501–510 of 1001 posts
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Are such drastic action appropriate given the current state of the US? The US probably hasn't been this economically dominant since after WWII. Feels like Chesterton fences are getting torn up left and right by people too young and incurious to possibly understand why those fences might be there.
Never appropriate. The actions are entirely unconstitutional. If the US decided to disband USAID it would have to be an act of congress, unelected friends of the president don’t come close to being able to make that call.
Remember, if you can vote, vote the next time you can. Convince your friends and neighbors to vote, too. Apathy has real consequences.
It sounds like you're assuming that if more people had voted, they would have voted for not-Trump. Is there data backing that up? Is there any indication that the result would have been different?
https://news.gallup.com/poll/24655/party-images.aspx
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/favorability/dona...
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/favorability/kama...
I applaud these guys and the work they're doing. Any bureaucracy, public or private, with access to a guaranteed income stream will grow like a tumor. The entire federal govt needs to be audited and gutted. The time for committees, reports and similar half measures is over.
Have you ever optimized a slow program? How do you do that? A popular approach is with a flamegraph. It shows the hot parts of the execution; what is burning CPU cycles. If we profiled federal government, we'd find 4 big areas of spending [1]. Social security, medicare, the military, and debt interest. In our flamegraph, these are big fat sections. If you're profiling a program, would you look at this and say, "oh i'm going to spend my time optimizing this function call which takes up .01% of the execution time?" no, you wouldn't (unless you're an intern).
But that's hard, which is why elon isn't doing it. Nobody wants to cut social security because then a bunch of old people would starve to death. Same with medicare. Defaulting on our national debt would be a bad look. And god forbid we give the military less money. So where does that leave us? Even if you truly believe elon cares about making the government more efficient, the approach doesn't make any sense. In the absolute most charitable reading of it, he's just incompetent and he's doing this for show to get some widely supported easy wins (let's get rid of the penny and save $86M/y!) so people will like him. But the more realistic viewing is that he's gutting programs in order to further his own agendas, which is literally the definition of corruption.
There's a saying "don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence" but you don't become the richest man in the world by being incompetent. You become the richest man in the world through malice.
1. https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
of course Musk recruits young ambitious kiddos - they work hard, for not much money, and don't question authority (because they're blinded by their ambition) it's only when you get older that you see how rife this is for abuse. as a simple example, if DOGE knows influential Treasury recipients, then they could find ways to extort them. help us and you'll get your money on time. oppose us, and... heck, I'm a treasury…
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Remember, if you can vote, vote the next time you can. Convince your friends and neighbors to vote, too. Apathy has real consequences.
If DOGE wants to be effective it really should be going after the big ticket items like medicare or defense, some estimates have medicare at 40% fraud and waste and the DoD can't even pass an audit so no one really knows what %. And that is just getting what we've paid for, not even evaluating if what we've paid for is effective. Of course to do that would require actual coalition building, hard choices that upset vo…
This is where we are, we need to stop complaining and deal with things as the actually exist. I am doing this in my own way, my fear is Elon and Co. hitting Medicare/Medicaid so I am making my own: https://medicare.dev . I think this is going to become more and more common as fed become less and less stable/reliable.