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.
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.
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.
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.
808 Billion for maintaining an army
That frog was Elon Musk’s mother.
So less than 20 Hummers.
Little female frogs in your pregnancy test!
:Pop it open and find it there.Doesn’t “DOGE” literally have a budget of nothing?
just wait until they find out how much a bomb costs…
Take that, already meager science budget! They will definitely be used to make society better.
Thank God we are cutting out this wasteful science. It will pay for half of an F-35. We’re buying an extra F-35, of course, so it’s a net loss, but our budget is unlimited for the military.
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.
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The Moon landing line is a pretty important thing to study, actually, since we know what the rehearsed line was: “One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” Without that “a” it’s a very silly line.
Armstrong for years claimed he said the line right and that it must’ve been garbled in the radio transmission, and in recent years has been vindicated as better signal:noise algorithms processed the recording and found the missing word. Researchers aren’t blowing money to find out if Armstrong was a liar, they’re using it to develop more sensitive receivers, better transmission protocols, and more advanced algorithms to parse signal out of noise, all of which have massive impacts in other domains. An algorithm that’s better at parsing data out of noise in particular is going to be useful in loads of places like MRI machines where improving resolution will take billions in research but improving parsing is just updating the software.
That’s exactly what I was wondering. Simple objective, very difficult problem, maybe have to invent new algorithms. Kind of like this:
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
The Game Theory was considered useless at the time.
It prevented a Nuclear WW3 for so many years.And it will still prevent stuff from going nuclear until enough world government officials become foolish enough to be unable to understand it.
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
The Stupid Reason That Elon Musk Is Complaining About Scientists Spraying Bobcat Urine on Alcoholic Rats
Pretty sure they cribbed most of that article from This Hank Green video from the same day. It’s a message worth spreading though, to be fair.
Oh, my bad.
Thanks.
Sorry, meant no criticism of you at all. I just wanted to share Hank’s video because he goes into a lot of depth and really helps in understanding.
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 feel like the soul exception is sovereign citizens, which gets dumber the more I learn about them.
I used to watch them on Youtube to see the stupid shit they’d do… Sadly they got boring quick as all they really do is whine about being required to have a license and forward their bills to the US Treasury. They simply run out of ways to be entertaining quick.
There are two camps.
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Those who are LARPing that they’re tough and “know the real rules” and are “using them to fight in this grand rebellion!” - It boils down to them being hostile with police and then hostile with the judges, wondering why their magic words aren’t working and blaming the Judge and cops for not knowing better. Weird how the movement is still alive when NONE OF THEM can find anyone in legal who will play along. Maybe it’s slowly dying, like the Christian Science movement (which has nothing to do with Christians who are Scientists, Science told through a biblical lens, Science in general, or even Christianity…)
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Those who fall on hard times and are desperate for some “life hack” that makes it all easier, even though if there actually was one we’d all be doing it.
The former is funny for a bit, but they run out of material fast, the latter is just sad.
I will say that early on Soverign Citizens arguments actually worked, though mostly because part of the scam is bringing a shit ton of paperwork with you, giving it to the prosecutor when you’re arrested, and hoping they’ll give up because it’s “Too much to go through and we have other cases.”
It worked in the begining, but as the SC Movement became more wildly known and more people went through the paperwork, these “papers” are usually just rejected out of hand as they’re basically just the written word version of filibuster and filibuster doesn’t really work in court. (Objection: Relevance)
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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).
This theory implies that conservatives think at some point, so I’m not sure.
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.
