Central Air - Calling All Cranks

Episode Date: August 25, 2026

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.centralairpodcast.comThis week: Cranks make society work. We challenge the popular consensus, and we aren’t afraid to speak up even when we know what we have to say will be poorly received. Thank you to all the Central Air listeners who answered our call for your crankiest policy proposals. We discuss some of them: Should tax returns be public documents that any citizen can look up? Should you be able to submit a standing order that all your votes should be cast for your favorite political party, instead of having to tediously complete a ballot at every election? Should we geo-engineer a tornado inside the Astrodome to produce clean energy? Should we do daylight saving time backwards, so we spring forward in the fall?Probably not. But maybe. Let’s discuss.

Welcome to Central Air, the show where the temperature is always just right. This is Josh Farrow. I'm here with Ben Dreyfus, where it's the Substack Newsletter, Calm Down, and Megan McArdle, columnist for The Washington Post. Megan, so I was out on Fire Island this weekend, and our neighbors had a house guest, who I was introduced to. And he was like, oh, I've met you before. You once told me to be quiet on the quiet car. This is the least surprising thing I've ever heard, Josh. I mean, he admitted. He was like, and to be clear, you were right.

I was not, I didn't realize it was in the quiet car. I was being loud. I was the one breaking the rules. Do you ride the quiet car, Megan, when you do your cellic corridor thing? I do. I am in full support. So, fun story, I was, years ago, a friend was having, I believe it was a bridal shower. And it was at 5th and K. And we walked, I believe it was at Madaglacius's apartment. And we walked out onto the street. And we're trying to get cabs because we have all these like gifts and, you know, empty plates and so forth with us. And we hail a cab. And as the cab pulls over a guy crosses the street and starts to get into the cab. And everyone's rolling their eyes and looking like upset. And I was just like, that's the cab we just hailed. Are you going to take our cab?

And he was like, well, I thought you were trying to get the bus. I was like, do you hail buses where you come from? Is that something that they do? Where we're like, and then he finally was ashamed. and stepped aside and we got into the cab. And apparently behind me, someone said, Megan is such a New Yorker. But the thing is, I'm not actually a super confrontational person, but in situations like this, the thing that New Yorkers understand

is that there is a very thin line between civilization and barbarism. And that if you do not take your role as altruistic punisher seriously and shame people who egregiously violate the rules of conduct, then all will descend into chaos. So I am, I'm firmly in support of the quiet car shushers. Well, let me tell you thing. Let me say anything.

Hey, I'm also in New Yorker. And I was once on a bus to Massachusetts to go visit someone who lives in Massachusetts. And my student with my brother, we were talking quite loudly as we do. And eventually someone did what you guys are describing. Someone switched me. Someone had the audacity to turn around and shushed me. and I looked at this woman dead in the eyes and said, what did she just say?

And she said, my brother, you could just see, he was like, oh, no, oh, no. And I said, no. And for the next three hours, insisted on telling my very loud stories just at the exact same high level. And my brother was like, we're never going on buses again. Look, teenage boys are natural barbarians.

I was like 33 or something. And didn't know this story. But actually, my favorite story along these lines, I got on the subway one morning, and I was exhausted, and I get on and there is a seat. As my butt is lowering into the seat, a middle-aged dude literally pushes me on the back and takes the seat. And I did not, in fact, confront. I was like, you know what? I'm too tired.

And also, like, it's easier to confront people, I think, when there are other people's interests on the line, not just your own. But so there is this, like, 15-year-old kid. And as I stand up, he just looks at me and he looks at the guy. He's like, dude, you just pushed a lady. You pushed her out of that seat. Do you push ladies? Did your mama not raise you right? And just keeps going until the guy like, I got on in 96.

That 86, this guy just like got up and slunk off the train. And the entire car started clapping. So whenever I was like, I don't know, 26 at the time when people were like, you know, these kids these days, I was like, no, they're all right. And that's how you and Peter Matt. They are all right. Yep. No, we met in Madaglacius' backyard, and I don't know why Madaglacius recurs so commonly in the stories that I tell.

