main acts that require detailed planning and the use of specially-trained operatives, to innumerable simple acts which the ordinary individual citizen-saboteur can perform,” the guide begins. “Simple sabotage does not require specially prepared tools or equipment; it is executed by an ordinary citizen who may or may not act individually and without the necessity for active connection with an organized group; and it is carried out in such a way as to involve a minimum danger of injury, detection, and reprisal.”

Do you work for the federal government? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at +1 202 505 1702. Otherwise, send me an email at jason@404media.co.

The guide’s intro was written by William “Wild Bill” Donovan, who was the head of the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, which later inspired the creation of the CIA. The motivating factor for writing the guide, according to a passage within it, is that citizen saboteurs were highly effective at resisting the Nazis during World War II, and the Office of Strategic Services wanted to detail other ways sabotage could be done: “Acts of simple sabotage are occurring throughout Europe. An effort should be made to add to their efficiency, lessen their detectability, and increase their number,” the guide states. “Widespread practice of simple sabotage will harass and demoralize enemy administrators and police,” the guide states, adding that citizens often undertake acts of sabotage not for their own immediate personal gain, but to resist “particularly obnoxious decrees.”

Because it was written during active wartime, the book includes various suggestions for causing physical violence and destruction, such as starting fires, flooding warehouses, breaking tools, etc. But it also includes many suggestions for how to just generally be annoying within a bureaucracy or office setting. Simple sabotage ideas include:

“Insist on doing everything through ‘channels.’ Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.”

“Make ‘speeches.’ Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your ‘points’ by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate ‘patriotic’ comments.”

“Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.”

“Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.”

“‘Misunderstand’ orders. Ask endless questions or engage in long correspondence about such orders. Quibble over them when you can.”

“In making work assignments, always sign out the unimportant jobs first. See that the important jobs are assigned to inefficient workers of poor machines.”

“To lower morale and with it, production, be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions. Discriminate against efficient workers; complain unjustly about their work.”

“Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.”

“Multiply paperwork in plausible ways.” 

“Make mistakes in quantities of material when you are copying orders. Confuse similar names. Use wrong addresses.”

“Work slowly. Think out ways to increase the number of movements necessary on your job”

“Pretend that instructions are hard to understand, and ask to have them repeated more than once. Or pretend that you are particularly anxious to do your work, and pester the foreman with unnecessary questions.”

“Snarl up administration in every possible way. Fill out forms illegibly so that they will have to be done over; make mistakes or omit requested information in forms.”

The guide also suggests “general devices for lowering morale and creating confusion,” which include “Report imaginary spies or danger to the Gestapo or police,” “act stupid,” “Be as irritable and quarrelsome as possible without getting yourself into trouble,” “Stop all conversation when axis nationals or quislings enter a cafe,” “Cry and sob hysterically at every occasion, especially when confronted by government clerks.”

It is impossible to say why this book is currently going viral at this moment in time and why it may feel particularly relevant to a workforce of millions of people who have suddenly been asked to agree to be “loyal” and work under the quasi leadership of the world’s richest man, have been asked to take a buyout that may or may not exist, have had their jobs repeatedly denigrated and threatened, have suddenly been required to return to office, have been prevented from spending money, have had to turn off critical functions that help people, and have been asked to destroy years worth of work and to rid their workplaces of DEI programs. Maybe it's worth wondering why the most popular post in a subreddit for federal workers is titled “To my fellow Feds, especially veterans: we’re at war.” 

404 Media is an independent website whose work is written, reported, and owned by human journalists and whose intended audience is real people, not AI scrapers, bots, or a search algorithm.

[fluffmugger]

"Simple Sabotage Field Manual" by United States Office of Strategic Services is a historical publication written during the early 1940s, amid World War II. This manual acts as a guide for ordinary civilians to conduct simple acts of sabotage against enemy operations without the need for specialized training or equipment. Its main topic revolves around promoting small, accessible forms of resistance that could collectively disrupt the enemy's war effort. The manual outlines various strategies and techniques for citizens to engage in sabotage that could be executed discreetly and with minimal risk. It provides specific suggestions for targeting transportation, communication, and industrial facilities to create delays and inefficiencies in enemy operations. The manual emphasizes the power of many individuals acting independently to contribute to a larger campaign of disruption, encouraging simple acts such as misplacing tools, delaying communication, or damaging equipment with household items.

