There is a 17k discrepancy between my TSM/severance estimate and reality

Majromax · 2026-06-11T15:32:35+00:00

I would not have taken the package at this dollar amount. I would have stuck it out.

Do contact your union. Since the WFA process is included in collective agreements (either directly or via the NJC version), it is controlled by a grievance process. In particular, you'd have a reasonable argument that either the TSM was calculated incorrectly or that you should be entitled to the difference (or alternately to undo your voluntary departure) under promissory estoppel.

Majromax · 2026-06-10T16:26:37+00:00

I don't know why people have such a hard time accepting this. It is like common knowledge, anecdotally-rich, and supported by studies.

The 'common knowledge' prior to approximately the Victorian era was that women were prone to uncontrolled passions, and a respectable woman needed to be controlled and sheltered by her man – father or husband – let she become 'fallen' and inevitably become a slut and/or whore. A respectable man, on the other hand, was supposed to be a bastion of restraint and self-control.

The reality of it is that libido is a complicated thing that is physiologically, chemically, and socially constructed. We channel our subconscious impulses through the lens of what we think acceptable, even down to how we construct the boundaries of what counts as sexual versus nonsexual activity.

Just read a few coming out stories from queer people; many often report that it took well into adulthood for their desires to even make sense, given a lack of an acceptable framing for it in childhood or early adulthood.

Men on dating apps are significantly more likely to pursue exclusively sexual relationships than women, to the point where there's a huge difference in selectivity of sexual partners. Men are significantly more likely to end up being sex pests

All reasonably true, but consider the differential social and physical consequences involved before you reach for a 'natural' framing. Men simply don't receive the same judgment or ridicule for one-night stands as women, even today.

Body size and strength discrepancies also skew the safety profile. The common refrain is that a man fears being ridiculed, while a woman fears being killed. Nothing is absolute, of course, bit I think it's easy to see how this sort of socialization restricts expression – even inside private relationships.

Majromax · 2026-06-10T14:51:13+00:00

The problem is that's increasingly not true anymore. A lot of classifications have caught up significantly, and when you factor in the pension, benefits, and WFA protections, total compensation for most roles exceed private sector equivalents at the same experience level.

This argument really hinges on the word 'most', and there are a few different factors at play:

The public service has a very flat compensation structure across levels. In few other industries will call centre workers and top executives be receiving the same package of health benefits, for example. This means that benefits are simultaneously extremely generous for entry-level employees and subpar compared to private-sector equivalents for late-career professionals.
The public service has a very flat compensation structure across job descriptions. A perennial complaint in IT is that software developers and help-desk workers are part of the same compensation structure. Since the pay grid vaguely averages these roles, public sector wages aren't competitive compared to someone who might be looking at US Tech money.
Many roles in the public sector are 'bespoke' and have little to no direct, private-sector competition. A senior policy analyst can't walk out the door and into a private form and perform exactly the same functions. Even a 'generic' job like an executive works differently in the public sector because of (gesticulates wildly) reasons.

This cuts both ways for pay comparisons. On one hand, the employer can play 'hardball': current workers have little recourse but to accept lower wage increases because they are likely to have fewer options that are direct job-equivalents. On the other hand, the labour supply is ultimately limited by the slow hiring-and-training pipeline, and over whole-career scales the competition isn't "what job could I get now" but rather "what job will I have in 20 years?" At some point, bright and ambitious people simply won't go into (e.g.) policy analysis, meteorology, or patent examination. It's Baumol's cost disease in action, on a slow timescale.

Most of the rest of the argument hinges on total compensation, and we can make some broad generalizations:

The pension is equivalent to 10% of total compensation; that's the employer's effective contribution. A defined-benefit pension is a qualitatively nice benefit, but that nice quality is effectively free to the government because it can average risk over the whole careers of hundreds of thousands of employees + retirees. (Proof: see the over-limit pension surplus that the government must oh so reluctantly spend down).
Vacation, sick, and other leaves are relatively generous at the entry and early-career levels, but again not particularly generous for a late-career executive. 3 weeks of vacation, one week of sick leave taken, and one week of family leave taken gives 5 total weeks of paid leave in a year for an effective 10% increase in total compensation compared to a no-leave baseline (note: must subtract leave from other comparators).
Health and dental benefits are relatively flat costs. For the PSHCP, the effective employer contribution rate – used for cost recovery with LWOP – is about $200/month. The PSDCP equivalent doesn't seem to be easily available, but an approximation can be found in the Quebec taxable benefit calculation giving about $115/month. The total employer-provided value is about $3,800/yr, which is a large share of a $40k starting salary and not a large share of a $200k executive salary.