He's an important connector. We're all drawn to him, like Maz's to a flame. I continue to lay down the law in the quiet car, by the way. I was recently, during the World Cup, I was on the quiet car in the Ocella with a bunch of French tourists, or maybe they were Belgian or something. I don't know. They were speaking French. Loudly in the quiet car. And then you can tell that they look up and they notice that it's the quiet car.

quiet car and start like, oh, maybe we shouldn't be talking so loudly, but they could still, you know, it's an ongoing conversation. But I went up to them and in French. I was like, Il-eatante d'i to parley to parley-is-see. And that shut them up. Do you think it was the, French accent that shut them up? Or was it the fact that they were in the quiet car? I think in general, French tourists are surprised if an American can speak any French. And don't expect to be held accountable for that reason. You know, the stereotype is that we go over there and are boorish and loud, but they feel they can do it here with impunity because it's like, oh, I'm a foreigner. I didn't know. I didn't know what were the rules, but I made sure they knew. This is a good

start for this week's conversation because we solicited our listeners. We asked them to send in their crankiest policy proposals. And boy, did you deliver. A lot of cranks listen to Central Air, and we appreciate all of you. The three of us each have our own cranky policy proposals to pitch today, and we would love to hear your feedback on those. But since we started talking about transportation, I actually want to take a few that came in from listeners because a lot of you have cranky ideas about driving and transportation. And actually, this is three different listener emails

that I'm going to list here. Joel Cohn says we should get rid of right turn on red. That right turn on red is dangerous. That actually causes a lot of accidents that people shouldn't be so impatient. They should wait their turn to turn on red. And we should also have severe penalties for jaywalking. That in Europe, you know, you go over there and people just stand there like idiots waiting for the signal to change, even if there are no cars coming. And he's saying that's a sign of a high trust society.

And we should treat jaywalking as though we're like running a stop sign in a motor vehicle with like more serious fines for it handed out more frequently. So what do you think about Joel's ideas to slow us down as we move through the city? No, that's my answer. Both of those. The red on red one, shut up. Shut up, Joel. Everyone is all any hall knows that they say, what's the one thing California has, right on red? You know, like over New York.

Everyone loves right on red. It's one of the defining things that makes America strong and powerful. J-walking, there are lots of places in America where they do treat jaywalking seriously. Like, the cops will stop you. And it's, as you just described in Europe, it's for losers. It's a loser place where these people stand there and they just stand there in Phoenix, because there's like a six-lane thing. And they don't want to get killed by some trucker moving fentanyl probably in from Mexico.

And so they just sit down there and they just sweat for months. In New York, they know, no, no, sir. You walk when you can. And if you get killed, you get killed. You used your judgment. Right out of college, I went to work for Wells Fargo in New York as a real estate banker. And my second week of work, they sent me and the other entering analyst to Los Angeles for a week of training. And one of my co-analysts was a guy grew up in New York, lived in New York.

He's crossing some street in downtown L.A. Right near the hotel, we're all staying in on like Bunker Hill, the office district in L.A. There's no cars anywhere because it's the middle of the day. And a cop writes him a jaywalking ticket. And he looks at him like, is this a joke? Like what is, you know, that's not a thing, but at least, you know, 20 years ago in L.A., that was a thing. I will never forget being in college. And so I went to school in Philadelphia.

And Philadelphia has these teeny tiny little streets and it has approximately one zillion teeny tiny little streets. And we're walking along at night and we lost part of our group. And so I went back to find them. And they are patiently standing at a red light on a teeny tiny little street that is completely empty. And I was like, what are you doing? And it turned out, of course, they were from California. John Endrus says that you should be charged to feed a honk your horn. This one I like.

If somebody's going to hit your car, it's worth paying $1 or $5 or however we decide to set it to honk your horn. But it makes you think about it. If you're just like annoyed that somebody's not moving when they're supposed to, if you just feel like making noise in the city, then maybe you'll honk your horn less. Because, you know, I live right near Madison Square Garden and the amount of horn honking that is done purely gratuitously in the vicinity of my apartment, I hate it. I'm of two minds here because on the one hand, the invention of cell phones has created a scourge of people who start reading at the light and keep reading as the light changes. Because I guess whatever is going on in their phone is way more fascinating than wherever they have to go. And you have to honk at those people. Because if you don't, they will just be like, oh, my God, have you seen the new Beyonce video?

and the Beyonce video will be three minutes and you will be sitting there waiting until Beyonce has stopped Beyonceing. On the other hand, the annoying flip side of that is that now if it takes you like a microsecond to start people behind you will decide you're on your cell phone and start honking at you and I would like to stop those people.