[losingtothejellybeans]

Felt this was the best episode in ages and seemed like a return to form!

Balance between medical stories with a touch of realism and NH. Less superfluous Buckle or Turner scenes and “plot”.

I think little baby June has served as a reminder that although medical advances existed and the family were “comfortable”- people still said (and do today) that they cannot cope.

Rosalind, seems to be hinting that she wants motherhood and (presumably) marriage. Maybe a hint that although Cyril has been on her mind and she’s wistful she won’t pine after him forever? I wonder if Cyril will come back or not, half think he’s going to come back at the end saying he’s separated other half of me thinks based on how characters get on a bus in CTM that he’s said his goodbyes and that’s it, there will be a single scene with a mention about renting out his flat, maybe a letter to Phyllis from Lucille to say her life now feels complete with Cyril staying and their home…

Joyce, I’m glad to hear she got to do some extra training. It would be nice for her to have a storyline of her own unless she’s supposed to be like sister Veronica (and honestly what all the nuns have become, vehicles for a plot/stand ins for the audience rather than getting their own standalone personal interest storylines). Perhaps something in the future about her career ambitions?

Trixie producing a decent evidence based report rather than the scene from an earlier series where her argument was essentially “you’re missing the human names and story” was great. It also better acknowledges the reality of the situation (nuns meet a need and cover a funding gap) . I don’t know if it’s intentional but I don’t dislike the subtle undertones of public services being inefficient vs fabulous benefactors and volunteers…a bit too Big Society for my tastes…..I think a future where Trixie takes on a non clinical role but still a nurse would be interesting and be a better fit for where she’s evolved to.

Excited to see new nun/postulant and what her arrival might bring. I’m curious to see what her calling story might be, especially if she joined late 60s/1970. I’ve always hoped they would do a closeted nun angle, with a woman from a deeply religious family and her own strong faith, with joining an order allowing her security away from marriage etc but also privately confident in who she is, perhaps pushing for tolerance and acceptance without being out.

Do we just assume Nancy got married off screen and is settled??

[rjzimmerman]

How to Repair the Planet? One Answer Might Be Hiding in Plain Sight. (New York Times)

Yes, yes and another triple yes to this premise of this article: we can address the various global crises facing us by looking at them "holistically" rather than as separate silos. I've been harping on this since I started this blog: deal with the "traditional" environmental issues, such as the collapse of biodiversity, properly, and simultaneously we might also be dealing with the newer and evolving climate crisis issues. All part of one, instead of separate kingdoms that benefit academia rather than the rest of us.

Excerpt from this New York Times story:

Sometimes, human needs can make problems like climate change and biodiversity collapse seem insurmountable. The world still relies on fossil fuels that are dangerously heating the planet. People need to eat, but agriculture is a top driver of biodiversity loss.

But what if we’re looking at those problems the wrong way? What if we tackled them as a whole, instead of individually?

A landmark assessment, commissioned by 147 countries and made public on Tuesday, offers the most comprehensive answer to date, examining the sometimes dizzying interconnections among biodiversity, climate change, food, water and health.

“Our current approaches to dealing with these crises have tended to be fragmented or siloed,” said Paula Harrison, a co-chair of the assessment and an environmental scientist who focuses on land and water modeling at the UK Center for Ecology & Hydrology, a research organization. “That’s led to inefficiencies and has often been counterproductive.”

The report, by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, an independent panel that advises governments on biodiversity issues, focuses heavily on solutions. It includes scores of potential interventions along with their cascading effects. For example, the authors note that efforts like incorporating prairie strips, areas of native vegetation amid crop rows, or strategically locating trees on farmland can help with biodiversity, food production, human well-being, water quality and climate change all at once.

Not all situations will have multiple wins. Often, negative consequences are unavoidable. But people should be aware of the trade-offs and make them deliberately, from national governments all the way to local communities, the authors said.