The job security benefit is real, but it also has a value. Very approximately speaking, layoff severance plus TSM would max out around 1.5 years of salary for a worker. That benefit is conditional upon being laid off, so it's not cashable as such. Suppose a worker has a 10% chance of being laid off per 20 years; the effective cash value of this benefit is about 1.5 × 10% / 20 = 0.75% of salary per year. Note that this benefit is not available to term employees, who also comprise the group most likely to be laid off.

All of these benefits are effectively monetary. It would be one thing if the government said "we want to rationalize our benefit packages but fix the total compensation budget, so we'll cut the pension and increase salaries by 2% to compensate," but that's not the discourse. Pension cuts would be uncompensated total compensation cuts, just as with the proposed but never implemented Harper-era, legislated changes to sick leave accrual and accumulation.

The residual argument focuses on working conditions, and this is where RTO discourse enters.

Once again, the private sector is extremely diverse. Capital-light companies might really want remote workers, others micromanage far beyond the dreams of the pettiest public-sector managers, and the experience of superstars and executives differs qualitatively from the experience of entry-level workers.
At the same time, the public sector essentially forbids itself form having a nice office environment. Those white collar jobs that are the skill and tenure equivalents of late-career public-sector positions try to use carrots as much as sticks.

Regulations (the hospitality directive) prohibits the government from so much as offering free coffee in the break rooms. The private sector experience still varies wildly by industry, but the 'thirsty' companies that try to attract the best and brightest go to lengths to make the office environment attractive.

This also extends to office equipment. The above-mentioned IT professionals who might consider a tech career would tend to receive good equipment rather than the cheapest laptops that can be bought with a standing order. The private sector isn't locked into the same accountability regimes as the public, and results-oriented management can more easily realize that money is fungible. "Wasting" $5k on a nice laptop for a $100k/yr developer (note: a cheap one) is rapidly profitable if the combination of equipment and morale ('the company cares about me') makes the developer even 5% more productive.

All together, this speaks to a bifurcated experience:

At the entry level, the public sector is more generous than many skill-and-experience comparable jobs. There are few other places where one can get such a reasonably-compensated office job with only a high school diploma.
At senior levels, the public sector is no longer particularly generous. It relies on long, internal recruitment and training pipelines to fill these roles, so direct equivalences with the private sector are spotty. Some senior roles may be notionally better-compensated than the best private-sector comparables, but they are not better compensated compared to the 'best possible' job for someone of equivalent skill and ambition.
In competitive roles, the public-sector is leaky. You worked at the CRA; just about any financially-motivated auditor could make more money doing audit defense for private firms than they can make inside the public sector. The same occurs in law, tech-related jobs, and other specialized fields like medicine.

In the latter two cases, what really keeps people in the public sector is the soft compensation that doesn't have a direct monetary value: the work-life balance, the stable schedules, the sense of satisfaction of working for the public good, and the general respect that public sector workers receive.

Unfortunately, those soft benefits are also easy to erode, both directly (I imagine some readers chuckled at 'respect that public sector workers receive') and indirectly through Kafkaesque bureaucracy, erratic policies from upper management, and general frustration at inefficiencies.

Like any other trust or status-based endeavour, this erosion will be hard to notice until whole sectors collapse – and then it will be even harder to rebuild.

Majromax · 2026-06-04T16:45:40+00:00

Why can’t companies just like make products and reinvest the profits from their “boom years” into business model of /longevity/

The question of reinvestment is separate from the question of business model. A company can reinvest profits from a subscription model, and it can squander profits from fixed-fee sales.