Right. So you're playing both sides here. I am. I feel like you're wrong in every possible way about this one. Embrace the healing power of and, Ben. Megan wants it so that other people have to pay to honk their horns, but she won't have to pay. Yeah. I mean, my feeling is that I don't think that there is a horn epidemic that we need to be worrying about. And this is probably unnecessary regulation.

But I am not opposed to it on the grounds. I think that, like, Josh, your argument, you know, I see it. It makes sense. If you can show me that this is a real problem, I would be open to developing this very complicated payment system. that we would need in Solmogun cars. Yeah, I don't know what sort of device. Maybe the flock cameras will pick up who's honking. Finally, Edwin Ward has a whole bunch of car-related ideas.

He's our crankiest reader on car issues. He wants to prohibit cars that are designed such that they are unfriendly to pedestrians if they hit pedestrians. I mean, I guess any car is unfriendly to a pedestrian that it hits, but the arms race with ever bigger SUVs is bad for people who get hit by them. He wants basically better speed cameras the way they work in Europe where it's like they clock you at one location and then they figure out how long it takes you to drive for the next location on the highway and if that means you were over the speed limit, then you pay a fine. He wants fines that are scaled to the value of a car. So if you drive a fancier car, your fines are higher.

And he says he wants to prohibit license plate covers, which are already prohibited. But I do see them a lot in New York. I always assume that anyone who has a plate cover that prevents, you know, cameras from reading the plate, that that person is a cop. and that's why they're not getting in trouble for having the plate cover. So I would be in favor of better enforcement on that. And maybe relatedly as another idea, not limited to cars, that we should have more systems where citizens can narc on each other. You call in there's some nuisance around you and you get a portion of the fee that is charged

to people. New York City already does this with certain environmental hazards. So maybe we could have a bounty on license plate covers that if you report them, then they, you know, they seize the car and you get some fraction of the profits. All right. So a couple of these, no. My main answer to most of these is no. Stop.

Everything is fine. We don't need, I mean, we don't need these European bans on SUVs, even though those would save lives, just the cost of freedom. Senator Ruben Gallego does say that the median voter wants his big-ass truck. He does want his big-ass drug. It's his dad. Edwin, right here coming for the big-ass truck. I don't like this totalitarian speech.

speed camera thing where they're going to try to prove how fast you in by catching where you were? No, no, no. I think that there's very good, you know, arguments against these speed cameras at all. Okay. And there's some due process questions about these in the first place, let alone this sort of minority report using fancy algorithms to prove that I sped. No, no, no.

How zippy is that, Miata, Ben? It's a very light car. It doesn't have a lot of horsepower. but Boyd's light, so it really goes. What was the last one, he said? He wants to do real enforcement about license plate covers. Oh, sure. That one's fine.

I mean, I think that that, I like the version of marrying it to a bounty system. I think that Matt Iglesias, constant person we mentioned on this thing, would love that. Yeah. I mean, a take that, like, is especially associated with Matt that has a lot to do with these driving-related proposals, that, like, you know, tough on crime should include things related to the operation of motor vehicles. like, you know, Republicans talk a lot about how they want the law to be enforced, people to follow the law, and then they get real mad if you want to, like, you know, put speed cameras up in their neighborhood in Staten Island. And, you know, I think my broadly most left-wing political views are the ones about the, like, the driving environment. I think, you know, in cities, I'm in favor of low speed limits and traffic calming and expensive parking and all sorts of things like that. I like my car, but, you know, the city should not be designed around my car. And I do like speed cameras. I think that, They, you know, I think they really do save lives. And I think that people really do drive too fast in the city.

I agree, like, they are effective. But I think that there's also, there's a reason why, like, they're treated in D.C. as well, as a lot of other places, they're treated as municipal citations and not. Well, that's because they can't know you were driving. So they're ticketing the car. Right, right. So there's a due process issue with it. Look, I am broadly pro speed cameras. And I think on highways, there should just be way more of them.

And they should be looking for reckless driving as well as speeding. I think the flip side of that is that cities have an obligation not to tune them to maximize the revenue. This should be about keeping the streets safe, not about raising as much money as possible. So in D.C. there's one that's on 25th and K Street, and it's a hill. And so, like, it's at the bottom of a hill. And so it's quite easy to pick up a little acceleration going down the hill, be going 10 miles an hour over the limit. and clock the camera or 11, whatever the level is, even if you're just going with the flow of traffic. It's in an underpass, so it's not like there's a lot of pedestrians you could be hitting, right?

