22 thoughts on “Reduction!

  1. I quit reading at
    “…coupled with overall government shrinkage in the past few years…”
    Not sure where DIANE STAFFORD has been for the last few decades, but it must not be reality.

  2. It should be noted, though, that the relative age of federal employees means that conservatives have had at least partial success in curbing the growth of government. That’s what an unbalanced workforce like that means–the company is growing and a bunch of people are on “on the job retirement”. You’ll see it in unionized car plants around the nation.

  3. The number of federal government employees hasn’t changed much since 1962:
    http://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/data-analysis-documentation/federal-employment-reports/historical-tables/total-government-employment-since-1962/
    If you count uniformed military, there are far fewer federal employees now than in 1962.
    That doesn’t mean that the federal government is smaller. Its powers are far greater now than they were in ’62.
    The feds have been outsourcing non-professional jobs like crazy. The federal government looks less like America now than it did in ’62. It’s lawyers making six figures for the most part.

  4. I see there is another story on the Minneapolis Dept of Civil Rights and its 23 employees. I wonder if I stopped in at their office right now, 1:15 PM on a weekday, what those 23 employees are all doing. Busy enforcing civil rights laws in Minneapolis? I wonder what their absentee rate is. It just doesn’t seem like there could be enough civil rights laws being broken in Minneapolis on a Thursday afternoon to keep 23 people busy.

  5. You wish they were sitting around doing nothing, Chuck They are compiling data and delivering reports that will become legislation or policy, damn them.
    Personally I oppose all civil rights legislation. It was all written by a bunch of rich old white guys, wasn’t it?

  6. The assumption that government is too large is of course, one more myth that is factually false on the right.

    There is no valid basis for the conservative claim.

  7. DG- To use your “logic” against you, then the opposite would also be true. “The assumption that that government is too small is, of course, one more myth that is factually false on the left. There is no valid basis for the liberal claim.” Fixed it for you.

  8. It is difficult to comprehend the density of Dog Gone. Over at Penigma’s place I spent thousands of pixels convincing her that she was wrong when she wrote that 95% of lesbians were left-handed (she had made a dumb math mistake). She referenced published research that showed that lesbians were 95% more likely to be left-handed than non-lesbians, so the real number was like 4% of lesbians vs. 2% of non-lesbians.
    The research she referenced — I am certain that she never read it — was a meta-study published in a Canadian journal of psychology. I have access to journals like this. I read the damn thing. Right at the top there was disclaimer that said that the data was crappy (different tests for lesbianism and left-handedness, with samples of widely varying size and surveys conducted decades apart).
    Psychology have far weaker standards for review than medical journals. Meta-studies are shit. Sociologists love meta-studies because you can slice-and-dice the results from dozens of published research until you get what you want (the Humphrey Institute loves meta-studies because they are cheap and you always get the answer you wanted to find!).
    Dealing with social pseudo-science can make you angry if you work in the science or engineering fields. They determine the conclusions before they do the research, and find some way to massage the data until they get what they want — or they don’t publish. All social “scientists” should be made to wear a silly hat so as soon as you see them you know you are dealing with a clown.
    I won’t even start with the time Dog Gone wrote a post blathering on about “trickle down economics”, using a definition of “trickle down economics” written by a professional motivational speaker for About.com.

  9. Doggone, you’re outdoing yourself in substituting your opinions as fact, and quite frankly getting it wrong. To put it bluntly, when our government is spending billions subsidizing coal-fired golf carts for the rich, I would hope that liberal and conservative alike could agree that government is too.damn.big.

    But apparently the environmental, populist, class warfare loving left likes burning coal to fuel golf carts for the rich.

  10. I’d say attrition at federal agencies is a good thing, lets hope for much more at warp speed at: IRS, BATFE, HHS, DHS, EPA, and so many more of the alphabet soup juggernauts.

  11. It is difficult to comprehend the density of Dog Gone. Over at Penigma’s place I spent thousands of pixels convincing her that she was wrong when she wrote that 95% of lesbians were left-handed (she had made a dumb math mistake).

    I’m left-handed. Dang, never realized I was a lesbian.

  12. I’m a lefty too. Well, Mrs. Bubba will indeed tell you that I am attracted to women, so maybe it fits……

  13. There is no valid basis for the conservative claim.

    Huh.

    Well, if you say so.

  14. Is it just me or has DG given up all basis of rational debating, come to think about it has she ever even tried to debate on this blog? I know Emery,RickDFL and other lefties come on and rile us up, but at least they have the decency to engage in (relatively) civil debate.

  15. The 95% of lesbians thing was a window into Dog Gone’s thinking. She was tying to show that since left-handed people were born that way, lesbians were also born that way.
    If she had read the paper she cited, she would have known that there is no evidence that all left-handed people are “born that way”, measurements of who is and who is not left-handed are not reliable (people often self-report their handedness differently than the results of objective testing), and left-handedness is associated with many bad things and few good things. Left handed people have a higher than average tendency to be addicted to drugs or alcohol, develop diabetes, as a group they have lower birth weight and a shorter life span than average (sorry Mr. D and BikeBubba).
    So, regarding the 95% claim:
    -It was wrong.
    -Even if it was right, it wouldn’t have proved what she thought it proved.
    -Even if it had proved what she thought it proved, it wouldn’t mean that lesbianism was not a pathology.

    It’s bozos all the way down with that woman.

  16. Oh, great. Now I’m a lesbian meth addict guzzling down forties and insulin on my way to an early death. At least I’ve got company. :^)

    (on the bright side, lefties are overrepresented in some sports and to a degree in intellectual pursuits, no? I seem to remember lefty boxers/fighters were the origins of the word “sinister” because righties expected a jab and not a knockout punch from that side)

    OK, seriously, my wife and I are both lefties (insert joke here), but none of our six children are. So I can safely assume that it’s not a simple genetic thing with double recessives or something like that. And we can definitely come to the conclusion that Doggone doesn’t know how to read data.

  17. Get this BB, POD sr. (may he rest in peace) and both his brother and sister were lefties (she got it literally beat out of her when she was young, thank you southern baptists…) and both his parents were right handed.

  18. BB also, being a left-handed pitcher is a HUGE advantage, easy pickoff throw to 1st so yes left-handed people are super over-represented in baseball.

  19. And, just in time, Althouse picks up on the growing meme of social science as fraud:
    http://althouse.blogspot.com/2014/06/an-intellectual-crisis-in-age-of-ted.html
    At least I hope that it is a growing meme. Congress actually takes this stuff seriously, ‘disparate outcomes’ policies are a result of crazy social science that “proves” that there is discrimination in the housing market although there is no identifiable discriminatory practice. There is racism present, for example, if a manager is given a thousand resumes with all possible race-identifiers removed and still picks the white guy for the job more often than the social scientists think that he should have. Social scientists use emotionally colored words like “segregation” to describe voluntary self-sorting that results in an arbitrary percentage of minority residents in an arbitrarily chosen area.

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