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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   2087 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 31, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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How has your country devolved into this? You are letting an unelected bilionaire do whatever he wants? And you are ok with that? 'It sounds not too crazy' no it actually sounds absolutely nuts to anyone with a functioning brain. Even if the federal system is that bloated you think musk , with no specialized knowledge, and a bunch of his yes men will fix it without fucking up your country?

Is it fair to call him unelected when Trump was elected and everyone seemed to understand that "power to Elon" was part of the platform? The power held by Elon now surely is still less than the total power held by all members of the federal workforce who are not directly elected under a "normal" administration; why was that not grounds for concern?

Well, in a functional organization you would say we have $4 trillion in revenues and $6 trillion in expenses, year over year. This is obviously unsustainable. We need to cut $2 trillion in expenses or we go bankrupt.

So you ask every department head to produce plans to cut their spending by one third. It's hard but they do it and you implement the cuts and layoffs and move on.

That's not the government we have though.

In our government such a process would take years and the conclusion would be that we can't cut anything. The "experts" would not comply. They probably don't even know how to comply, because they've been shielded from "efficiency or death" forces their whole lives.

Faced with this, you can do it in reverse. Randomly shoot big holes in the agencies. Then drip money back into them. It'll be now be clear what roles were most essential and should be filled back in first.

Is this ideal? No. But what's even more not ideal is the current trajectory.

He was elected. We elected Trump and Elon’s presence is Trump’s will. Elon was important for getting Trump elected, too.

We now know control of the U.S. government's infrastructure has a price tag: About $300 million.

EDIT: Several of you missed the point of my post: Elon donated that amount to get into Trump's good graces to form a faux agency currently wreaking unnecessary damage to the government.

No, you don't. If Biden admin wasn't such a nest of total incompetents Trump would never have won. Ditto for the Uniparty hating the US citizen and wishing him to just die quietly.

If they weren' like that Trump would have no openings to exploit.

Also, it was much, much cheaper to be a functionary in the Biden white house with arguably more control over a smaller subset of federal policy.

One of the unsettling things about democracy is complete randos (and their delegates) can be elected and take control of the entire country despite having built none of it, yes.

I mean, if you ignore the price tag on the DNCs efforts. About $1 billion. If you are going to reduce it to "Whoever spends more buys America", you gotta include that the losing party spent almost 3x more on their failed bid. So perhaps there was a bit more to it than that.

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