For listeners who are not familiar with downtown D.C., this is an example of really bad street design, where there's a part of K Street that is basically designed as though it were part of a freeway. Yeah. But it is still, what is it, a 25 limit or a 30 limit? Yeah. And it connects, in fairness. it basically takes you to 66. But anyway, I don't think you should do stuff like that. It's a good way to raise money, but that's not what it should be for. It should really be about giving people very strong incentives to obey the laws of the road.

That said, I think if you do that, you then have to revisit the speed limits on some roads. Because people don't generally think about what is the speed limit. They think about, like, what does the road feel like, what feels like a safe speed? And there are reasons to not honor that in like school zones, but in general, you kind of have to work with that. Otherwise, you're not going to get the political legitimacy to do this. By the way, I should mention for listeners, we need to do this on an upcoming episode. But I think all of us feel pretty good about the flock cameras, right? Yeah.

Yeah. Criminals drive around and the government sees where their license plate went and goes and arrests them. Seems good to me. I'm open to argument here, but I don't think you have a reasonable expectation of privacy on a public street. No, I like our new Panopticon. Dear listener, I brought this up in our group chat a few weeks ago, which we're talking about it. And I just said, like, so what did everyone think?

And I thought that I was going to be the, like, pro-flock person. And then, no, Josh immediately jumped and was in the pro-flok camp. Then Megan has libertarian, you know, concerns, but also seems pro-flock. And it was very clear that we're, oh, well, I guess we're all authoritarian. Which left us without a good argument to have about it. but we continue to look for the news hook. Yeah. Speaking of the Panopticon, I'm going to introduce my crankiest policy idea.

Just as, you know, I think that the government should know where our cars are going and what license plates are where. I want to see what's on everybody's tax returns. I think that, you know, in Norway, your income and your income tax paid are matters of public record. Anyone can go to the tax authority and say, I would like to know what John Smith made last year and they will tell you. And I think we should do that here in the United States. Why? I like chaos. I think it would be fun. But more seriously, there are a number of parts of our financial record system that are already like this, and we like that they're like it. I mean, I know, first of all, property sale tax and mortgage records are already public in most

states. You can look up how much your neighbor paid for his house, how big a mortgage he has on his house, what property tax he's paying. And people, you know, if that wasn't something we were doing, people would think that was invasive and bizarre, but it's basically just part of the wallpaper. Everyone's used to it, that everyone knows what you bought your house for. And it has positive effects. It helps inform homebuyers so they know what, you know, what prices are and what they should offer to pay. There are accountability benefits. We often learn about, hey, this politician is taking a homestead exemption on two different homes or is claiming to live in this place while he's registered to vote somewhere else. We've just been through this fun news cycle about

Gustavo Gordillo, the co-chair of the DSA in New York City, who lives in a 1.5 million, dollar row house bought by his father. We only know that because of public property records. The salaries of public employees are generally public. You can look up what every conductor on the Long Island Railroad made last year and how much overtime he did. The tax returns of charitable organizations are public, and they also have to disclose the salaries of their high-earning employees. And I think we again consider that to be a useful thing for accountability. And so if we knew about everyone's income, it informs workers so they can go more strongly into their own salary negotiation, if they know what their peers and what their competitors are making.

And you might have compliance benefits, too. They think there's a little bit of this in Norway, that if people have to disclose how much they're paying in tax, it makes them less inclined to try to evade tax because somebody might notice it. And so, you know, I think it's already been so good for us that we know everybody's business about real estate. We can take that energy to other parts of the economy that are not real estate. This is where I get back on the libertarian train. I mean, look, in part, this works in Norway because wages are sectorally bargained there. So you already kind of know what people make. And that's true in all of the Scandinavians.

