May 2, 2025

CHANGE: ‘No Participation Trophies’: Trump Revamps Performance Reviews for Top Bureaucrats.

Performance reviews are about to become much more difficult for the upper echelon of federal government employees.

The Trump administration will soon introduce rules to end what the Office of Personnel Management describes as an “everyone gets a trophy” culture permeating the federal workforce, RealClearPolitics is first to report.

The ranks of the Senior Executive Service, top bureaucrats serving throughout the government and across administrations, swelled to around 8,000 under President Biden. Most live in Washington, D.C. They typically earn an annual salary between $183,000 and $250,000. An overwhelming majority, 96%, according to an OPM memo, receive above-average performance ratings even as public trust in government continues to crater.

“Above average” doesn’t mean what it used to.

Posted at 11:44 am by Stephen Green 3

COME SEE THE VIOLENCE INHERENT IN THE LEFTISM:

UPDATE (From Ed): Past performance is no guarantee of future results:

By the way, if “Hitler’s terrible tariffs” implies that Trump’s tariffs are bad, then going full Godwin means it’s time for the Atlantic to go full libertarian as well: Hitler’s Handouts — Inside the Nazis’ welfare state.

—Michael Moynihan, Reason magazine, August/September, 2007.

Posted at 10:55 am by Stephen Green 58

CAN YOU BELIEVE IT’S FRIDAY AGAIN [VIP]: Sky Candy Close and Distant Earth.

This is a little bit different approach this time, sort of a travelogue.

As always, if you’re not already a VIP member, you can subscribe here. Use promo code FIGHT for 60 percent off.

Posted at 10:43 am by Charlie Martin 1

DECOUPLING: Apple Says Most of Its Devices Shipped Into U.S. Will Be From India, Vietnam.

The company was among the hardest-hit of the tech giants last month because of its exposure to China, a primary target of the Trump administration’s global tariff pressure. Most of Apple’s devices are assembled in the country, and investors are closely watching its efforts to shift final assembly to India and other countries.
…
Apple expects that a majority of iPhones sold in the U.S. in the June quarter will come from India, Chief Financial Officer Kevan Parekh said in an interview. A majority of the company’s other devices sold in the U.S. from April to June—including iPads, Macs, the Apple Watch and AirPods—will come from Vietnam, he said.

The company’s shares have recovered much of the value they lost after President Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs sent them spiraling, thanks to a pause on so-called reciprocal tariffs for smartphones. The administration continues to weigh other actions that could affect tech companies, and the company faces 20% duties on imports from China and 10% from those sent via India.

China is a good place to get out of and not just because of tariffs.

Posted at 10:42 am by Stephen Green 48

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE:

Posted at 9:57 am by Glenn Reynolds 62

THE NEW SPACE RACE: FAA grounds Firefly Aerospace’s Alpha rocket until failure investigation is complete.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is requiring an investigation into Alpha’s latest flight, an April 29 launch from California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base that ended in failure.

“A return to flight is based on the FAA determining that any system, process, or procedure related to the mishap does not affect public safety,” the agency wrote in an update the day of the mishap. “In addition, Firefly may need to request and receive approval from the FAA to modify its license that incorporates any corrective actions and meet all other licensing requirements.”

The April 29 mission, which Firefly called “Message in a Booster,” was the sixth to date for the two-stage, 96.7-foot-tall (29.6-meter-tall) Alpha. The rocket was supposed to deliver a prototype version of Lockheed Martin’s LM 400 multi-mission satellite bus to low Earth orbit, but that didn’t happen.

Just after its two stages separated, Alpha suffered a mishap “that led to the loss of the Lightning engine nozzle extension, substantially reducing the engine’s thrust,” Firefly wrote in a post-launch update. (Alpha’s upper stage is powered by a single Lightning engine.)

Better luck next time, fellas.

