The biggest news of the day should once again be about DOGE.
A new Executive Order was passed a few minutes ago.
It empowers DOGE to spearhead the complete reorganization of the federal governmentđź§µ
The first part of this Order is simple:
The OMB will put out a plan to make the federal workforce smaller and more efficient, including a stipulation that agencies must remove four existing employees for each new hire, with some exceptions.
The second part is meatier.
New hires have to be approved by newly-installed DOGE Team Leads in each agency. These Team Leads will report what goes on in the agency they're assigned to on a monthly basis.
But that's not even the big part yet.
Third, agency heads will prepare for a massive reduction in the federal workforce.
This workforce reduction will apply to employees not performing necessary and statutorily mandated functions, so if Congress isn't protecting your job, you're likely leaving.
Fourth, suitability judgments about the excepted service will be expanded.
People who do not meet certain legal obligations, people who do not certify NDA compliance, and people who steal or misuse government resources are deemed no longer suitable for employment in it.
Here's the really big part of this order. It's kind of buried down deep, but it's very important:
Agencies are ordered to develop a comprehensive reorganization plan that identifies offices that can be purged because they lack statutory protections, and offices to consolidate.
Putting this all together, what the Order entails is a massive reorganization of the federal workforce and the streamlining of the civil service to make its operation line up with the goals of DOGE.
Not only that, but it empowers DOGE by embedding Team Leads for oversight.
Couple this with the February 4 OPM memo on CIOs, and what we have is staggering:
The federal government will be centralized, stripped down, and more intimately controlled by the President and his delegates, with control enhanced via DOGE.
This is the biggest news of the day, and it's hard to overstate just how big it is.
Because the federal government has grown so unwieldy that no one can provide you with a semblance of an outline of it, measures like this may just be needed to tame the beast.
First thing's first: Most studies agree that rent controlled units have lower rents, but also the supply of rentable units goes down and un-controlled units see their rents increase.
Uh-oh!
Rent control also means that fewer homes get built, and it means that housing quality drops.
After all, if you can't raise the rent, what incentive do you have to make everything sparkly and neat?
Rent control lowers residential mobility, meaning people stay put longer
That's not good because it causes misallocation
Consider an elderly family whose kids left the nest. They should move to a smaller place, but rent control keeps them in place, so new families can't move in
I have actually had people thank me for getting them on this stuff precisely because they had inflammation issues that these drugs *immediately* solved for them.
Here's an example I've posted before: this man's back pain was cured!
Wolf packs are remarkably good at respecting each other's established borders.
The project this data is from sometimes releases videos of how this plays out.
For example, here's a video of this playing out for a few wolves over a single day in Spring.
Alternatively, about 10-20% of wolf populations lack a pack. They're "lone wolves" and they're more likely to just wander across the territory of different packs
But this isn't permanent! Apparently this one eventually joined a pack and changed his long-distance traveling habit!