Last Thursday they fired several hundred people at the NNSA with no notice, and then had to walk it back by Friday night when they realized that's the people that oversee the fucking nukes.
“The DOGE people are coming in with absolutely no knowledge of what these departments are responsible for,” Daryl Kimball said to The Associated Press, executive director of the Arms Control Association. “They don’t seem to realize that it’s actually the department of nuclear weapons, more than it is the Department of Energy.”
> “The DOGE people are coming in with absolutely no knowledge of what these departments are responsible for,” Daryl Kimball said to The Associated Press, executive director of the Arms Control Association. “They don’t seem to realize that it’s actually the department of nuclear weapons, more than it is the Department of Energy.”
The predictable result when you send in a bunch of young, obviously arrogant software engineers to "fix" things.
As a software engineer, I can say technology people can be fucking obnoxious. So many have an inflated sense of their own intelligence (and the important of "intelligence"). They swagger around foolishly thinking everyone else is an idiot, and make messes because they're so dumb they didn't learn from the people who know how things work.
> Last Thursday they fired several hundred people at the NNSA with no notice, and then had to walk it back by Friday night when they realized that's the people that oversee the fucking nukes.
Last Thursday is old news. Yesterday's headline was "USDA accidentally fired officials working on bird flu and is now trying to rehire them":
It's not incompetence, it's exactly what was planned.
> Russell Vought, President-elect Trump’s pick to lead the Office of Management and Budget, has expressed plans to put career civil servants “in trauma” under a second Trump administration so that they dread coming into work and quit. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains,” says Vought.
Which just shows that DOGE is a lie, and not about government "efficiency" or cost savings. NASA is arguably a giant waste of taxpayer dollars. Very little of its activity tangibly benefits the vast majority of Americans, and much of what it does do could easily be replaced with a generative AI model that produces new space pictures for desktop backgrounds. The entire space exploration and manned spaceflight activities could be cut, and no one would notice.
> Ok, you're obviously trolling here. This is clearly bait. But for anyone else reading this:
Only a little. The point is "waste" and "efficiency" are so subjective to be a near meaningless concepts. You could make the same points you did about many of the things Musk wants to cut, but they're not going to resonate to a tech audience like cutting NASA does. It's basically a temple of geek religion.
> NASA's budget for 2023 was roughly $25 billion [0]
That money could fund a lot of housing assistance or healthcare.
Personally, I think the things that "engineers" like should be cut first instead of being protected.
Yeah, it’s also really a drag about how we have technology for crossing oceans and flying through the air. Imagine the savings we could have diverted to the rich if only we hadn’t squandered all of those resources learning how to do that useless stuff. After all, humans were just fine for millions of years before ships and airplanes.
Elon is good buddies with a former Nasa director -- that director gave SpaceX their big break and backing when they were basically insolvent... I imagine conversations were had.
> Elon is good buddies with a former Nasa director
Who specifically are you talking about here?
> I imagine conversations were had.
It wouldn’t surprise me if Jared Isaacman (Trump’s nominee for next NASA administrator, an obvious Musk pick) convinced Musk to call for a back-off. I imagine Isaacman would argue that if there are going to be any personnel cuts, that he get to decide who and how many, rather than inheriting the decision already made for him.
Edit: Now I actually read the article, it contains the same speculation about Isaacman. Obvious enough to be arrived at independently
NASA aren't rocket guys. They hire people like him to build rockets. They make satellites and do science. If they decide not to hire him he'll fire more people until they do.
They manage space policy so it probably still isn't a good idea to piss them off. The enemies he's making at FAA aren't a good idea, either, but he can just fire them as well.
This isn’t true. NASA engineers own the design and engineering of the SLS rocket. No doubt some of the detailed engineering work is given to contractors, as is the manufacturing, but NASA’s “rocket guys” own the overall design. (And of course a lot of the big picture was dictated by Congress-still, there’s a lot of engineering decisions left in the middle between what Congress dictates and what is left up to the contractors.)
