Comment by whoitwas

You are being too kind to those young people. One doesn't need experience of bricklaying to see that building a house takes a lot longer than bulldozing it.

Anyone doing this kind of work is not merely ignorant.

This meshes well with the established policies of the Republican party, which is to campaign on how badly the Government runs, promise to fix it, get into office, then break the Government more, then run back to your constituency and say "I can't believe how bad the Government is, get me back in there so I can keep working on it."

Fuck, that sounds familiar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Olds

I wonder if the DOGE kids will be also sent off to the countryside once they're not useful anymore...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sent-down_youth

This is the classic 3 step plan.

Step 1. Destroy the old

Step 2. ???

Step 3. Profit!

"Build the new" doesn't even seem to be on the table at this point. There's no proposals to replace any of this. At least not public anyway, we know they are replacing all of this with for-profit scams.

> Yet people with experience know that Step 2 requires orders of magnitude more effort and time than Step 1.

And also that the steps here should be reversed. Sure if you are tearing down a building you destroy before creating, but systems aren't buildings. If you are going to create a new system to run the cash registers for your business you don't tear out the old one and worry about building the new one later. First you have the replacement ready THEN remove the old one.

> It's easy to convince inexperienced people there's a 2-step plan:

> Step 1. Destroy the old.

> Step 2. Build the new.

Feels very 'cultural revolution'-y

FYI, the Marines have passed two audits so far: https://www.marines.mil/News/Press-Releases/Press-Release-Di...

They were even able to account for all their crayons! PT belts on the other hand...

Congress approves the annual budget for each department, it's not micromanaging how it's spent

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Many countries don't have this boat anchor named "student loan" at all, so maybe the lesson here is that indenturing your people who actually want to study shouldn't be a must?

The current GOP plans for the budget and tax cut will increase the deficit by 4T.

No one is serious about “saving money”. It’s just to justify the corporate tax cut.

The way we know they're not serious is they're already planning to cut taxes taxes on the rich and corporations. There's no savings to be had, they plan to spend everything they cut on themselves, and another $3T beyond that.

Or cutting the budget for cgi roadsters in orbit.

American bureaucracy is not broken (but is in the process of being destroyed). Claiming that it is broken is easy rhetoric for charlatans and backed up by a few cherry picked examples.

yeah, the claim that the bureaucracy is the thing that is broken-- can we look at a few things?

Every time the administration changes, the heads of all the departments change, and the incoming people are typically pretty ignorant of what the department does. How would a corporation work if every 4 years you rotated the C-suite and 2 levels down, with people from a completely different business sector?

Meanwhile, funding is shifted even more often. Or is just outright cut once every few years.

Meanwhile, every action they take is an official government action. Which means it is LEGALLY REQUIRED to happen in certain ways based on laws written by people who don't think about consequences or how they are enacted.

And it is 2.2 Million people. There are economies of scale here.

So I wonder how this compares to current Google, current Facebook. I've heard people here talking about how messed up those companies are, projects started/stopped at whim, massive investments that get abandoned 2 years later, etc.

Or to banks. Banks don't modernize their software because they can't, not because they don't want to. No wonder the US government has similar issues.

Lottery for national park access seems like a great idea, way better than putting a price on it.

The American problem, speaking as an American, is the Americans. Their brains are incredibly smooth, and therefore they fear almost nothing. Famine? War? Environmental catastrophe? Societal collapse? Nah. The only thing they fear at all is someone who sounds like they might have a wrinklier brain than them. That's the problem.

If it was broken before, it's about to be a lot more broken.

Writing the post mortem for a two year project after a few weeks seems unserious.

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That's a good read on the budget proposals the House Republicans are bringing to the table – the aggravating part, though, is that the loss of $4.5T of revenue won't help with the deficit or debt, since the current target for cuts in annual spending are only $1.5T. (Give or take increased defense and national security spending over the next few years.)

https://apnews.com/article/house-republicans-budget-blueprin...

