Voldemort believes himself to be basically immortal at this point, so he can get away with taking some riskier decisions than he might otherwise. Worst case scenario he has to go embed himself in somebody else's head and start over. Presumably he can blow up his body or something if necessary.
Harry doing the memory erasure only happens because of the specific combination of information and abilities Harry had.
The biggest flaw I find in the story when recommending it to other people is that Harry's character can be very off-putting. Lot of people have told me that he seems to be right about everything and feels didactic. Knowing the full scope of the story we know that he does make a lot of mistakes, but they're not spotlighted in the early chapters where people drop off. So a hypothetical rewritten version might benefit from having him be visibly wrong about something early on.
I think plane crash does a better job with this as Keltham is visibly wrong about important things from the beginning. Not just the things he's being actively deceived on but also where he's confidently wrong about things due to overestimating his own knowledge.
The ancient forebears of the wizards, thousands of years earlier, had told the Source of Magic to only levitate things if you said...
'Wingardium Leviosa.'
Harry slumped over at the breakfast table, resting his forehead wearily on his right hand.
I always read this as just a punchline about how incredibly silly sounding it was, and his despair at the idea of that being ingrained in the fabric of the universe, not him noticing a timeline issue.
In universe you could possibly explain Latin and other later languages as being influenced by the language of spells, rather than the other way round
This is tangential to the main point so I don't want to go too deep into it. But since you raise it, that link doesn't show evidence of the original claim Trump made in the State of the Union, which I as referencing. Which was specifically: “Eight million dollars — for making mice transgender. This is real.” (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/transcript-president-donald-trumps-2025-state-of-the-union-address)
The link shows roughly $8 million spread across a number of NIH-funded projects that involved administering hormones to mice to investigate specific medical outcomes. These include topics relevant to transgender patients (e.g., immune responses under hormone therapy https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10849830), but also other populations with atypical hormone profiles. The largest grant ($3.1m) https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10891526#description is about asthma disparities that occur between cisgender men and women, with trans women mentioned in the context of distinguishing hormonal and chromosomal factors.
This is importantly different, because Trump’s original claim relies on the absurdity heuristic to make the research sound worthless (since mice do not have gender identities). It's simply false to say the aim of the experiments was “making mice transgender.” That was not the goal of any of the studies, and the researchers involved would almost certainly say that’s a meaningless concept in the context of lab mice.
This seems symptomatic of a wider pattern in these kinds of arguments about government spending. The original claim is phrased to sound so absurd anyone would agree it's waste. But it reduces to a more specific and controversial claim where there would be a difference in opinion about whether it's valid use of government money. So "waste" = "spending I disagree with" again.
Cases of genuine reform and improvement of processes, both in government and the private sector, tend to take the form of upfront investment of resources to overhaul systems, deploy new infrastructure, train staff, etc. which then lead to efficiency savings in the long run.
(Sticking to Eastern Europe, Estonia's "e-government" programme involved significant upfront spending but radically simplified and reduced the costs of large parts of their government, as well as enabling growth of private businesses. Or for US examples look at the roll out of the UPS ORION route optimization system which cost something like $250m to roll out, but now saves $400m in fuel a year).
The problem with DOGE and other similar ideologically motivated attempts to cut government is that they instead cut the funding first, and leave the agencies to work out how to do their job with decreased resources. If you've just fired 10% of the federal workforce the people remaining don't have the slack to consider ways to improve their systems, they are just struggling to keep the current system from collapsing. So you end up with something that costs less, but is providing you with less outputs per dollar of inputs. And doing these things in a messy and rushed way as they have been adds chaos and inefficiency to the system.
It's not just a question of "where would we need reform?" or "what kind of reform would work" but "what kind of goal are we seeking to get out of reform to begin with?"
Most of the time when people talk about "government waste" what they actually mean is "government spending money on things I disapprove of". When right wing lawmakers talk about money wasted on apocryphal transgender mice, they aren't asking about how many transgender mice were generated per dollar, but the existence of the supposed project. Or one of the most frequently cited examples of government 'waste' is overseas aid, which is often very effective at fulfilling its aim, but its not an aim they agree with.
So in practice arguments about government waste tend to be ideological arguments in disguise, which causes people to be distrustful of them.
The issue in Eastern Europe being described seems to more fit the "rule of law" vs "rule by law" phenomeon, often used when describing authoritarian regimes, and particularly China. Where the law exists as a tool for the state to deploy at its discretion, not a consistently applied set of rules that limits them.
Generally the solution to this is not fewer laws, as that also leaves the authorities with great discretion, but to have strong counterbalancing institutions like an independent judiciary, press, opposition parties, etc. that will force them to act within the law.
I think there's also a strong preference towards Wizard over King power (at least in this cultural space) because being seen as actively seeking power over others is considered threatening. Saying you want to tell people what to do because you think you know better than them how to get things done is going to make people defensive and wary.
The main reason I haven't been motivated to do much of the sort of thing you're describing is that it seems to me like there's an oversupply of people trying to do something impressively interesting and novel,
The post inspired a similar thought in me as well. There's a reason that people in any complex field have a wariness of anyone coming in thinking that they've discovered a new way to do everything better from first principles. And modern culture tends to valorize disruptors and innovators more than people who grind away slowly on incremental improvements to complex systems.
Though I do feel like there are a lot of people out there who don't consider knowledge based solutions to their problems as much as they should, so maybe its a reverse all advice you hear situation.
Reminds me of something about trauma being adaptive responses to a particular situation that are no longer adaptive in the current situation. E.g. being hyper vigilant is useful in genuinely highly dangerous environments but not elsewhere