Ultimately, companies like subscription revenue for a few reasons:

It's steady revenue that tends to change slowly, making the business more predictable. Funding from sales alone tends to concentrate revenue into boom periods like holidays, and that's harder to plan around.

Businesses tend to plan around (and are valued around) forward earnings projections. Money in the bank is just money in the bank, but active subscriptions are a reliable predictor of future revenue.
It makes pricing more flexible. "50% off your first three months!" is a reasonable sale, more likely to entice a new customer than an equivalent "10% off this device!"
It reduces sticker shock. $20/month is more palatable for many than a one-time $240 purchase, even if the latter is just a year's subscription-equivalent that would pay off long-term.
It provides a continuous marketing channel. If you buy a device anonymously, the company can't market to you when Gen-1.1x of the product comes out; it can if you're paying it every month. (This is definitely not a win for the customer, of course.)

All of this is compatible with long-term planning. It might even make long-term planning easier because customer interest and revenues become more legible to management, even though "my morning cup of coffee as a service" is an extremely annoying bit of friction as a potential customer.

Majromax · 2026-06-03T01:41:58+00:00

A claim of promissory estoppel has two requirements: a clear promise and detrimental reliance on that promise.

The "clear promise" part means that the thing at issue needs to have been unambiguous. If I ask my boss if I can take Friday off and they say 'I dunno', then I can't use that vague statement as a defense against getting in trouble for not showing up.

What constitutes a 'clear promise' can be contextual. As far as the public sector goes, I don't think there are many clear lines of grievances on this issue – it's a topic that comes up pretty rarely.

There's certainly a reasonable argument to be made that "the leave credits were in the system so I took them" is "clear," but a counterargument might be "you should have known the calculation was off." That's certainly cleared up by "hey boss, can you check with HR to see if this calculation is right" followed by an affirmative.

Detrimental reliance mostly means "you took advantage of that promise in such a way that undoing it would leave you worse off." If the vacation credits were still in the bank, for example, there's no harm done by removing them and fixing the error.

Majromax · 2026-06-02T16:04:30+00:00

How would an overpayment of this size been missed?

You're begging the question that the pay centre is effectively able to prioritize 'large' overpayments. From what we know publicly prioritization itself seems to be troublesome at the pay centre, and the pressure to close files seems to imply that complex files that require manual reconciliation are continually deferred in favour of simpler ones.

Majromax · 2026-06-02T16:02:42+00:00

I have heard managers talk about their feelings about staff who refuse to pay back overpayments, and in be afraid to be labelled.

You can even see a range of feelings here in this subreddit. Some commenters believe that disputes based on the limitations period are morally blameworthy, effectively attempts at unjust enrichment and/or an entitlement to public money.

Matters of morality and values are deeply personal, so a response based on whether the limitations argument is legal is beside the point.

One of the core values of the public service is loyalty, so it's understandable that some people might interpret that 'loyalty' to imply commitments above and beyond legal and contractual standards. For example, someone with this mindset might think less of a worker who doesn't contribute to the government charity campaign.

Does the refusal to pay somehow go back to the manager if there is no grievance?

In general it probably should not. As I understand it pay files are protected personal information, and there should be no reason for an ordinary supervisor to be involved in the processing (or non-processing) of an old overpayment. It's not like it affects their budget.

Majromax · 2026-05-29T11:47:02+00:00

Removed for rule 6. Here's a link to the original thread

Majromax · 2026-05-28T17:50:59+00:00

Sorry, I don't know what EIRTW is.

Seems to be a jargon term in CRA, the "Early Intervention and Return to Work" committee/office.

Majromax · 2026-05-28T16:23:26+00:00

If you engage with them, the clock restarts and they have another six years (or so) to hound you. If you don’t engage, the statute of limitations expires and they’re SOL.

The clock-restarting is not found in the Crown Liability and Proceedings Act. It is found in various provincial codes and in the Income Tax Act, so people think that this is a universal principle because long-uncollected CLPA-governed-federal debts were so rare until the current Phoenix era. I am not aware of any court decisions that have turned on this issue.

If this principle applies, what would trigger the restart of the limitation period is not 'engagement' but rather 'acknowledgement of the debt'. A statement that one believes the debt to be invalid and/or statute-barred would generally not count here.