> You can call it legitimate policy

Nothing is legitimate about this. Literally everything they are doing is both illegal and completely unconstitutional. They have thrown out the entire rule of law and it is a pure flex of power, a shock-and-awe meltdown that they hope to execute faster than the normal processes can react. They absolutely intend to abolish resistance and they know they can suffer no consequences for it.

Dark times ahead. We're aren't arguing government efficiency or saving money, they are smashing it all.

Yeah that's not going to happen. Lower government spending wont lower taxes. That's not what taxes are for.

So I guess you’re happy with the concept of Redlining[0] and believe that any government spending on either preventing the practice, or undoing the decades worth of damage caused by historical Redlining are simply a waste of government time and money?

That preventing a repeat of the damage done to America cities by the national highway system[1], which was used mechanism to literally segregate American cities is also a waste of time and money.

Most of the US significant racial atrocities committed against its own citizens, where either committed by, or with the direct assistance of, the U.S. government (at both state and federal level).

There probably a good discussion to be had on how much should be spent on DEI efforts. But the idea that spending zero really doesn’t make much sense, we know what the consequences of allowing the U.S. government to become entirely occupied by white men. Ultimately a monoculture of people results in a monoculture of ideas, and monocultures never last, something comes along finding some critical weakness that common to every agent in the monoculture, and utterly destroys the organism (in the case of the U.S. government, that might be Trump and Musk). DEI is strategically important because diverse systems are more robust, produce better ideas, and are better capable of surviving extreme shocks. All attributes people should want in their government.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining

[1] https://www.npr.org/2021/04/07/984784455/a-brief-history-of-...

Don’t say “I’m avoiding any biases” with one breath and “I don’t want the gov to spend a dollar on DEI and don’t try to convince me otherwise” with the other. Seems you don’t understand what “bias” means.

Cutting DEI is blatantly and explicitly political. They can do that, within the laws and regulation that apply (this part is arguably something they don't follow). But it's not fraud or abuse, this is just "stuff they don't like".

They're cutting a lot more than that, this has been all over the media. One example would be biomedical research via NIH/NSF. This is not just DEI (in whatever overly broad and vague definition they use), but a lot more.

How is getting rid of USAID and CFPB, cutting back on the EPA and firing anyone at the DOJ who had anything to do with Trumps cases, related to DEI?

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I’m no Trump supporter by any means but I think this kind of comment must alienate Trump supporters and contribute to polarization around the topic rather than reasoned exchange. If you really want to oppose Trump I think your purpose is better served with respectful speech. I realize the anger many people feel must make respectful speech a challenge. But I also think that the rise of polarization on social media is one of the reasons we have gotten to the place we are today.

If you kill everyone on earth, you technically stopped humans dying from climate change events, but I doubt it's the right way

This assumes every government is as intransigent as the one you have experience with.

> only learning from catastrophe.

Worse. 1.1 million people died in a deadly plague and there's no national mourning, just straight back to the culture war and polarization.

Suppose they do care. What would that look like? Posting memes to TikToks and Instagram? Would it look protests in all 50 states? Because 50501 did that and got barely any coverage. If you knew to look for them you could and can find coverage, but it didn't dominate the news cycle on all channels for days on end.

We're not united because they've goaded us into to fighting each other over two topics that really aren't, and there's only two teams to pick from. One was bad, and the other one worse.

> The vast majority of Americans simply don't give one iota of care as long as they are currently comfortable.

Can you blame them? They've been toiling hard for decades while getting poorer and poorer, while the privileged class has lived lives of wealth and comfort from milking these government institutions. Did they care about the vast majority being comfortable or not?

I do think 9/11 was more a response to brutal colonial warfare and three letter agency shenanigans going back many years and less about religion..

Delusion + power + conviction doesn't always equal evil, so there has to be something missing in that equation. I'd wager it's evil.

The People for the New American Century or the off script timezone goof by the BBC?

Or maybe the Gelatin art crew?

>There is only delusion + power + conviction. There is no other evil.