“Right now, we don’t take account of a lot of the trade-offs,” said Pamela McElwee, also a co-chair of the assessment and a professor of human ecology at Rutgers University. “And so, they get passed on to somebody else.”

Overlooked costs to biodiversity, climate, water and health from the fossil fuel, agriculture and fisheries sectors were estimated at $10 trillion to $25 trillion per year. Negative health consequences were especially costly, Dr. McElwee said. For instance, she pointed to the nine million people a year who die from air pollution, and the rise in obesity and diabetes because of unhealthy diets that also harm biodiversity and contribute to climate change.

[mariacallous]

In December, the Republican senator Joni Ernst, of Iowa, released a report tauntingly titled “Out of Office: Bureaucrats on the beach and in bubble baths but not in office buildings.” Ernst, the chair of the Senate DOGE Caucus, had recently announced her intention to help Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency “cut Washington’s pork and make ’em squeal.” The report, with the alliterative plosives of its title raining down like flecks of spit, was an opening volley in the fight to rouse sleepy bureaucrats and put them on notice.

Ernst charged public employees with widespread absenteeism and dereliction of duty. The report’s headline finding—claiming that just six per cent of federal employees work full time in their offices—was quickly debunked. But the narrative of a lethargic civil service in bad need of work discipline was set in motion. “The parasites are thrashing hard,” Musk posted on X. Instead of government employees “pretending to work” and “being paid a lot for nothing,” Musk wrote, they would have to “get a real job.” The Fox News personality Jesse Watters summed up the story line by pronouncing, in December, that “bureaucrats have never been lazier.” According to Watters, “Biden spent forty per cent of his Presidency on vacation. But compared to the rest of the government he’s a workaholic.”

America’s federal government employs a dizzying range of workers: mail carriers and mapmakers, firefighters and fish biologists, volcanologists positioned on tectonic-plate boundaries, cooks on Navy submarines. Recent antagonism toward the government workforce, however, has targeted a particular type: the office-dweller, the laptop-user, the knowledge worker who is possibly remote, possibly dead, whose products are indeterminate and, therefore, of dubious value. DOGE’s waves of firings has been indiscriminate, more machine-gun spray than surgical excision. Yet throughout, the image of the pampered paper pusher has stood in for a larger hazy vision of taxpayer-sponsored waste.

Bureaucrats are easy to loathe. As the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises—a leading thinker beloved by enemies of big government and friends of the free market—wrote in 1944, “Nobody calls himself a bureaucrat.” The very term implies an insult. The rule of bureaucracy, von Mises argued, favors the “inefficient expert” who “cannot succeed within a competitive system.” For von Mises, as a bureaucracy swells, it risks blossoming into state tyranny. Other critics of bureaucracy point to a different danger: the corrupting effects of the system on the bureaucrats themselves.

Gray walls, harsh lighting, stiff hierarchies, mystifying rules, endless reams of paper: the tedium and repressiveness of bureaucratic work is proverbial. Writing in the early twentieth century, the sociologist Max Weber saw bureaucracy as dehumanizing, a coldly rational deprivation of human freedom. “The individual bureaucrat cannot squirm out of the apparatus into which he has been harnessed,” Weber wrote. “He is only a small cog in a ceaselessly moving mechanism which prescribes to him an essentially fixed route of march.” The government worker may “enjoy security,” von Mises added. “But this security will be rather of the kind that the convict enjoys within the prison walls.” The political scientist Ralph Hummel went so far as to argue, in the nineteen-seventies, that bureaucrats are bad in bed: warped by their work, bureaucrats focus not on love but on “technical performance in sexual intercourse.” Recent claims, in the conservative press, of a twelve-person orgy among officials at a Veterans Affairs medical center in Tennessee, offer salacious elaboration on this theme of erotic pathology, casting the bureaucrat in the bedroom as at once perverse and virtuosic.