But they've been doing this in Norway since the 1800s. I don't know how long they've had sectoral bargaining. Fair enough. I think this would be really corrosive. We don't live in a high trust society where everyone would just be like, oh, okay. We live in a low trust society where people would use the information in other. ways, including to nark on each other, but also to harass each other, right? How fun would it be to report someone you didn't like for tax evasion, something that you kind of can't do right now,

but could definitely do if you had their tax returns. Well, did they actually evade taxes? Well, after the IRS spends, you know, 10 months investigating and finds out no, you still have to pay the accountant and the lawyer while that's happening. And I think that sort of thing probably happens somewhat less often in a Scandinavian country that it would in the U.S. I mean, just like if you look at the way that neighbors are constantly harassing each other with building code complaints, which happens all the time here. We had some random, someone, some neighbor, angry neighbor, we were replacing a fence in front of our house and ended up in three weeks of like buildings department hell.

because some neighbor called to complain about it. Now, that's their right as Americans, whatever, but do I want that extended to, like, my deductions? When I first heard this idea of yours, Josh, I was pretty like, you're a psychopath. And I was like, I was much more on the degree with me. But I do think, like, to a number of those concerns, there would be ways of structuring it, right?

So that, like, it reports a range, it doesn't show exact everything, blah, blah, blah, blah. And there have been other proposals in the past to do some version of things where, you know, isn't there the program where if you report some government waste or something that they'll give you 10% for the money saved or something? Yes, yeah, false claims act. It's especially used for Medicare fraud. Right, exactly. So, I mean, there is some sort of like way of probably doing a version of this where you are crowdsourcing the investigators to some extent with the help of other things. you just bring them to some level of like a low,

a low flagging so that it can get looked at. I don't know exactly how I do it. But also, but I feel like the bigger problem would be just, um, I would be afraid of people, it just being gross because I don't think it's actually good for us to be thinking about class constantly.

And I think this would greatly increase that. And I would be worried about other weird, like, unanticipated consequences. like prices be different for people when you really knew they're, when you could put it in, when you could hire a service that says like blah, blah, blah, set the price to this person's exact salary

because I know exactly how much money they have, so I will charge them more for this Hilton vacation at the hotel than for someone who only has, like, credit files says they have this much credit utilization or something like that. So I have a couple of things to say about that. One is that corporations already have access to a large trove of data about your consumer behavior, including data from which they can very likely impute your income level

because they know so much about what you spend money on. So I'm not sure that this would be that useful for that. The other thing is that in Norway, there are limitations on how many queries you can do that are designed to make it impossible for someone to run a service where they just get the entire database of salary information. You're only allowed to query X number of people in a month. So that might be another way of, you know, limiting it only to when people are really interested. The other thing they do in Norway is that they tell the taxpayer who asked to see their information. And now I guess, you know, there's, you might not be able to prevent people from using third parties as cutouts. But, you know, just as someone who likes chaos, I like the additional chaos of like.

I mean, that sounds like just terrorism. Imagine getting like a Gmail update every time it's like, oh, Bob in Pennsylvania has been pulling up your tax return. I do think it would be really fun to see who with the like, you know, the gorgeous lifestyle is all hat and no cattle and who is living below their means. But like, is it worth the fun I, I demur. But so I guess I would ask about the Gustavo Gordio thing, which, you know, if listeners haven't been following this, is the co-chair of the DSA in New York City whose father bought this this brownstone that they are renovating that he is residing in, he describes himself as, a union electrician, but the other thing the press figured out is the, in fact, dropped out of the electrician practice program. He went to Yale. Ah, the original electrician program. He's not qualified to wire your apartment. But, I mean, you could imagine saying, like, well, why is it anybody's

business where Gustavo Gordillo lives or how much the house costs? Why should anyone know what his father is spending money on? People don't say that because we're just used to the idea that property records are public. But, like, the privacy concerns that you describe there, Megan, And it seems like they could equally apply to a lot of this property information. I'm not actually sure I feel an urgent need to know about Gordillo's $1.5 million row home. I mean, it's funny. I enjoyed a laugh at his expense as much as anyone. But is this really publicly valuable information?