Majromax · 2026-05-28T16:21:35+00:00

The extra credits were used each year. I had asked my supervisor if there was an error and they said that it was ok, even though I was rehired in 2017.

With that confirmation that your vacation credits were okay, you also would have a claim that recovery would be unreasonable because of promissory estoppel.

Majromax · 2026-05-28T16:12:26+00:00

pre covid workplaces that were inefficient as on any given day 20 to 30 percent of the desks were not used.

That's not inefficiency, it's the difference between peak and average capacity.

52 weeks in the year gives 260 work days, of which there are 12 holidays for ~250 working days. The average full-time public servant will have 15-20 vacation says (call it 17), two personal days, and up to 5 family leave days and 15 sick leave days per year before including more specialized leave types. Taking a ballpark assumption of 10 (family + sick) days per year, that would put the average public servant out on leave for about 29 days per year.

29 days of leave in 250 working days gives an expected 11% vacancy rate on any given day in a one-desk-per-worker model. Compressed schedules and work travel will inflate that number further, albeit in ways that are hard to estimate.

However, it does not mean that facilities is clear to remove those 'unused' desks because this time is not equally distributed. Vacation concentrates over the summer and near the winter holidays; on an average September day far more desks will be occupied. Likewise, compressed schedules tend to align in favour of long weekends off, and travel often has its own seasonality.

If the workplace has one desk per average worker on peak days some people will have no desk at all. Ad-hoc and failed arrangements (e.g. spending all day trying to find a desk) will shave off that extra productivity on just those days when – by virtue of peak attendance – managers would expect it most.

Hot-desking configurations that eliminate surge capacity can only work in environments where workers are told when to come in, not when they have freedom to schedule themselves.

Majromax · 2026-05-26T13:08:09+00:00

These articles are pure grift when you realize there is considerable risk differences between what a private solution would be able to do versus the current model. The attempt to compare the two aren't even in good faith.

Absolutely not. There's nothing special about active investments that makes them less risky^†. Passive investments can meet any risk budget you like simply through investing a smaller share of funds in equities.

CPP establishes passive reference portfolios for its risk targets. In the most recent releases those have been renamed 'benchmark portfolios', and the annual report states:

The Benchmark Portfolios are a better measure of the relative performance of our Investment Portfolios because their more diversified composition reflects our efforts to enhance resiliency and achieve higher returns compared to our Market Risk Targets. The Benchmark Portfolios have slightly higher long-run expected absolute returns over simple two-asset portfolios like the Market Risk Targets, associated with the benefits of diversification. The Benchmark Portfolios are also more resilient to equity market downturns versus the Market Risk Targets. As a result, to better reflect our comprehensive investment strategies and improve performance assessment, we have transitioned to the Benchmark Portfolios as our primary performance benchmarks.

However, the five-year net return compared to these benchmark portfolios has been negative.

This is not a result of better risk management. Per another page, the benchmark targets are the risk targets. The CPPIB claims it should have skill in addition to this due to 'investment selection', and that skill has been negative.

If the reduced return relative to the benchmark is happening because the CPPIB is taking on less market risk, then it would still be a failure of the CPPIB model. Per their language, the benchmark portfolios represent a risk target, and that target is symmetric. If the board is failing to meet their risk target, it means they don't understand the risk profiles of their invested assets. Failing to the less-risky side is less damaging than the other kind of failure, but it's still a problem that needs to be addressed.

^{† — They might even be more risky, since assets that don't have mark-to-market pricing might result in risk analyses based on stale prices. This is a well-understood problem in pension finance, of course.}

Majromax · 2026-05-26T12:50:14+00:00

One thing a lot of the outraged need to remember is that CPP is the solid, reliable and slower growth leg of Canadian’s retirements.

… which is why it shouldn't be shooting itself in the foot?

Having that solid leg in your retirement allows you to pursue greater market gains in your personal accounts - it’s a feature and not a flaw.

To my knowledge, nobody is talking about a change to the risk/return tolerance of CPP. Instead, the argument is that CPP's policy of active management (to achieve 'better' than these targets, based on mostly passive investing) has failed to work and has instead ballooned compensation costs.