Although the question of whether bureaucrats make good lovers is relatively modern, the trope of the bureaucrat as avoiding hard work has existed for as long as bureaucracy itself. The scribes of ancient Egypt were among the world’s first bureaucrats, and while scribal work was considered prestigious and honorable, a career as a scribe was also a way of evading the hardships of other forms of labor. “The Satire of the Trades,” a frequently copied text composed during Egypt’s Middle Kingdom, presents itself as advice composed by a father for a son on his way to scribal school. Becoming a scribe, the father says, “saves one from work.” That is, it saves one from the miseries, indignities, and bodily damage incurred in nearly all nonscribal occupations.

The bulk of the “Satire” is devoted to recounting the physical arduousness of jobs outside the courtly bureaucracy. The barber “wears out his arms to fill his belly,” walking the streets “crying out, his bowl upon his arm,” looking for customers to shave. The potter’s clothes are “stiff with mud,” the furnace tender’s eyes are red from smoke, the weaver gets whipped, and the fisherman must contend with crocodiles. Only the scribe is spared these horrors. And so the father exhorts, “I shall make you love books more than your mother.” Then again, the division between manual and cognitive labor is, as ever, deceptive. The Egyptian scribes may have avoided the crocodiles, but skeletal remains indicate that plenty of them developed arthritis.

The idea that bureaucrats are slow-moving and unproductive, as well as insufficiently motivated, is drawn out in Victorian literature, too. In Charles Dickens’s novel “Little Dorrit,” published between 1855 and 1857, the most powerful government department is the Circumlocution Office, through which all official business gets routed—and blocked: “Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving—HOW NOT TO DO IT.” A full-blown moral panic about the laziness of government workers, such as we are now experiencing, is more rare. Nonetheless, Musk’s filleting of the federal government is not the first time that so-called lazy bureaucrats have been thrown under the wheels of historical change. Campaigns to purge the “parasites” tend to emerge—or to be fanned into flame—at moments of political rupture. When an insecure yet ambitious regime attempts to carry out large-scale social transformation, the indolent bureaucrat makes for an ideal scapegoat.

In the late nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire, fearing decline, pursued modernizing reforms. The reformers worried that change was too halting, and that the Ottomans were falling behind the industrializing European nations. In 1906, Osman Hamdi Bey’s painting “The Tortoise Trainer,” one of the period’s most celebrated art works, memorably depicted such anxieties. It shows an elderly man in religious Ottoman garb attempting to train the sluggish tortoises crawling at his feet, their domed shells evoking mosques.

In this context, widespread alarm arose in Istanbul about whether civil servants were working hard enough, as the historian Melis Hafez recounts in her 2021 book, “Inventing Laziness.” Bureaucrats who didn’t measure up were purged. Clerks who fell asleep in the office were charged with crimes. In 1911, as the empire verged on collapse, the Grand Vizier—the head of state second only to the Sultan—demanded that “every lazy, incompetent, and inefficient civil official be weeded out.” An empire in decline turns on itself and attacks its own organism, while fastening onto the belief that if people worked harder, the country would be saved.

Classic attacks on bureaucracy center on the paralyzing effects of rigid institutional structures. The concern with bureaucrats sleeping in the office shifts the emphasis from structural issues to individual weakness of will. In Trump’s America, as in late-imperial Istanbul, the napping bureaucrat has been summoned for abuse. One self-proclaimed former federal worker reported via TikTok that “our government is filled with the most incompetent and most lazy people.” Every morning, she said, she would walk past one colleague “snoring at his desk.” Another employee, she alleged, would regularly slip out of the office to “take a nap in his favorite park, under a shady tree.”

Trump’s consolidation of power in his second term has been driven by a perceptible change of pace. The Administration has ginned up a sense of urgency, doing away with brakes and guardrails by insisting that the fate of the nation depends on rapid executive action. “All federal workers should be working at the same pace that President Trump is working and moving,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told Fox News last month. Why? Because “we have a country to save.” As Watters said on his show, “Work-from-home Fridays isn’t going to fly in the Golden Age.” He credited Trump with a revival of the American work ethic. “This country was forged by pioneers. This isn’t a lazy nation like some of you nations out there. You know who I’m talking about, Canada.”

