We spend about 90 Billion dollars on corporate welfare each year.
90 Billion.
Yeah but let’s focus on the rounding errors.
The Department of Government Efficiency is going to increase the efficacy of giving taxpayer money to the ultra wealthy.
Musk continues to demonstrate loud and clear that he is none of the things he claims to be.
Spoiled rich boy who wants to be president and figured out how? Rumor is he hasn’t left trumps side since the win.
He’s an investor and salesman. Given the way he treats his workers, I’d bet money on him being a douche to waitstaff.
Little spoon wants to be the big spoon.
It’s like the two dumbest kids in your middle school were the only ones that ran for school elections and now they spout inane shit you have to ignore, except they control nukes.
Nah, there was another contender, but they were a fuckin’ nerd with big, scary words and headachy sentences and got bullied out of the race.
(The nerd is a general analogy to reasonable people, not any specific person or group)
Anyone remember the early days of Musk’s Twitter takeover?
“I don’t know what this ‘microservice’ nonsense is, I’m gonna remove it”
“…Sir, everything is fucking broken now, could you please stop messing with the system”
“Ur fired lol”
…Expect more of that.
Or the server move
I think many of these people would be perfectly happy for a woman to not have definitive knowledge about whether or not she’s pregnant. I suspect there might be some overlap with the group that’s trying to get rid of all contraception and abortion measures.
they don’t need to know they’re pregnant, the body has ways of shutting that down
Doesn’t “DOGE” literally have a budget of nothing?
It also can’t be understated how much private corporations benefit from technology this research yields. We spent $25 billion ($175 billion in today’s money) on the Apollo programs alone, and NASA research has led to everything from cell phones and laptops to the rubber molding process used for sneakers. The DoD wasted a ton of money in the 80s on this new technology that involved getting computers to communicate with each other, and now we have the internet.
The government spends money in ways that could never be justified by cooperations, then the cooperations enrich themselves with that research and use the profits to lobby Congress for lower taxes and limited spending. It’s absolutely infuriating.
That frog was Elon Musk’s mother.
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This isn’t about efficiency, it’s about attacking science as a tool for evaluating truth. It’s a way to discredit the authority of expertise and shape the course of research with selective funding and demonization.
Especially if you’d add up all the inefficiencies already introduced in the name of efficiency. All those grant proposals, superfluous fluff articles to bump impact factors, etc. are all required overhead to game a system designed to seem efficient.
I think it’s because Elon Musk just really wanted to be the head of a department called “D.O.G.E.”. The whole attacking science thing is just a bonus.
Yeah how much is this “office” going to cost the taxpayers? I would guess a lot more than $100k on a sunfish experiment.
Elon Musk: now singlehandedly responsible for the US falling further behind China in innovation and research (for the record, fuck the CCP).
I seriously hope the UK takes advantage and offers visas and funding for the research. We’ve already got a good research sector though it took a hit from Brexit. Taking in these US scientists, even if it’s only for four years, would accelerate the UK’s growth, suck it Yanks!
p.s. also the EU would love to have them as well.
This is a regularly done conservative tactic. Attack research because it’s frequently stupid sounding. But sometimes stupid sounding research leads to incredible things.
Sometimes you research the mating habits of red eyed tree frogs and you learn a lot for conservation efforts and stuff about the species. Conservatives love this because they can hand wave and go “who cares about this thing I personally don’t care about that most people aren’t personally impacted by”
But those science nerds sometimes do stuff like researching gila venom in the 70s which eventually led to ozempic now, one of the potential major treatments for t2 diabetes, a scourge of our morbidly obese modern society. This has gigantic positive implications for public health and financial benefits
The whole point is you can’t know until you’re done what will be groundbreaking
It’s an even more fundamental conservative tactic. What they do is find a single example of something they think they can easily deride and hold it up as representative of that entire thing. Think welfare, immigration, criminal justice, reproductive rights, gender identity, and much more. Right wing media is full of single cases they beat into their viewerships’ minds while ignoring all other cases
It’s used by every group to deride anythign they disagree with, just oversimplify things until they sound stupid.
I heard the explanation “conservatives stop thinking if they like the current result”.
If immigrants committed any crime, the obvious solution is to deport all of them. Less immigrants, less crime, sounds great, no further research needed.
But if it’s about something like social security, they go to the ninth layer of indirection to “prove” that it’s bad, because now they found a study that slightly agrees with one of their talking points (p ≈ room temperature).
Take literally any scientific idea and you can easily imagine a conservative mocking it.
“They want to male a huge bomb, sit on it, and go to space!”
“They’re looking at mold from their days old sandwiches and call it science!”
I tried googling whether penicillin was mocked “pencillin was mocked as stupid” just out of interest. The third result (or first after “people also ask”) on Google, The Stupid Reason That Elon Musk Is Complaining About Scientists Spraying Bobcat Urine on Alcoholic Rats
Around and around and around
They don’t want groundbreaking though, unless it’s profitable. They want people to suffer unless they can profit from their relief. They don’t want the government funding this sort of research. They want the government funding their companies that then perform this sort of research at a 5000% mark-up.
How much do we pay for politicians and their security to go golfing?
I personally don’t think that politicians should be given elaborate security details. Their performance or lack of performance should determine how safe they are from the populace they’re tasked with serving.
Ehhh, with a large enough population you’re bound to find someone crazy enough to do it for no reason at all.
Take that, already meager science budget! They will definitely be used to make society better.
I’m thinking the outcome of this may be even more sinister.
I know there is already plenty of corporate hands in science, doing what they can to fund research they want and making it more difficult for potentially damning results to come out.
Fun wild experiments won’t go away, they’ll still get funded, but only at the mercy of the corporation that bankrolls their study.
Well, that was something that benefitted women, so it’s clearly not efficient for any of the grey, white men in this committee
including trans women, which they also hate
That’s not true. The rethoric is easily explained. They’re not women if you can’t “grab them by the pussy”
Knowing your wife is pregnant definitely benefits men too.
instead give it directly to Elon, he will know what to do with the extra money!