Posted at 9:40 am by Stephen Green 7

EVEN YALE (MY LAW SCHOOL ALMA MATER) IS LOOKING RELATIVELY GOOD (BUT ONLY RELATIVELY): I Don’t Mean to Brag, but I Didn’t Go to Harvard. Money quote: “It’s almost like certain Harvard affiliates want to give the Trump administration ammunition in its war against the university.”

Posted at 9:29 am by David Bernstein 52

LIKE DRUDGE IF HE WERE STILL RELEVANT: White House introduces White House Wire.

Posted at 9:15 am by Glenn Reynolds 37

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: ‘Maryland Dad’ Is Such a Scumbag Dems Will Probably Run Him in ’28. “The only way that the Democrats will move on from Kilmar Abrego Garcia is if they can swap him out for another criminal lowlife who is fresher in the news cycle. It’s almost riot season in the cold weather Dem-run cities, and you know they’re casting their eyes about for their next George Floyd.”

Posted at 9:09 am by Stephen Green 64

THIS WAS INEVITABLE: Google is quietly testing ads in AI chatbots.

A report from Bloomberg describes how Google began working on a plan in 2024 to adapt AdSense ads to a chatbot experience. Usually, AdSense ads appear in search results and are scattered around websites. Google ran a small test of chatbot ads late last year, partnering with select AI startups, including AI search apps iAsk and Liner.

The testing must have gone well because Google is now allowing more chatbot makers to sign up for AdSense. “AdSense for Search is available for websites that want to show relevant ads in their conversational AI experiences,” said a Google spokesperson.

If people continue shifting to using AI chatbots to find information, this expansion of AdSense could help prop up profits. There’s no hint of advertising in Google’s own Gemini chatbot or AI Mode search, but the day may be coming when you won’t get the clean, ad-free experience at no cost.

It’s a sure thing that advertisers would pay dearly to tailor ads to the privacy-busting data made available by LLM queries and chatbots.

Posted at 8:38 am by Stephen Green 52

PEOPLE SAY THE GOVERNMENT DOESN’T WORK, BUT IT WORKS FINE AS A MONEY LAUNDRY FOR THE CONNECTED: Elon Musk and the DOGE Team Do Group Interview – What Big Balls Has Uncovered Will Infuriate You.

An accountant friend comments on Facebook: “If you’ve not yet watched yesterday’s FoxNews DOGE bros interview, it’s really a must. DOGE has unconvered just ASTOUNDING levels of incompetence in our federal government. In fact, incompetence doesn’t even begin to reach it. Rather it seems very much to be a system that was intentionally set up without, or more likely robbed of, even basic internal controls so that TRILLIONS and TRILLIONS of money could be spent in ways that are completely unaubitable and therefore unaccountable.”

This isn’t by accident. It’s by design, to facilitate stealing.

Posted at 8:27 am by Glenn Reynolds 111

THE NEW YORK TIMES IS NOT HAPPY, BUT I’M OKAY WITH IT: The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive. “I think the best way to understand politics right now is that the United States, for the first time in my lifetime, has a real right-wing counterculture — an edgy, radical-seeming alternative to the status quo.” It’s awfully long, and there’s a lot of blather, but there are some interesting nuggets.

Including this on college: “The thing I’ve thought long and hard about — and what I saw when I was a lecturer at UCI — there’s been this severing of a continuity between the past and the present, and I think it’s an intentional severing. These kids, they’re not well read. They don’t really know anything. I spent half of my classes just teaching Wikipedia-tier history just so we can have enough context to have the conversation about the actual stuff we’re talking about.”

Posted at 8:22 am by Glenn Reynolds 76

WHY DID THE SCORPION STING THE FROG? Who Are the Maudes, and Why Did Biden Try to Ruin Their Lives? “If you watched Donald Trump’s cabinet meeting on Wednesday, you may have seen Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins hold up a photo of the Maude family of South Dakota. I’d heard a little bit about the fifth-generation ranching family before that, but I decided to learn more because I couldn’t believe the story Rollins told about how the Joe Biden administration treated them. It’s unbelievable. Or maybe it’s not, given all we’re learning about the last four years.”

Posted at 8:07 am by Stephen Green 74