The purging of bureaucrats has often coincided with zealous announcements of a new golden age. During the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong came to believe that the revolution was losing momentum because of the country’s lumbering bureaucracy. Mao rejected the idea that communism encouraged laziness. On the contrary, he saw laziness as counter-revolutionary. “The Chairman could not abide ‘lazy’ bureaucrats,” the historians Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals write in “Mao’s Last Revolution.” In 1964, Mao declared, “Laziness is one of the sources of revisionism”—a deviation from revolutionary ideals. Purges of supposed revisionists were routine in Mao’s China; linking laziness to counter-revolution, he put idlers on the chopping block. Throughout the nineteen-sixties, the Chairman hacked away at the bureaucracy, focussing especially on ministries dealing with culture, education, and public health.

Soviet Russia, too, experienced periodic panics about slothful bureaucrats impeding the dictatorship of the proletariat. In the nineteen-twenties and thirties, films such as “Don Diego and Pelagia” presented indifferent and self-indulgent office workers reading romance novels and eating huge meals at their desks. The historian Sheila Fitzpatrick describes, in her book “Everyday Stalinism,” a political cartoon titled “Bureaucrat on the trapeze.” It depicts a pair of circus artists, one representing the Soviet citizen, the other representing the bureaucrat; the citizen has just launched himself into the air, but the bureaucrat, instead of rising to catch him, holds up a sign reading “Come back tomorrow.”

The morality of work was crucial to the Soviet Union’s revolutionary effort. The 1936 Soviet constitution quoted St. Paul’s dictum, “He who does not work, neither shall he eat.” Later in the century, idleness was criminalized. The Soviet Union’s 1961 law outlawing “social parasitism” mostly targeted tramps, beggars, and prostitutes (as well as poets like Joseph Brodsky)—not bureaucrats. But the message was clear: if you’re lazy, you’re not with the program. The glorious future of the nation depends on everyone laboring at a fast pace, with no time to slow down and question what’s happening. Trump’s agenda, reactionary though it may be, exhibits a certain revolutionary fervor.

In the United States, the apparent incontestability of the work ethic makes it awkward to fight back against attacks on “lazy” bureaucrats. Musk’s recruiting call for DOGE asked for “super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week.” (The conspicuous youth of the DOGE team may reflect the greater willingness of young people without family responsibilities to submit to such a punishing regimen; according to Politico, some DOGE staff members are sleeping on IKEA beds in a federal office building.) Musk has repeatedly contrasted the fecklessness of federal employees with the industriousness of his élite cadre of libertarian workaholics. DOGE employees, he boasted on X, are working a hundred and twenty hours a week. “Our bureaucratic opponents optimistically work 40 hours a week. That is why they are losing so fast.”

Attempts to defend federal employees by showing that they actually do work long hours, while helpful, miss the point. Totting up working hours places us on Musk’s argumentative terrain. Over the years, Musk has made himself into a contemporary saint of overwork, laboring with a ferocity at once stunning and pathological. A Business Insider headline, from 2023, announced that “Elon Musk’s productivity hack is taking 2 or 3 days off a year, working 7 days a week, and getting 6 hours of sleep a night.” Musk confided to his biographer, Walter Isaacson, that the strain of work “would often keep him awake at night and make him vomit”; in 2018, he wept on the phone with a Times reporter while describing the agony of his hundred-and-twenty-hour workweeks. Few of us are going to match Musk on hours worked. Nor should we.

DOGE’s assault on the federal workforce is, in part, a classic Silicon Valley story of condemning the public sector as unproductive while lauding the private sector as dynamic, innovative, and entrepreneurial. (This picture of the public sector’s inertia is, at the very least, highly disputable: Musk himself has received thirty-eight billion dollars in federal funds for his businesses in the past decades, and a low-interest Department of Energy loan helped get Tesla off the ground.) But it’s also a story about how work ethic gets twisted to serve the ends of people in power. For Musk and Trump, the “lazy bureaucrat” is anyone who stands in their way. ♦

[butch-snorlax]

Postal service and the bus servic3 need whipping harder I swear to God. Inefficient failures all the way through. Filling to deliver public service should be considered a crime against the state and have you flogged

[probablyasocialecologist]

