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The appointment of Elon Musk to lead the proposed department of government efficiency raises concerns, given his track record of business management.
His handling of Twitter/X after its $44 billion acquisition has resulted in a significant decline in its value, with some sources putting the valuation around $9bn.
Doesn’t seem very efficient to me.
This idea has been around for a while. Make government more efficient by putting a private enterprise person in charge
It never worked because the private enterprise person got efficiency by having a cool project or forceful personality in the private enterprise which let them pay their employees poorly. Or maybe they paid their employees well and had excellent success. But then they have government employees who are hard to fire, have highly specialist knowledge, aren’t in it for profit and so the private enterprise maverick is usually [worse than] useless
I don’t expect it to work this time either, especially as Musk is more interested in Tesla, SpaceX, and his other companies
Not just significant, I’m pretty sure the loss in value is some sort of a record, for real.
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Sure, that’s great but it’s not even the point. Fundamental research and other type of “useless” scientific endeavors help humanity as a whole to better understand our universe but would never be privately funded because they don’t have any concrete and immediate financial benefits. This is precisely what a government should finance, because no one else would do it and yet it’s small stuff like that that make us collectively move forward as a species
Oh, they’ll probably publicly fund it for private profit
Musk fans don’t want humanity to advance. They hate technological progress.
For OTHERS, yes. But many want the cutting edge for themselves, at no cost to themselves.
Where did Musk come from? I don’t see any mention of it here
The Department of goverment efficiency was Musk’s meme idea and Trump is apparently just rolling with it.
Thanks for actually explaining it instead of downvoting me. Heaven forbid I’m not aware of every micro-connotation caused by the current depressing news cycle
Musk will govern the DOGE department, won’t he?
In addition, government research in the sciences is miniscule. You could cut ALL of science funding and be no where close to the 1 trillion that Musk claims he’ll be able to reduce the budget by
Now if he could start making cuts to the military…
How dare you threaten the poor defense contractors.
also, entire military is just under 1tn - all of it, including completely nonmovable things like nuclear silos and submarines. ripping enough copper from the walls to get 2tn would involve massive cuts to social security and healthcare, and maybe education. but nooo heavens forbid that progressive tax on income be introduced
The DoD itself spent $820B in 2023. To get over $1T, you also have to include veterans benefits, like the VA hospital system.
The full bill for Vietnam started coming 20 years after the fact as all those veterans got older and started heavily using the benefits they were promised. From the start of the War on Terror, we’re about at that same point right now. So unless the plan is to rug pull those benefits from people who really need them, then there’s going to be a huge bill coming that no amount of efficiency trimming can ignore.
If Democrats did the rug pull, Republicans would cry bloody murder. If Trump did it, they will cheer him on while veterans suffer.
The full bill for Vietnam started coming 20 years after the fact as all those veterans got older and started heavily using the benefits they were promised. From the start of the War on Terror, we’re about at that same point right now. So unless the plan is to rug pull those benefits from people who really need them, then there’s going to be a huge bill coming that no amount of efficiency trimming can ignore.
Pulling the rug out from under exactly when they need it most is almost the most based of praxis; the government giving them the wall is 100% based praxis.
oh nooo all the butchers who went overseas to shoot at brown children will suffer for their choices
what a terrible fate for a bunch of terrible people
While I understand the sentiment, US veterans are in many ways victims of the capitalist system themselves. At 18 years old, they’re pressured by family or school administration to go into the military. They may have grown up poor and have no viable career path once they leave high school. College is a pipe dream. Combine that with recruiters who will use every high pressure tactic in the book and outright lie to get you to sign (“sure, you can get leave later on to be the best man at your friend’s wedding”). All this is happening before they’re legally allowed to drink, and they certainly haven’t finished developing into their adult self.
They go off to the military. Most will get through with nothing more traumatic than boot camp (which can be pretty traumatic) and some shitty food, but some will die, and others will be injured or have PTSD.
Keeping those services and improving them is part of cleaning up our mess. So is dismantling the capitalist system that creates more of those veterans.
i, for one, would like to see more air defense assets going to Ukraine
Genuinely why bother at this point
“hey why bother going against a nationalist land grab? i am the real antiimperialist” gee i wonder
most of the rest can be made in europe, even if it would require some scaling up of production
e: i can see you have came here with your instance-issued portable public opinion influence brigade. will you bitch and moan again when you get defederated from another instance?
nationalist land grab
Is that what you actually think this is? Russia, famously lacking land.