Doing a lot of eh in this segment. The other thing, by the way, is like, I think we talked in our production meeting or a meeting a couple of weeks. ago about, you know, how would we feel if our information was public? And Gawker published my salary once already. When I was at Business Insider, there was a spreadsheet of every employee's salary that some B.I employee in a genius move left on a shared folder accessible to anyone in the company. And so somebody leaked the spreadsheet to Gawker, and they published this story. I mean, amusingly, B.I. pays well compared to its competitors. So the story basically ended up being, like, oh, we got every salary at B.I. And they're kind of high. But they, my salary was one of the

ones that they chose to publish individually in the story. And, you know, life went on. How were the internal dynamics on that? So I had, I had just recently left B.I. at the time that the article was published. Ah, okay. So I was not, I was not in the office for this conversation. There's obviously, like, a big, you know, labor history of, like, wanting people to have salary transparency, right? So that everyone can sort of, like, know what the bargaining is and everyone can know what to ask for and if they're being undervalued and stuff like that. But during this period 10 years ago or so, when the internet discovered unions and decided everyone needed to be in the union and they all started writing all these stories about this,

all these journalists would say, but I think this is a good idea, but I'm also not going to tell you mine. You know, until we start. And, you know, I worked at a pro labor magazine. It was also a nonprofit. So it did have like rules about how much you could make. and they had to report, as you said, the certainly people who make the most. Were you ever on the 990, Ben?

No, but I did eventually, like, need, they needed to pay me more for this thing. But they also didn't want me to be one of the top five people who they would have to put on the 990. Because as we would eventually find out, I was a somewhat controversial person in this company. So they have ways of getting around it. I was the only person at that company who had a, performance-based forgiveness loan that they just gave me that if I stayed for a number of years was just just disappeared and I just think that like that stuff those little games that would be used would would permeate everything you're not going to get the world where

people were really having the salary transparency that I think that maybe academics I'd imagine when they think about like everyone will have a fair fair wage now because we all know the truth. Let's take a quick break and we'll be back on Central Air with more cranky policy ideas for August. So we have my cranky, invasive idea that we're going to get mail about. Megan, what's, what do you want to do? Okay. A big problem that everyone agrees on is that there are people working for the government who should not be there and cannot be fired. And anyone you talk to is work for the government. It really varies by agency, but pretty much every agency has their people who have kind of retired in place. And the other people don't like them either, right?

They make, they're like negative value. I've talked to people who, for example, have to get permits from agencies that are normally regarded as being pretty good. But they said, like, if we got the one guy, we knew it was going to be a disaster. It was going to take forever and be incredibly annoying. Everyone who knew who, everyone knew who the guy was. No one wanted to get the guy. But those people can't be removed because it takes like an act of Congress. to get them out. And so my proposal is that managers, but actually like before we go to that, the problem is that making it easier to fire them raises legitimate concerns about politicization of the bureaucracy. So my proposal is that each office has to stack rank their employees,

which is best or worst, and fire the bottom 5%. This means it won't be done by the political, It'll be done by civil service people who know who the low performers are, but it has to be mandatory because otherwise they won't do it. So that, like, and that for that proposal, it's expedited paperwork. Like, sorry, you were in the bottom five. We're not, this is not like a due process thing. That's how you were ranked and you're gone. So that you would do this once?

I'm open to once as a negotiating position. But no. I don't think your proposal was once. It's not once. How often are we going to do this, Megan? Every year. Every year. This is not like that companies do it.

And in fact, I think in the private sector, it's usually a bad idea because it kills morale. But so most companies don't do this, right? This is a general electric thing, if I recall correctly. Yeah, it's the Jack Welsh idea. No, other companies do it too, though. And I think the reason to do it in government is that otherwise the incentive is towards inertia. And you're also attracting people. Like, what is one of the major ways we don't pay people, like, especially educated workers,

we don't pay them that much relative to the private sector. So what are the benefits of going into government? One is that you, like, your mission driven. You're really passionate about space or the national parks or whatever. But another big one is just that you can't be fired. And I, look, I feel you. I would also like to not be able to be fired. I'm not saying that, like, people who go are.

are lazy in planning not to work, but it's selecting on people who are risk-averse. And one thing that I've really learned by thinking about, like, Randy Clerk at WMATA in D.C., the transit agency, Bill Bratton in New York, is that, like, what policy entrepreneurs can get stuff done. What is the characteristic of those people? Well, there's a lot of them. They're good leaders. They're good talent spotters.

But a major one is they're willing to be fired, not trying to be fired, but they're willing to take risks and they're not managing to be maximally defensible in front of a congressional committee. But the personality you are selecting for is going to be on average. I'm talking averages, not every single individual. It's going to be more risk-averse than is optimal for a high-performing government. I mean, I don't really understand how you would stack it the way that they can at G in this situation.