Capitalism is highly inefficient from an ecological perspective, and we know from empirical studies that it is possible to have a much more efficient economy that delivers high levels of wellbeing with much lower levels of total production. In fact, it is possible to provide good lives for 8.5 billion people on this planet with much less energy and resources than we presently use, if that was the objective of production. Universal public services are key to such a future. I mean not only healthcare and education, but also affordable housing, childcare, recreation facilities, clean energy, internet and nutritious food. This approach ensures that the most important goods and services are always produced in sufficient quantities, and available to everyone. The claim that there is ‘no money’ for universal services is totally wrong. Money simply represents productive capacity in the economy – real resources and labour that can be used to produce things. And we know that in the UK there is massive productive capacity. The problem is that it is misdirected. The key is to reallocate it. This can be done by using credit policy to reduce investment in damaging and unnecessary sectors, thus liberating resources to be redirected elsewhere. Then you use public finance to directly mobilise necessary production – for example, renewable energy and public services. With this approach we can rapidly solve our social and ecological problems, and maintain price stability at the same time.

23 April 2025

[misfitwashere]

February 26, 2025 

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

FEB 27

This morning, Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought and Office of Personnel Management acting director Charles Ezell sent a memo to the heads of departments and agencies. The memo began: “The federal government is costly, inefficient, and deeply in debt. At the same time, it is not producing results for the American public. Instead, tax dollars are being siphoned off to fund unproductive and unnecessary programs that benefit radical interest groups while hurting hardworking American citizens. The American people registered their verdict on the bloated, corrupt federal bureaucracy on November 5, 2024 by voting for President Trump and his promises to sweepingly reform the federal government.”

Vought was a key author of Project 2025, the blueprint for a second Trump administration, and in July 2024, investigative reporters caught him on video saying that he and his group, the Center for Renewing America, were hard at work writing the executive orders and memos that Trump would use to put their vision into place. But his claim that voters backed his plan is false. An NBC News poll in September 2024 showed that only 4% of voters liked what was in Project 2025. It was so unpopular that Trump called parts of it “ridiculous and abysmal” and denied all knowledge of it.

But the policies coming out of the Trump White House are closely aligned with Project 2025 and, if anything, appear to be less popular now than they were last September. Under claims of ending diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been slashing through government programs that are popular with Republican voters like farmers, as well as with Democratic voters.

Yesterday, Secretary of Veterans Affairs Douglas A. Collins celebrated cuts to 875 contracts that he claimed would save nearly $2 billion. But, as Emily Davies and Hannah Natanson of the Washington Post reported, those contracts covered medical services, recruited doctors, and funded cancer programs, as well as providing burial services for veterans. The outcry was such that the VA rescinded the order today. Still on the chopping block, though, are another 1,400 jobs. Those cuts were announced Monday, on top of the 1,000 previous layoffs.

Despite the anger at the major cuts across the government, Vought announced that agency heads should prepare for large-scale reductions in force, or layoffs, and that by March 13 they should produce plans for the reorganization of their agencies to make them cost less and produce more with fewer people. Before Trump took office, the number of people employed by the U.S. government was at about the same level it was 50 years ago, although the U.S. population has increased by about two thirds. What has increased dramatically is spending on private contractors, who take profits from their taxpayer-funded contracts.

In his memo today, Vought instructed agency heads to “collaborate” with the DOGE team leads assigned to the agency, who presumably report to Elon Musk.

Also today, Trump signed an executive order putting the DOGE team in charge of creating new technological systems to review all payments from the U.S. government and then giving the head of DOGE the power to review all those payments. “This order commences a transformation in Federal spending on contracts, grants, and loans to ensure Government spending is transparent and Government employees are accountable to the American public,” the executive order says.

Make no mistake: This order transforms federal spending by taking it away from Congress, where the Constitution placed it, and moves it to the individual who sits atop the Department of Government Efficiency.

Yesterday the White House announced that the acting head of DOGE is Amy Gleason, who was hired on December 30, 2024, at the technology unit that Trump tried to transform into the Department of Government Efficiency. Nevertheless, members of the White House, including President Donald Trump, have repeatedly referred to Musk as “the head of [DOGE].”

