281–290 of 316 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because feeding starving children is the right thing to do.
I agree I'm not saying people can't or shouldn't donate to do that I'm saying a country with 40 trillion in debt shouldn't be spending even more money to feed people on another country when it's own citizens are struggling.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because we're rich and powerful and we believe the world should be a better place. It doesn't matter what other countries do. We should want to step up and help. Leaders lead.
When USAid started in 1961 there were around 100 million starving people in Africa, as of 2024 that number has tripled to over 300 million. Sure the percentage of the population that's starving has gone down some but the actual number has gone up significantly and these people are still fully reliant on others good will for their survival. Has that really made the world a better place?
But just to engage with your numbers (which I don't agree are fully accurate and are definitely not at all a complete picture):
Getting the rate of starvation down from 33% to 20% in an already food-stressed region that has experienced 5x population growth could be presented as an accomplishment, yes. Flip your numbers around. In 1961 200m Africans were food-secure. Today 1200m are. A billion extra properly fed people, by your (possibly bad and definitely over-simplifed) numbers.
DOGE fired a whole bunch of NIH staff that processed high scoring grants to get them ready for Notices of Awards (the official document that starts moving funds, etc). Meanwhile, the administration now requires final approval of any grant by non NIH political staff. Consequently, Science is slowing down (and that is outside of other shenanigans). What used to take 3 months is taking 9 or more. For the many medical re…
>DOGE found an actually highly efficient Federal government For anyone that has worked on either side of government procurement it is obvious that this is not true. It's quite common for contracts to no longer make sense yet neither side wants to cancel them due to the paperwork involved. "Just put the money towards something else similar" Plus the many high profile examples like high-speed rail, rent subsidies.
And repossessing the fruits of successful Obama era industrial policy (Tesla & SpaceX) for the American people who paid for them too, of course.
In the 90s, I was running out of space on my 2GB Win95 machine. I decided to delete files. But I was not ready to part with my games which were consuming the bulk of the hard drive. I noticed every application folder had those .ini files and they were everywhere. So I deleted them, and saved a few megs overall. Win win. Everything worked just fine... Until I restarted. That's doge.
"That takes up so much space!"
Worked until reboot. And thats the start of my dive into IT
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And the Trump administration would similarly hamstring any newly created transparency organization. Not that the current congress would ever pass such a thing. And anyway, the Supreme Court has made sure that even if congress passed a law to make a(nother) government transparency agency, they can't make that agency truly independent and protected from presidential interference.
Creating an executive agency to investigate the executive would be pretty stupid. It'll likely lead to "we've investigated ourselves and found nothing", even if the president wasn't vested in all executive power, as the executive branch consolidates. However, creating an agency in the legislative branch is another story. One of the duties of the legistive is to investigate the executive, is it not? (not that this mat…
DOGE fired a whole bunch of NIH staff that processed high scoring grants to get them ready for Notices of Awards (the official document that starts moving funds, etc). Meanwhile, the administration now requires final approval of any grant by non NIH political staff. Consequently, Science is slowing down (and that is outside of other shenanigans). What used to take 3 months is taking 9 or more. For the many medical re…
>DOGE found an actually highly efficient Federal government For anyone that has worked on either side of government procurement it is obvious that this is not true. It's quite common for contracts to no longer make sense yet neither side wants to cancel them due to the paperwork involved. "Just put the money towards something else similar" Plus the many high profile examples like high-speed rail, rent subsidies.
Worse still, the lack of significant savings DOGE, indicate that the government was generally efficient.
This means that while specific cases may exist, the vigilance of the public and the set up of the US system had kept average performance in bounds.
I would like to personally thank Elon, "big balls" and the rest of DOGE for causing hundreds of thousands of deaths [1] by shutting down USAID! Also an honorable for bringing the screwworm to the US. Good job everyone, you guys did it! [1] https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hund...
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Unfortunately I have some insights I can not will not, must not talk about. But from another perspective, the reviewers: an idiot and google is a very dangerous combination.
"Unfortunately I have some insights I can not will not, must not talk about." Lol.
The bottom line is very easy: I am not looking for problems.