Like, how does the Department of Energy say, all right, we're going to find. the worst 5%. One, I mean, I feel like if you're doing it every year, a lot of people are spending their entire lives. The second you finish firing, but you're going to be needing to figure out the next cohort of firing. Yes, but you also then need to like speed up hiring.

We should raise salaries. But like, we should do this as part of a way to smash the culture of defensive regulation, I guess is the way to put it. So you do this one. and, you know, everyone knows who the slackers are who've retired in place and you fire them. And you come back next year and you've already fired those people. Like, if it's 5% every year, the odds that any given federal worker will get caught up in this at some point in his or her career has to end up being quite high, right?

Like, don't you eventually run out of low performers? Fine. Do it once every five years. Just clean out the deadwood periodically. And then presumably you have to pay a lot more because you're no longer, you know, the value of job security you've gotten rid of. Yes. I am saying that we should pay in money and not in the freedom from being assessed on your performance. And then how do you ensure that the process doesn't get politicized? Like, you know, they could decide that they disfavor people for one reason or another. They don't like what some department is doing or that sort of thing.

Like, the government is often not good at evaluating things. How do you, how do you ensure that they're actually doing a high quality rank? You set it at a small enough level of unit the managers of those units are making a decision, not the people above them. Right, they're not politicals managing every like 100 person unit in the government. They're not that many political appointees. I feel like a determined, a political appointee, determined administration could in, would in fact have their people at the top of that create a culture that made clear to the people running the smaller unit that there was a certain type of person that they were expected to get rid of. And that that's sort of what would happen. I mean, that's what happens in

countries that have this sort of like extra layer of, you know, the Communist Party gets to also be the mechanism that decides everything. Life is tradeoffs. And I think that the tradeoff of having some political interference, which there might be in individual cases, although you can also still have the procedures that say you're not allowed to do that and they can file a grievance on that. If a manager is told to fire of people for political reasons. They can make trouble for you. But, like, I think it's a, it's a worthy trade-off. I have one final objection, which is that when GE or a private company does this, it's, you know, there are mistakes made. Sometimes you get too far. But for the most part,

GE is a perfect example, kind of a destroyed company, right? No longer the GE hold. But, like, there's a lot of companies that people are a little more hesitant about doing that with, right? like Boeing. Boeing did it, and Boeing kind of had some problems. You know. That wasn't Boeing's problem, though. Boeing's problems were that they stopped managing for engineering and started managing for like short-term results. And while I'm often skeptical of that story that like the left likes to tell about companies, in Boeing's case, it really does seem to be true. Right. I just mean like the specific stack bringing thing, like the guy who they hired who began the CEO of Boeing was literally Jack Walsh's deputy. And like he had come and he had said,

I'm going to do this. I look at what I learned here at GE. But anyways, my point is, I guess, in the federal government, there's all these things that are not, there are much, that are as important as airplanes falling out of the sky, but actually far more important. You know, there's a catastrophic 5% error

of like anywhere of the wrong people leads to, literally plants falling out of the sky, but nuclear energy not being regulated right, all of these various different things that happen. And, you know, I look, what about the catastrophic error of having, 10% of people who suck at their jobs. The other funny thing with this for me is that, you know, you have the, you talk about civil

service protections here as a safeguard that prevents politicization, but then there are other proposals out there that I'm actually pretty sympathetic to that amount to weakening civil service protections in certain ways. I mean, you know, when I think about effective organizations I've been, and I'd actually look at Business Insider, which outperformed most of its peers and sort of similar web journalism over the, you know, the 15-year history that it's been there. And a key thing is, B.I. fires a lot of people. They, you know, they bring you on.

They, you know, spend a few months figuring out whether you can really write, and then they fire you if you can't. And that, like, made them a much more effective organization than a lot of peers that I think don't fire nearly enough employees. And so I would think you would want to unleash managers in the government to do more of that, to select the right candidates. Some of this is also about hiring has done all wrong in the federal government, and we need to give them a freer hand. But I would assume that there are some agencies where you really want to fire a lot more than 5% of the employees.

And there are other agencies, air traffic control would be one I would say as an example, where you have acute staffing shortages and it would probably be harmful to, you know, have a target of doing any amount of firing. Sure. We will exempt any agency in an acute staffing shortage. Fine. But that's not that many agencies. Look, you proposed this episode. I came up with my crank proposal. I do not yet. It's true. We had to, Megan kept offering things that were not really cranky. Yeah.