NASA has continually had rocket engineers going back to not long after its founding, when Wernher von Braun and his team transferred over from the US Army - through Mercury and Gemini, to Apollo’s Saturn V, the Space Shuttle, the abortive Constellation program, and now SLS. Part of the argument that SLS supporters make for not canceling it is that it gives NASA’s rocket engineers work to do and helps keep that knowledge in-house
NASA’s engineers also provide technical advice to commercial launch vehicle and engine vendors such as SpaceX, Blue Origin, ULA, etc, and they also have an important role to play in NASA’s verification of the commercial vendors’ technical analyses to demonstrate their launch vehicles are safe and reliable. But double-checking the work of someone else isn’t the same thing as owning your own launch vehicle design. Now, personally, I don’t agree with the argument-it isn’t worth spending billions for NASA to retain their own “full service” rocket engineering skill base when the commercial skill base in that area is now just as good, arguably even better - but that’s the argument they make
Real, actual workers have their livelihood endangered by out-of-touch billionaires going back and forth on serious economic policies hastily carried on made up grounds of "cutting waste" and "anti-wokeness" while keeping the lion share of the economy for themselves. This enrages me, and I can't comprehend how anyone needing a wage to live can side with them. Don't they understand that Trump, Musk and cie's interests are diametrically opposed to theirs?
It is out of touch billionaires, but it's also a vast swath of misinformed non-billionaires who seem convinced that the only thing they need to know about government is that it's bad.
They're the ones who put the out of touch billionaires in charge, and they remain thrilled. Even when people don't get fired, they like the way the randomness keeps everyone else terrified.
It's not really surprising when both parties continue to promulgate the lie that "hard work" and "intelligence" correlate with wealth, when in reality, luck and legacy correlate much more strongly, meanwhile the top 10% of households in the USA hold 67% of the wealth while the bottom earners have to make due with a measly 2.5%.
This leads all those people into thinking the government must not work (because it is unable to curb the insane uneven distribution of wealth, which they don't see but feel the direct side effects of) simultaneously thinking mr. big businessman must be able to fix it, because the standard narratives tell everyone to do nothing but worship such people because wealth = smart = good, right? .
Government (local, federal, state) spending as a percentage of GDP is 34% and as a total amount is 6.75 trillion. According to wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_the_num... there are ~756 billionaires in the US (interestingly the state-like region with the highest amount of billionaires per capita is Washington DC). The total wealth of these billionaires is ~6.72 trillion. I don't think there is a reliable estimate of billionaire spending so I will use 5% of assets for what I consider a high estimate which yields 336 billion. In reality I would guess that these people are far too greedy to spend enough money that they risk depleting their assets over time.
So to be clear, you think that control over ~336 billion (or feel free to provide a better estimate?) in spending is the "the lion share of the economy" and that we should not take a hard look at the 6.75 trillion in spending by an organization that includes the pentagon and is famous for funding forever wars in the middle east?
Those of us siding with the billionaires here (really just two that you have identified, not all of them - others such as Gates are clearly on the other side of this issue) recognize that there are people earning a living wage from the current status quo but we believe that the country would better be served by having these individuals earn a living wage in a more productive endeavor than what we see as staffing an unproductive and oversized bureaucracy.
Are we going to ignore the fact that part of that government spending funded private companies owned by Musk?
Wealth inequality in America is worse than any of its peer nations and has only been getting worse since the 80s (see Pew research on this). Americans on the ground feel this more than they feel the effects of bloated government spending that funds, well you know, stuff that's supposed to be in the public interest (like social security and other programs).
Are we further going to ignore that all the cuts they have made so far are on things that are not even a fraction of that spending and that the billions of taxpayer dollars funding Tesla will likely go untouched while actual people trying to make a living lose their jobs?
I agree that the military apparatus is a massive problem but I fully expect spending in that area to stay roughly the same. I think all that will happen there is a swap in who is getting the contracts. I'm not going to pretend I can't be wrong on this and sure some cuts may well be good, but you have to be extremely out of touch with reality and its consequences for real people if you think this is the right way to do it. The only people cool with this are prepubescents and immature adults who seem to think that life is like a video game full of NPCs and not of people who live actual meaningful lives like themselves.