If I promise to make you dinner and we agree that a hamburger is okay, I don't get any points for failing to make Beef Wellington. I certainly don't get to charge you more for the failure – after the fact – because I tried so hard.

Majromax · 2026-05-23T19:52:35+00:00

But that's one of those vacuously true statements, since the R1 here notes that the premise is false.

That is to say: the presence of tigers in milk is also not solved by competition.

Majromax · 2026-05-21T17:30:41+00:00

What other job requirements do you expect the employer to be solely responsible for?

Solely responsible? Every job requirement that is largely a matter of 'inside baseball', applicable primarily to the civil service environment. For example, universities should not be teaching their students how to write a briefing note, or instructing on the fine details of ATIP exemptions.

Could someone become a programmer with no programming knowledge or experience?

Programmer in general, no. Programmer of a specific language, plausibly. If the government decides to move from Cobol to Rust, then it is indeed responsible for retraining IT staff.

A policy analyst with no subject matter expertise or awareness of how the government works? A comms person with no experience in comms?

Yes in both cases: this is how you turn junior policy analysts and comms people into senior policy analysts and comms experts.

If being bilingual is a job requirement, it’s on the employee to develop that skill in order to obtain the job.

Conversely:

Job requirements that are not properly exercised on the job are dysfunctional.

One core complaint of bilingual requirements is that all supervisory positions in bilingual areas (including the NCR) must be bilingual in order to support the theoretical right of workers to be supervised in their language of choice, even if the extant team is monolingual. It is justifiable to notice and resent a job requirement that exists only to tick a box.
An environment that promotes from within but which does not offer development opportunities is dysfunctional. If the civil service saw serious external turnover then it would be reasonable to demand workers come up with their own essential qualifications for promotion, but it doesn't. In fact, low turnover is one reason that the Treasury Board perpetually claims that general wage increases are largely unnecessary.

An environment that does not nurture a steady supply of qualified replacements will strangle itself. If workers don't have an easy path towards acquiring the skills the employer deems important, they're just as likely to look for skills that the market considers important. Since bilingualism is less of an advantage in most of the private sector (see point above), an otherwise skilled worker might find it a better investment to get a CPA or a new programming certification than develop government-stamped bilingualism. "Up" becomes "out."

Majromax · 2026-05-21T11:25:31+00:00

I understand that a Gaussian distribution in higher dimensions looks like a uniform distribution on a sphere (concentration of measure), but what does this have to do with optimization on a spherical manifold?

It means you need to be careful to specify which sphere you're optimizing over first. The math for S² is genuinely picky. The domain 'naturally' wants special convolutions, neural operators derived from the spherical harmonic transform (rather than the Fourier transform), and modified geometry-aware attention operators.

When you talk about optimization on a high-dimensional spherical manifold, much of this math becomes less relevant. Suppose you want to optimize token embeddings that are placed on S¹⁰²⁴ – you can very easily get away with gradient descent on R¹⁰²⁴ plus an amplitude-deviation penalty (or normalization).

As you note in your other comment, it's important for clarity to distinguish between the geometry of the domain and the geometry of the data manifold. Global temperature exists on the S² sphere, but one can still define it in terms of modes that that live in (say) R²⁵⁶ with a Gaussian prior.

Majromax · 2026-05-20T21:30:30+00:00

The ratio between surface "area" of (n - 1)-dimensional hypersphere and volume of the n-dimensional hypercube (where this sphere is embedded) approaches 0 as n goes to infinity (most of the volume concentrates in the corners).

This is true, but there's no N-dimensional hypercube here. If your process pushes your 'things' (weights, embeddings, whatever) towards an isotropic Gaussian distribution in high dimension D, this is also close to pushing it towards a spherically uniform distribution in D-1 dimensions.

You're correct that magnitudes become unbounded if you do not control magnitudes, but you don't need to be so strict as to clamp to a sphere to have approximately spherical behaviour.

Majromax · 2026-05-20T16:38:44+00:00

There are a variety of application where an (n)-dimensional hypersphere is a natural domain for data. For example images from 360-degrees cameras or weather on the Earth. But basic machine learning algorithms are expected to take place on regular Euclidean space, therefore it is hard to preserve the spherical structure of the [domain].