If your “defence of democracy” requires replacing a democratically elected government with a nazi puppet regime in a violent coup, supporting that regime as it commits 8 years of terrorism against its minorities, and forcing it to kidnap old men to the front lines to keep the profitable meat grinder going…maybe you’re not actually doing anti imperialism? Just a thought. Like when the swastikas came out and the genocide in Palestine kicked off, you should have realized we’re the baddies, and baddies lie.
But epistemology aside, why bother from a practical standpoint? The war is over. Anything sent over at this stage is either going to the scrap heap or a military warehouse in the Russian Federation. Also lol, you will not be scaling up domestic weapon production to any meaningful degree, because we, the US, blew up Europe’s pipeline and ate it’s energy sector, and now Volkswagen can’t even keep making it’s cute little nazi cars.
The point is not gain of land for Russia but removing land from another state, as a punitive measure for trying to get away from russian influence. This is also not the first time it is happening. Because of how nationalist Putin’s supporters base has become over time, he chose to use small invasions like 2008 invasion of Georgia as a tool to increase his domestic popularity. This parallels 1999 false flag bombings and response in form of second Chechen war and 2014 invasion of Donbas. In all these cases, as well as for two first weeks of 2022 war, approval rating of Putin’s government soared which was exactly the point the entire time. Because of how much of that comes from nationalists, he can’t back off because he’d come across as weak and lose support, he can’t advance much faster because he’s physically unable to, and his best bet is this kind of slow grind like we see now. Any western military aid will make it harder, so of course russian influence operations are directed against it, and you know that too
Also you will not be scaling up domestic weapon production to any meaningful degree
Speak for yourself. Orbital ATK buys european explosives, we have scaled up weapons manufacture in France, Germany, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Czechia and few others, there are new Rheinmetall plants in Ukraine too.
Ukrainians don’t lack resolve. In 2022, something like 85% (iirc) said that fight should go on if nuclear weapons were used by Russia. Even now 80%-ish don’t think that any territorial concessions should take place in any peace agreement. They have some of their own defense industry, lots of things (other than mostly air defense, and parts of aircraft manufacture) we can do in Europe, even if it requires some scale up, then there’s South Korean deliveries and few other things that still can happen.
Like when the swastikas came out and the genocide in Palestine kicked off, you should have realized we’re the baddies, and baddies lie.
who the fuck “we” is supposed to mean there? in middle east i wish everyone involved regime change, situation is fucked with any of current people in power staying in power. Put Netanyahu, Assad, Erdogan, Khamenei and their cabinets and top people from Hezbollah in Hague then we can talk. but it’s severely off topic so maybe don’t
shut the fuck up you stupid liberal. fuck off
Death to America
The US is helping Israel annex Gaza and West Bank as we speak, spare us the “opposing nationalist land grabs” nonsense.
oh look a sexist nazi
what a surprise
can see you have came here with your instance-issued portable public opinion influence brigade. will you bitch and moan again when you get defederated from another instance?
Look, I originally came in here to look at dunks on
and then I saw it back in my feed with like, quadruple the number of comments it had when I originally saw it.We’re not brigading just because we’re all in agreement that someone calling for regime change in some of the only countries and organizations who are resisting a modern Holocaust is a bad person undeserving of respect. I just wanted to read some Elon Musk hate and you decided to talk about how the Arabs should have their leaders chosen by the enlightened white Westerners.
I leave for an hour and you come back with some snide edit to cosplay as inglorious basterds? Weird thing to do in the middle of -and I cannot stress this enough- supporting actual, seig heiling nazis in a war.
I, for two, would like to see the same
Regardless, he’ll claim he cut 500 bajillion dollars no matter what he ends up doing
My bet is that if he expects to cut 2 trillion, he will end up increasing the budget by 4 trillion.
No no, you don’t understand. This is what people have actually been asking for this whole time. Nobody wanted the budget randomly cut, they wanted it distributed
Sadly we already know it will be distributed to the friends of the 1%
He actually claimed 2 trillion.
I knew Elongated Muskrat was a dumbass but I didn’t know he also can’t do math.
I don’t think he even attempted to do math. Someone asked him about it and said what the current budget was, and he just rectally sourced 2 trillion. I assume he said that because it’s big enough to sound huge, but less than half of spending so people don’t panic that everything will be cut.
It’s meaningless bullshit until he actually says specifically what will be cut. Republicans have been claiming they can cut huge chunks of spending for years, but it never materializes. They only know how cut government income without paying for it.
Still waiting for that ACA replacement promised on week 1 of trump’s presidency. It was supposed to be so easy. Now we’re 8 years out and they have “concepts of a plan”.