"Are we going to ignore the fact that part of that government spending funded private companies owned by Musk?"
Elon musk has received ~$18 billion over a decade. In exchange he gave us the first broad market electric cars and reusable rockets which were lucrative outside of the public sector. While I have broad concerns about the money going in the pockets of the wealthy from government spending, this doesn't strike me as bad ROI. Just looking at the dollars and cents, the income/capital gains taxes paid by tesla/spacex workers+management over the last decade is almost certainly a substantially larger figure (I think Elon himself paid $11 billion in one year?) so the net "funding" of this "investment" from the government is a negative figure and this contributed to the balance sheet rather than subtracted from it.
While I may agree with you about certain problems we are seeing (e.g. wealth inequality), I think we disagree on the causes and solutions. I primarily blame government and would cite specifics such as 1 a slow down in housing construction that I blame on regulatory change (leading to large price gains which benefit established home owners) and 2 spending on bureaucracy that I view as generally going to well off people 3 skyrocketing cost of education which I generally blame on universities being enabled by incentives often from the government to act like a business and not a public good 4 increased cost of medical care which I generally view as a collection of market failings also caused by (in my view) bad policy (e.g. doctors are protected from immigrants taking their jobs due to the medical credentials not often being able to cross borders) 5 worse demographics (aging population requires more medical care and produces fewer workers). I believe you generally blame billionaires or the "very rich" who you feel are capturing a large share of the economy and I would be curious for you to lay out your case for this.
"You have to be extremely out of touch with reality and its consequences for real people if you think this is the right way to do it. The only people cool with this are prepubescents and immature adults who seem to think that life is like a video game full of NPCs and not of people who live actual meaningful lives like themselves."
I will acknowledge that often cuts are painful, chaotic, and impact real people. The nature of management for large organizations and in this case an enforced tight timeline due to political terms in my view make this inevitable and I am hopeful that there are long term positive outcomes that make the short term pain worthwhile. I don't think this makes me a prepubescent or immature adult and I don't view you or other people in life as an NPC. To be honest I view you as someone who is likely smart living a full life and who can probably be convinced with facts/figures along with a rational argument (although I will acknowledge that this takes time and happens over years / decades and not in a short conversation :D).
The temporarily embarrassed millionaire is a real mind set for a lot of people. There was some truth to it, for select groups of people, throughout certain times in the US.
Reagan explained it all to everyone more than 40 years ago. Let the rich get even richer, more breadcrumbs fall from their tables, which means more for everyone.
I mean, how are you even going to have a job if the billionaires are all out business?
The problem was that the Laffer curve had a vague ring of truth to it (enabled by the lack of any labels on the axes), and millions of Americans have bought into the bullshit it has implied for decades now.
"If they do better, we do better". It sounds so simple, so lovely, so true. But it's a lie.
The story earlier was jumping the gun before the decision had dropped, either way. When reading it earlier kept thinking there was no official news yet, no real substance to it, as we'd have to have another one when the news actually dropped.
The US Government is an ugly baby discovering the reality of Stein's Law[1]. Is DOGE optimal? Very obviously not. The Tea Parties failed to trigger reform. Trump may also fail; it's way too early to tell, and the foes get a "vote".
But the raw chaos that the was the Obama/Biden destination would likely be worse.
The voters can weigh in next year at the mid-terms. Start your candidates. Recommendation: offer a coherent alternative, and not the recent hormonal whinging.
You maybe didn't notice that all those Obama/Biden critics happen in an imaginary future, the same way all Trump proponents argument with an imaginary past.
Last Thursday they fired several hundred people at the NNSA with no notice, and then had to walk it back by Friday night when they realized that's the people that oversee the fucking nukes.
“The DOGE people are coming in with absolutely no knowledge of what these departments are responsible for,” Daryl Kimball said to The Associated Press, executive director of the Arms Control Association. “They don’t seem to realize that it’s actually the department of nuclear weapons, more than it is the Department of Energy.”
https://www.wbir.com/article/news/national/firings-of-east-t...