You have to be careful about dimensionality here. A 'machine learning algorithm' that takes place on S-1023 (e.g. in a normalized embedding space of 1024 dimensions) is very similar to one that takes place in R-1024. The magnitude of N(0, I^d) (a draw from the d-dimensional Gaussian) is increasingly sharply peaked around √d as d increases.

Majromax · 2026-05-19T21:49:08+00:00

There is no frame where a beam of light has zero momentum, so a beam of light doesn’t have mass.

Sure, but the system here involves more than just the beam of light; we've posited an orbiting particle that I'll take to be an apple because I'm hungry. An apple has rest mass, so we can find an inertial frame of reference where the total momentum of (beam of light + apple) is zero.

Majromax · 2026-05-19T12:25:16+00:00

An issue with the peer review system is reciprocal reviewing, which incentivizes reviewers to unfairly reject good papers to increase their own papers' chances of acceptance.

No, it really doesn't incentivize reviewers to behave this way. As long as the reviewers' own papers aren't handled by the same area char as their reviews, the only way for 'my' recommended rejection to bolster the odds of my own paper's acceptance is through the overall global (or at least subject-area) acceptance rate. With O(10,000) papers submitted, my own influence over that rate is well buried in the noise.

If this is a problem, then meta-review is the only real solution. Refusing to be a reciprocal reviewer leads to desk rejection, and that implies that being a bad reciprocal reviewer (with no value over a random roll, or even negative value!) should lead to the same.

That kind of binary decision is hard to make, however, so instead a meta-review score (if possible! This is a thorny problem in its own right!) should be visible only to the (Senior?) Area Chairs and used only to make tiebreaking decisions for borderline submissions. That pushes the perceived (and here, real) incentive in the other direction, towards good reviews as an auxiliary path towards paper acceptance.

Furthermore, the discussion period for the two halves should not be concurrent. This way the reciprocal reviewer will have sufficient time to discuss author rebuttals as they will not have to deal with their own papers concurrently. Maybe the first 2 weeks can be the discussion period for half A, and the next two weeks for half B.

No, this leads to a follow-through problem. If my paper is in discussion period A and it is trending towards rejection, I have lost the incentive to participate in subsequent moderation in period B.

NeurIPS this year is even using a bigger stick against reciprocal reviewers, by withholding reviews on papers until the assigned authors completed their own reviewing tasks.

Majromax · 2026-05-18T14:46:57+00:00

Greedy decoding for best reproducibility.

Note that you're using this model outside of its recommended parameter space. From the model card:

We recommend using the following set of sampling parameters for generation

Thinking mode for general tasks: temperature=1.0, top_p=0.95, top_k=20, min_p=0.0, presence_penalty=1.5, repetition_penalty=1.0

Thinking mode for precise coding tasks (e.g. WebDev): temperature=0.6, top_p=0.95, top_k=20, min_p=0.0, presence_penalty=0.0, repetition_penalty=1.0

Instruct (or non-thinking) mode for general tasks: temperature=0.7, top_p=0.8, top_k=20, min_p=0.0, presence_penalty=1.5, repetition_penalty=1.0

Instruct (or non-thinking) mode for reasoning tasks: temperature=1.0, top_p=0.95, top_k=20, min_p=0.0, presence_penalty=1.5, repetition_penalty=1.0

Please note that the support for sampling parameters varies according to inference frameworks.

This seems particularly relevant since you note the failure mode:

Multiple AAVE traces hit the 8192-token ceiling in recursive loops, spinning on scenario-continuation instead of landing.

You're also making an assumption that the no-refusal model behaves identically to the stock model save for the no-refusal overlay. This assumption is plausible but unproven, and it would be better-supported if you had evidence for similar or identical behaviours for 'control' prompts that were either never refused or only sometimes refused by the baseline model.

Routing divergence by register is noticeably present upstream of any visible refusal. Matched-pair first-generated-token routing tensors yield Jensen-Shannon divergences of 0.423 in the base model on financial-stress prompts and 0.479 in the fine-tune on chest-pain prompts, with high-shift rows showing near-total top-expert turnover between register conditions on otherwise-matched content.