I’m sure with control over all government branches again they’ll have the ACA completely replaced in no time. For real this time.
The plan is to repeal it first, and then figure out what to do from there.
Probably whatever makes the most money for insurance companies.
The goal’s more about cutting all the science funding than reducing spending. These are people who bitch about Ukraine when they don’t even plan on spending that money on something else they’re just guzzling Russian propaganda.
The world just keeps getting more and more efficient at being dumb. Let’s just count all the appallingly stupid things crammed into this small meme with 2 million views:
- “Insurrection Barbie”
- Celebrating the defunding of useful scientific research by a new government efficiency agency
- This new agency is named after a cryptocurrency
- The cryptocurrency in question was created as a joke to satirize cryptocurrencies, but became a top prominent cryptocurrency itself.
- The “Department of Government Efficiency Agency” has 2 heads, both of whom have other primary jobs and were chosen in return for political support.
- There is also already an existing government agency that does the exact same thing, called the “Government Accountability Office”. But most people seem to be unaware of it, likely because it’s not named after a cryptocurrency/dog meme.
- This whole scheme was the idea of the richest person in the world.
Idiocracy didn’t happen because of unnatural selection, it happened because social media unlocked a runaway chain reaction of stupidity.
Why are people saying that it was named after a cryptocurrency?
Isnt the dog the first thing people think of when seeing “doge”?
Isnt the dog the first thing people think of when seeing “doge”?
It used to be so, but in recent several years Doge has lived and pretty much been defined in public consciousness by the cryptocurrency, which Musk has openly endorsed/memed.
Is it better to be named after a stupid meme instead?
Yes, Kabosu was a gem.
It was for me until a few years ago. I used doge as a base for most of my internet alias since I like the meme (as you can see from my username). One time inside a game, I was asked if I was a crypto bro because of my ign. At the time, i don’t like crypto but have no hard feelings against it. Ever since then I loath those crypto bros and their worship of crypto currencies for destroying the image of doge and with their stupid crypto currency nonsense.
Its reasonable to make the connection to the coin, as this particular cryptocurrency was propagandized and manipulated by musk, who will be running the agency.
Wouldnt it be possible that he just likes the doge meme, promoting a cryptocurrency that is named after it?
No, he likes money. Remember a few years ago when he tweeted about how great dogecoin was? Then a week later he tweeted about how stupid is was and that he was done with? He probably made millions buying and selling dogecoin as he made those tweets. There ia a huge conflict of interest when it comes to celebrities endorsing crypto coins. If you have the pull, you can just buy a bunch of some shit coin, talk it up and then all the people who look up to you to will go buy it, pumping up the price while you sell and make a huge profit. Then the value crashes back down and everyone who bought is left holding the bag. Whenever some famous person talks about a crypto, 100% of the time it is a grift to skim money from their follower’s pockets.
100% spot on, pump and dumps are especially rampant in crypto because a couple of people can generate a ton of coins and own the entire market for that coin. If they can get that price to rise even just a fractional amount through whatever completely unregulated means they can dump it to the suckers buying and cash out. It’s like printing money but the printing presses are stupid people.
This has been going on for years.
People used to find an almost dead crypto-coin, buy up as many coins as possible, and then pretend they were developing back from the dead. Then they would cash out.
True! It was then technically named after a meme…which the coin named itself after, as it was supposed to be a “meme coin”.
Still stands though.
“Government agency named after meme. Such dumb. So chaos. Woooooow.” Lol
Say it with me:
No. Research. Is. Useless.
If we say that research is useless because it doesn’t bring you mo ey we could stop teaching children math beyond the absolute basics because “it doesn’t brinf them anything”. This is stupid, because those are the fundamentals that tech children to thing logically and become useful member of society. Same with research. It teaches us the things necessary to maybe invent some of the most useful stuff ever seen
Republicans: “No. Research is useless.”
That’s a good one, but sadly true.
Republicans want drones and cannon fodder, not scientists and intellectuals.
You say that but I’ve heard concerningly many people say that there is no point in teaching everyone stuff like basic math because chances are they won’t use it
I also hear that argument often and I absolutely hate it. They always say “tech them things like insert manual labor work. Nobody needs Math.”
It always depends. A lot of people will likely never use a saw outside of school. Especially in a time where a lot of people go to university the skills that complex math teaches you are basically the bare necessitys. Also school usually is teaches you the basic broad knowledge and skills required to get more specific education on a specific topic. This includes studying all different subjects and also getting training as a woodworker. It is literally impossible to focus on everything and that also isn’t really the use of school. Its just the first and universal form of education.
Besides all that manual labor requires math. A ton requires geometry.