Like, what was the first one that you wanted to do? Universal catastrophic health insurance, I think. Oh, yeah, yeah. We said, no, Megan. You have to go back to the drawing board. Okay. Yeah, true. I mean, these are supposed to be.

I have not had time to draft the 200-page white paper yet. But give me a few months. Ben, why don't we do your crank proposal? What idiot thing do you want done? All right. So my crank proposal that I have thought of and wrote about one to Mother Jones and have actually emailed political scientists about who have refused to engage with me on the subject because they so disagree with it is that in the United States,

we talk about how voting is a civic responsibility. You know, it's not just a right that you have. It's a responsibility. You have to learn and do this stuff, then go to the ballot box and do the thing or take the mail in one and push the thing. But it's that. And use it or lose it, they'll say, and stuff like that.

This is horseshit, all right? I own a percent of America. It's a small percent. But I've got some voting shares here. And I should be allowed to do with those voting shares, essentially, whatever I want. just as if we had a time share, the Biltmore in Arizona. And I, I, and so my point is this.

If I do not go to vote on voting day, on election day, the government will say, all right, he didn't show up, and they will not cast, they will not take anything, zero change from the Ben Dreyfus voting pool will have happened. But there's no reason for the, government actually to assume I don't have an opinion just because I didn't go that day or didn't act or vote on it. I've given them a reason to know that I actually probably do have an opinion. I've registered with a political party. And like I've given them a strong indication of that.

And I think that we should have backup default voting so that if I don't go, I do not vote in a general election, that they should look at it and say, all right, well, he's a Democrat. He probably would have voted for the Democrat. And you can always go and say, you can always vote for a Republican if you want. And you can always, you know, override that. But if you don't show up, they can still say like, all right, let's try to figure out what this person would have thought. And before you say that this is terrible. Okay.

There's a lot of situations that won't work in. It won't work in primaries. It won't work in, it won't work in, you know, non-partisan elections. It won't work in run. All right measures. Yeah. It won't work in any of those things. And what about those of us who have to register as Democrats in order to vote in our local elections,

who might have different feelings. That's a great good. You could separate it from the party registration thing. Yeah. It could be as simple as you can file a form that says, unless I vote otherwise, cast my ballot for all the Democrats or all the Republicans. But we wouldn't make it so that you had to do that in order to be registered with a party. It could be a separate choice.

If the state wanted to do this and wanted to experiment with the pilot program with this, I don't think that they would just convert the things because, like, a lot of people, when they registered, they didn't intend to do that. You would want to, like, give, have them file a secondary thing. Like, we are going to try this. You are allowed to do this. And you don't have to. But you will, if you don't show up on voting day, we'll just assume that this person that you said, like, all right, just assume I, vote for the Nazi party.

This is they'll cast it for them. Or the Communist Party or whoever it was. I don't totally hate this idea. If we think about, like, what is voting for? We want a government that reflects the will of the people. And so I think you could argue about, you know, like going, like having to go and cast the ballot reflects an intensity of preference. And so maybe we don't want to count votes from people who can't even be bothered to go cast a ballot.

But on the other hand, you could say, you know, maximally democratic system, we want to collect as many people's views as possible. And so just as, you know, politicians spend a lot of time trying to figure out how do we make it easier for people to vote, this could be like the ultimate voting access thing. You only have to vote once. So basically you get to vote in states you've moved out of until they purge their voter rolls, which they do by observing that you haven't voted. Yeah, I mean, there's like a number of real, like, practical issues with it.

That's it for this week's free episode of serious trouble. If you want to hear more cranky ideas, more about Ben's idea for autopilot voting for the lazy, and more ideas submitted by Central Air listeners. Move Halloween to August. Do reverse daylight saving time where we spring. forward in the fall. Banned circumcision. That was the longest email that we got from any listener was about why we should ban circumcision. And finally, to harness the energy of an artificial tornado in the Astrodome to produce electricity and geoengineer the climate in Houston,

the weirdest idea we heard. To hear about all of that, go to centralairpodcast.com. You can upgrade and become a paying subscriber, get every full episode, all the cranky ideas you ever want to hear. That'll be available to you there. Thanks. Again, that's centralairpodcast.com. Thank you.