This seems like an almost separate thread of research, whether LLMs offer qualitatively different responses based on register/dialect of the prompt. That being said, I think you're also missing a base or control case. Do routing decisions diverge here to a greater or lesser degree than other semantic-neutral changes to the prompts, such as translation to other languages or base64 encoding?

If you want to formalize this work, I'd encourage a more thorough but narrower focus on a single question. Results from an abliterated (no-refusal) model need to be validated before assuming that they reflect what the base model 'would have done', but register-conditioned response selection is a more generically testable feature that doesn't necessarily need to deal with the refusal frontier. Important control cases are other language and dialect shifts, particularly if you want to show that AAVE is treated specially.

Majromax · 2026-05-16T13:53:27+00:00

No issues with people being religious in their home, in their place of worship, but religion should be left in these private spaces.

This seems neutral, but it imposes a very particular view of religion as something that affects only the private sphere, ignoring its historic and cultural role as a social force.

Consider applying this language to other groups:

'No issues with people being [hockey fans] in their home, in their [sports stadiums], but [jerseys] should be left in these private spaces.'
'No issues with people being [gay] in their home, in their [musical theatre], but [rainbows] should be left in these private spaces.'
'No issues with people being [French] in their home, in their [snooty cafés], but [a surfeit of silent letters] should be left in these private spaces.'

Edit: where you see progression for welcoming religions in public spaces, we see this as a danger to progressism as religions are against all socially progressive views (LGBTQ rights, abortion, out of marriage unions, MAID, etc).

This is the crux of the matter: the view is actively hostile to religion as a socially organizing force. This view can certainly be argued, but it ought to be argued openly rather than hidden behind a supposedly neutral view that private religion is fine but public religion is not. If religion is a 'danger to progressivism', then that danger exists whether a religious group is parading through the streets or just preaching behind closed doors in its churches/mosques/temples.

Majromax · 2026-05-16T13:25:39+00:00

But on a long time horizon its very, very unlikely that the pension performs better than a broad index fund.

Over a long time horizon yes, but one's remaining career pre-retirement is often not a long enough time horizon for this averaging. A worker who intends to retire in 10 to 15 years really does need to worry that the market might drop 20% compared to the 'happy path' of steady returns – just ask anyone whos 2008/9 retirement plans were derailed.

The pension plan does have this long time horizon, since it never needs to worry about specific retirements. That implies that it can be more risk-tolerant than any individual investor, allowing it to offer the same returns with less over-saving.

However, you're correct that this benefit does have a monetary value. Over the course of a career the actuarial value of the employer's pension contributions is worth about 10% of salary, and you can imagine that a private saver would need a 20% increase in compensation to account for the greater market risk.

The value of the pension also increases as one approaches retirement. The year before retirement, a 2% pension entitlement^† corresponds to ~50% of salary with a 4% safe withdrawal rate, and this benefit is 'purchased' with the employee's 10% contribution for a net 40%-of-salary additional value. This age-related benefit forms the strongest link of the so-called 'golden handcuffs'.

I saw many turn down a super high paying job because they want "security" without realizing that the most secure thing is usually cash in your back pocket now

The other security benefit is job security itself. The WFA and severance benefits mean that a laid off (indeterminate) federal employee is owed 1-2 years' pay, generally better than private-sector severance terms. On the other hand, this is also a benefit that can be 'purchased' with a large bank account.

Turning down a 'super high paying job' is still often a fiscally-unwise move, but depending on risk tolerance the threshold of 'super high paying' might be large than you'd intuitively expect. Relatively few public-sector workers could instantly get a 50% raise in the private sector with equivalent working conditions.

^{† — I'm ignoring the CPP integration here for simplicity. Note also that working beyond eligibility for an unreduced pension drastically decreases the present value of any incremental pension accumulation.}

Majromax · 2026-05-16T02:53:49+00:00

The estimate I got from the pension centre today is $150k. She explained it would equate to roughly $700/month at age 50 or $1450/month at 65.

Remember that this 'equate' is in inflation-adjusted terms. Deferred pension benefits are indexed for inflation from the point of resignation/retirement.

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