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.
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.
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.
As an American in college right now I also hope the EU takes an interest
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Yeah how much is this “office” going to cost the taxpayers? I would guess a lot more than $100k on a sunfish experiment.
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.
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 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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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.
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.
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.
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.
Well, that was something that benefitted women, so it’s clearly not efficient for any of the grey, white men in this committee
Knowing your wife is pregnant definitely benefits men too.
As if any of them give the first fuck about any of their spawn
ETA: wait, whoops, forgot Trump wants to fuck his daughter
Have you ever watched Game of Thrones, or played Crusader Kings 3? Children are valuable assets!
valuable assets
Thanks for the reminder, I was wrong. Trump actively wants to fuck his daughter, so I guess at least one of them gives a fuck
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”
instead give it directly to Elon, he will know what to do with the extra money!
Doesn’t “DOGE” literally have a budget of nothing?
808 Billion for maintaining an army
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.
So less than 20 Hummers.
This is the predictable outcome of empowering ignorance. When your opinion is as valid as my facts, bad things are going to happen.
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.
