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Brian Wilkinson's avatar

Kudos to you for writing on both of these topics! I appreciated your objectivity and candor, as exemplified in this paragraph: "Now that many companies are dropping their DEI efforts, while others are holding onto them, I hope they can all be honest about their reasons. Without a profit-based justification, it comes down to values. Do you see race-based hiring as righting a terrible historical wrong, or do you see it as another form of discrimination? Both sides have valid points."

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DigustedwithElitism's avatar

Psychologists know that one person's core values cannot be changed with lectures and shaming, even DEI boot camps. DEI is madness, stark, raving madness.

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Eugene Steuerle's avatar

I think you would agree with this clarification of your statement that "institutions do more harm than good:" "At many margins, including growth largely unrelated to core mission, they do more harm than good." The trick is to fix, reform, target better, and so forth at those margins. Engaging the fight by attacking the institution as a failure on average, whether it's the IRS, Social Security, defense, CFPB, or the FED tends to be foolhardy both politically and economically.

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DigustedwithElitism's avatar

ALL successful problem-solving techniques begin with the same fundamental premise - if a problem cannot be appropriately named and identified it cannot be solved. Failure is a real thing, government agencies and civil service employees are not exempt. USAID is not just a failure, it is a snake pit overflowing with treachery, if not treason. And DEI (and CRT and settler colonization ideology, and transgender ideology, and all the rest of new dresses on an old whore, Marxism) are intellectual poison and must be destroyed, root and branch.

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j b's avatar

Uh. "Shaking things up" or tearing it all down?

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/10/opinion/treasure-secretaries-doge-musk.html

Stunned that a financial person completely overlooks the clear and present danger the violation of policy vs mechanism Musk presents.

As an old white man I disagree also completely with you also about "DEI" but that blindness is secondary to the DOGE criminality, which impacts all. Best wishes.

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DigustedwithElitism's avatar

When a corrupt policy was written by corrupt persons so as to protect corrupt persons, how is one to dig it out? The clear and present danger was and is the old status quo; the USA did not have a future on the trajectory it was on.

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j b's avatar

Your assertions are unconvincing and you provide no evidence. If concerned about debt there are dozens of policy options for bending the debt curve that don't involve illegal dismantling of rule of law. And I predict that as has happened on every GOP admin tax cuts worsen the debt situation.

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Phil K's avatar

How do you feel about about it as a biped?

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Christian Cabaniss's avatar

How do we reconcile risk as viewed from the different echelons of society?

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