Musk appeared to be in charge of the first Cabinet meeting of the Trump administration today. As Kevin Liptak and Jeff Zeleny of CNN reported: “If anyone was still in doubt where the power lies in President Donald Trump’s new administration, Wednesday’s first Cabinet meeting made clear it wasn’t in the actual Cabinet.” Katherine Doyle of NBC News described “Senate-confirmed department heads spending an hour as audience members.”

A photograph of the meeting in which Musk, wearing a Make America Great Again ball cap and a T-shirt that said “Tech Support,” appears to be holding court while Trump appears to be sleeping reinforced the idea that it is Musk rather than Trump who is running the government. When Trump did speak, CNN fact checker Daniel Dale noted, his remarks were full of false claims.

Cabinet officers, who had brought notes for the statements they expected to make, sat silent, while Musk, the unelected billionaire from South Africa who put more than a quarter of a billion dollars into electing Trump, spoke more than anyone except Trump himself. Trump didn’t turn to Vice President J.D. Vance until 56 minutes into the meeting, and Vance spoke for only 36 seconds.

But Trump appeared to be aware of the popular anger at Musk’s power over the government and today dared the Cabinet members to suggest they weren’t happy with the arrangements. “ALL CABINET MEMBERS ARE EXTREMELY HAPPY WITH ELON,” Trump wrote on his social media channel this morning. “The Media will see that at the Cabinet Meeting this morning!!!”

“Is anybody unhappy?” Trump asked the Cabinet officers during the meeting. When they applauded in response, he commented: “I think everyone’s not only happy, they’re thrilled.”

—

[robot-wrote-a-love-song]

Connor headcanons (refined sort of. not really.)

all under the cut bc kms

- post game he has a tie collection :D this includes a few bowties for special occasions

- his favorite is one that kinda looks like stars. that and the stupid looking fish one

- his arm has permanent bite marks under his skin bc I chewed on him. he allows this bc he loves me

- sometimes the arm i chew on glitches (skin will flicker out) he says he doesn't mind but I still feel guilty

- absolute sucker when it comes to affection. give him a hug and he'll do basically anything (this mainly applies to me ^-^)

- stays with the DPD while Hank works there bc he likes working with his dad :3

- once Hank starts thinking about quitting (he's 50, not going to die) he starts to look into other things

- works at a pet cafe for a while bc he liked the animals and people watching (THATS HOW HE MEETS ME!)

- likes to restore old technology and toys. keeps some and gives some away

- dog person, but still likes cats

- cats like him A LOT. they like how warm he is and the white noise... (it's me I'm cats)

- if u rest ur head on him, u can hear a fan whirring and what sounds similar to a heartbeat

- lets me stick my hand in his chest with his biocomponents

- but would not let me lick them :( (someday)

- absolutely has a problem when it comes to sticking things in his mouth. like a goddamn toddler (oral fixation who?)

- no genitals during the game bc it was inefficient

- has not thought about getting any bc it's require a lot of money

- kept his LED after the revolution

- does not like snow (canon imo)

- very affectionate. would crawl into ur lap in public if u let him (I always let him <3)

- will just. pick ppl up (AS LONG AS THEY'RE OK WITH IT)

- love language is acts of service

- charges with a cable in the back of his neck, or with solar panels.

- blue blush.... bc his blood is blue...

- we have a lil apartment together <3

- adopted a cat n a dog with me :3

- sometimes he feels bad about the ppl he caused to die/killed. then remembers that it wasn't his fault

- still feels bad

- walks around fully clothed everywhere. not even just pajamas (unless he just woke up)

- keeps trying to learn to play an instrument. he wasn't made for it though, so he struggles a lot

- likes sweaters. much like the ties he has a collection

- so many button ups. think of a closet full of them. now two. more than that.

- lets me steal his clothes <3

- if he's got corpses of himself, he absolutely had them buried (i like to think that androids will decompose well n it's not bad for enviro)

- does his best to try n fix Connor 60. he doesn't come back fully right, but he still cares about him

- DOES NOT ACTIVATE TJE OTHER CONNORS. (61+) having three is enough. some still got activated though somehow

- when he finds RK900 he gets activated.