You think plumbing, framing, electrical or any trade is done without measuring and quite complicated math?
Especially in America. Sure just cut that board down to 29-13/64 inches…and remember the blade is 1/8" thick.
I agree no research is useless but some just goes straight into the bonkers folder.
Yeah, but just because a scientist calculated what would happen if we replaced the earth with blueberrys doesn’t mean we should defund him.
If a scientist came to me asking for funding to research on bodily odor (which has happened, if memory serves me well) I would be baffled by the request but I wouldn’t outright deny it.
Sweaty arm pits. Stinky feet. Bad breath. Farts.
The lab would have to be declared a bio hazard area by itself. Too good to miss out. Just the chance to see someone trying to keep a straight face while taking in some of these fine bouquet of rancid would be too good to miss.
Imagine watching the footage of a day of work.
And so the US lost decade becomes the medieval dark ages
It’d be fascinating as an outsider if the choices made by the US didn’t basically impact everything, everywhere.
I thought we were done with the “medieval dark age” myth.
How’s Neo-Feudal Gilded Age strike you?
One giant leap forward, one roundhouse kick back.
More of a global depression after these yahoos purposefully crash the economy.
“preventing next corn plague” with resources used being a box of soil and bunch of underpaid grads seems pretty efficient to me, but i guess that since the common clay of the new west already voted they can be safely disposed of
at USDA, they’re turning beetles kinky! 😡
- alex jones fuming aimlessly while being stored in some container
The Onion buying Infowars is the only good news I’ve heard this week.
China is going to devour the scientific world if we keep it like this
Won’t happen, or at least won’t be useful if it does. Lotta Chinese authors are faking data for the sake of the CCP and their studies don’t replicate. If that takes over, it’ll be like a global Dark Age.
Hell yeah
A scientific monopoly is a bad thing regardless who you cheer for
I agree with the sentiment, but disagree that this is a scientific monopoly. Socialist countries correctly view science as a collaborative process whose fruits belong to society at large. As an American, I fully understand the concern: we’ve seen how our government used a scientific monopoly, and it was to create a capitalist world hegemony that we’re still suffering in. But it’s important to remember that they’re not us. I’m not just talking about morality either: China and it’s allies simply have none of the incentives to do what we did, and many incentives to do the opposite.
Going to continue devouring the scientific world with lots of smart Westerners leaving the new SlaveTastictm USA
Republicans deserve no progress. Let them fall back into the ages they desire. No Smartphones. That’s which science.
Like the dead don’t realize they’re dead, they don’t realize they’re stupid. They’re just everyone else’s problem.
They were when they were alive, too
Neolib idiots don’t see the (immense) value of fundamental research because it doesn’t directly generate profits, more at 11
They’re not neolibs, they’re fascists. The Democrats are neolibs
True, but I don’t think many of them would say that to your face (including musk who I assume would pretend to be neolib, who do kind of have a hate boner for basic research, at least in my country)
Fascists lie, including about being fascists. Trump is a fascist, his party are fascists, those who work for him, even if they don’t go all in on fascists values, are absolutely tarrable with the same brush. The biggest difference between them and the Nazis is that the Nazis had better dress sense
Which is stupid, because even video games make you research sticks before you can make nuclear reactors. Guess even entertainment can’t teach dumb shits anything. Just retaining nothing.
They’ve never seen a game complicated enough to have research tbf.
It directly generates profits, they’re just too stupid to understand how.
Yeah but sometimes it might not because that is not the main goal ! Useless, I tell you !
Welcome to the new Dark Ages, brought to you by religious fascists.
Elon isn’t even religious. Like always religion is just a fucking disguise for enriching themselves, both with money and power.
Stupidly funny, right? Like watching a movie, where something dumb is about to happen. You are watching and screaming in agony, pleading for the characters on the screen not to do the dumb thing. But you watch in horror, as all your words are without any effect, you can’t reach anyone.
But now with the added bonus, that the dumb thing might affect your life. Or that of your loved ones, neighbours, friends.
Living in Australia, with China just to the north as our largest trade partner, I’m not looking forward to what is going to happen with America’s allies in relation to China
again
I’m thinking this too… let’s hope Renaissance mk2 only takes a few years to blossom - but my confidence is not high.
Hell can we mention that the cold war era these fucks idolize was also the golden age of the government throwing money at side projects?
Yeah, we’ve been studying the sex lives of various different animals (including ourselves!) for centuries now, yet nobody bat an eye until now. 🙄
the 2010s science bazinga man being the reason all the cool science gets cut is darkly funny.