If you believe this, your beliefs are out of step with essentially every Western justice system, which hold murder to be a worse crime than manslaughter. The difference between them is solely the intention.

"Those guys stole a cookie from the cookie jar. Therefore I'm entitled to rob a bank."

"Those guys walked on the grass. Therefore I'm entitled to demolish the building."

"The media" Give me a break. Who is this 'media' you speak of? Your local newspapers? CNN? Fox News? Joe Rogan? Who is to blame?

Especially when (my background, I gave that all up - maybe later than I should have) you already believe in spiritual beings daily fighting over your very soul, etc..

The same kids who have now access to vital US systems.

Better people learn about their lack of experience fro a hacked doge site than a hacked paxment system. The ones who will hack that won't be as friendly.

Many people who are not in tech circles think Elon is a brilliant expert in everything from artificial intelligence to space travel. People who largely think of technology fields as magic hail him as like the modern Galileo who cannot be wrong.

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> I assume property values will evaporate along with the stock markets if this train keeps on rolling.

The US government can prop up the stock market for a very long time. Anyone who purchased Puts early on during COVID times found themselves on the opposite side of a suddenly generous Fed that poured hitherto unseen amounts of liquidity directly into the markets. The chickens only came to roost in the next administration, but ai suspect they could have kept at it for 10+ years and still kept inflation under 12-15%

> I'm going to assume good faith here. Yesterday they just asked congress for $4.3 trillion in deficit spending (debt increase) to fund tax cuts for the people who pay the lowest taxes already.

Completely - it's again propaganda vs reality. They keep showing exactly what they believe by their actions, but from.what I see people on the right keep believing their words/propaganda. There is such and echo chamber on the contermporary right it's incredible. No matter how much tangible, see-it-with-your-own-eyes evidence of something is presented, as long as there is a cover story given that denies it people seem to keep believing the story. And then afterwards when it becomes clear that reality was the case and not the story it all swaps over to rationalizations and the cycle begins again with a new topic.

I remember when it was "there is no way this candidate really will do the extreme things he claims. He's just saying them for effect." To "he doesn't really mean he'll work to be a dictator from day one when he says it" "he doesn't really mean vote for him and you'll never need to vote again".

Then when he starts doing it but gives a different cover story it: "Yah he's not really doing that, he's just cutting waste", to what will be "he's not really doing that he's just fixing unfair election procedures" and so on.

Then finally it will be again "yes he actually did those things but here's why its ok and it doesn't change my mind".

Extremely prominent SV backers in the VP side of the administration have said/implied multiple times if it's democracy or their world views, they choose instituting their world views - and somehow people are still making justifications saying "they don't really mean that, they won't really do that." Even with the clear evidence of what's happening now.

Why do people refuse to believe people when they are explicitly stating their intentions?

Sidestepping any specific political topic, this new view of "I'm against the other party's political touch point item that I'd rather throw out 250 years of democracy" is really wild to witness.

I am always reminded by a critique of the Obama v Mitt Romney (2012) how if there is one thing the left and right are in full agreement on, it is to massively spend on the military. The left and the right can disagree on health, taxes, and the economy, but when it comes to the military they are in a full agreement.

This old video from rap news still ring very true. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpMPu5p_QXU

The largest discretionary spending is the military.

The issue Americans have is that they can't really afford non-discretionary welfare spending.

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How can you repeat exactly what he said verbatim and then call him misinformed or trolling? I'm going to assume bad faith here and remind other readers that only a small portion of the country is productive and those people should be incentivized to work above all others, even if it means paying them.

This has been the status quo for a long time, rather than pay taxes and get it all back in controversial and bloated government contracts (which is what gives the appearance of government spending working) it's better to stay lean and just have them not pay, as this removes the middlemen.

Let a company do it's job and you get people crying about them raping the planet and exploiting workers

Stick a company with red tape, tax them a billion, give them (and yourself) a billion to complete a political project that goes nowhere and it's labeled a great success with people cheering in the street and using it as an example of socialist success for the next 60 years.

Hamas. But what a typo!