- rk900 is a military android. he's much nicer than he looks

- would not be comfortable sharing his partner (ME!) with Sixty and Nines. he feels weird about it bc while they aren't exactly brothers, they do have his face. it makes him worry that id only want him for his looks

- I love him for him. not for his looks

- always covered in some kind of animal fur. take a lint roller to him and it'll explode

- sometimes he'll accidentally shock ppl when he touches them. apologizes every time. I forgive him <3

- has a projector built into his wrist and forehead. did not realize this for a long fucking time

- thirium is edible. this is 4 ppl like me who r bitey. it tastes metallic, but also subtly sweet. a bit rubbery

- I found out after biting him rlly hard. I like it

- as his model gets older some of his parts + systems start to fail. has to track down Kamski + work with cyberlife to figure out how to fix it bc he was forgetting things (no angst here thank u <3)

- if I ask rlly nicely he lets me plug my phone into him to charge it

- thirium will stain ur tongue blue. please don't bite your androids before work (found out the hard way)

- if he got genitals (tbh he won't) for about a week he'd have an insane sex drive. this is a bug in the software that engineers have not figured out. they're still working on it.

- he genuinely does not care about sex and that stuff. neither do I

- can detach his limbs if he wants to. if he's in a meeting sometimes he'll detach his arm and give it to me. people have found this disturbing <3

- it's a pain in the ass to take it off and then reattach it tho so he doesn't do it often

- likes holiday lights

- can switch his pain tolerance off if he wants to (no reaction when he got shot, but after he starts to deviate, things hurt more) usually keeps them on bc once he turned them off while cooking, and didn't realize there was a knife stuck in his torso until he couldn't find it and went to ask me to look for it

- actually horrifying

- will not wear turtlenecks. he doesn't like how they feel on his neck + they're Nines' thing. they look too similar otherwise

- hair is slightly wavier than it looks.

- can grow hair wherever he wants. prefers to be relatively hairless

- tried long hair for a bit. liked it, but preferred it shorter

- thought about getting a piercing. did not bc minor wounds (such as piercing holes or papercuts) close super easily

- if he took out a piercing 4 too long it'd close :(

- way later into his deviancy (like. 2040 or smth, after he leaves the DPD) he starts researching punk/alt subcultures

- absolutely made himself a battle vest :3

- it's more Sixty's thing w/ the whole style thing (sixty is 100% on the alt stuff. many piercings despite how hard they r to keep) but they bond over it :3

- Hank teaches him how to sew on patches n make spikes n stuff

- it takes him a few months after deviancy to call Hank by his name

-the first time he called Hank dad was by accident

- not objectum. would 100% do so much research on it 4 me :3

- sort of understands it too

- his battle vest has his model number (RK800) with the triangle on it. he cut it directly from his jacket

- other patches on his jacket include the MLM flag, and one about punching Nazis. he's got an ACAB one on the back

- if you give him enough materials, he'll just. make things.

- once he was asked by some kids to fix the tire swing at a park. took Hank's spare tire for it and it's 100% safe

- weighs a bit less than he looks. he's designed to be aerodynamic

- if ur strong enough and threw him, it'd be funny bc he'll go rlly far

- learns to slow dance/dance but romantic bc he's hopeless

- can play music from a speaker somewhere. I can't tell if it's in his mouth or behind his ear and he won't tell me >:(

- can take photos with his brain. has an entire album of me :3

- similarly, I am running out out phone storage with all my photos of him

- starts to draw at some point. not very good at it but he puts his little doodles on anything he writes on

- a lot of them r me n him :3

- if someone were to jump him, he'd take it until either they got bored of him not reacting (turned off his pain receptors) or damaged smth important

- we have talked about this. he says he will stop taking it. I will beat ppl up 4 him

- if someone were to jump someone else he cared about, he'd 100% beat their ass

- HE CAN PUT LITTLE EMOTICONS OR SYMBOLS IN HIS EYES.

- his fav is a lil <3

- others he does often include ? ! ★