How in the world did the government spending get so far off the tracks? In less than a month Elon will and his 20 year olds will pry 1 trillion dollars out of the politicians cold dead hands. will

[jross]

11 minutes ago, 1032004 said:

Lol

Nah, we should give $1B to a NGO , where $10K goes to the people in need.

[1032004]

2 hours ago, jross said:

My overall claim is that citizens (left and right) should be skeptical of the media, recognize media propaganda from all biases, and and that the media is heavily influenced by the government.

The ethical should be thankful for DOGE's mission and progress.

We should question what inside of us is supporting to undermine the greater good to rapidly reduce wasteful spending.

I agree with influenced.  I don’t really agree with “funded,” which you said earlier.

As I said earlier I like the idea of DOGE, but I’m nervous if they go too extreme.  And hopefully DOGE themselves is ethical also.  But I don’t like that Elon has a conflict of interest (billions of dollars in government contracts for his own companies), and now we know they’ve knowingly hired openly racist folks, so some of the judgement could be questioned.

5 hours ago, jross said:

This is their brain on media.

The media now proven to be funded by the government.

 

[Offthemat]

20 minutes ago, jross said:

Nah, we should give $1B to a NGO , where $10K goes to the people in need.

That’s the problem, Musk, nor anyone else is pointing at legitimate aid, and what Trump has said is that that part of the program will be moved to the State Department, where it will be more responsibly managed.  These squawkers aren’t informed, honest, nor do they care. 

[Lipdrag]

1 hour ago, jross said:

How much money does the USA have to spend (less than -2T)

This is the main point.  It is immoral to give away our granchildren's work/money/energy/property to make ourselves think we are virtuous.  If we had a budget surplus then, perhaps (only perhaps because I do not see foreign welfare authorized in the Constitution) we can give it away to foreigners.  But absolutely not when we have a runaway deficit.  Absolutely not.

[pokemonster]

This is much ado about nothing until they take on actual big spenders like the DOD and healthcare. Trying to dunk on democrats for finding wasteful spending from USAID, which in it's nature is meant to be donations / aid to foreign entities struggling, and accounts for 0.7% of the budget, is a waste of f'ing time.

Yes, our government is inefficient as hell, everyone knows it and it's because of both parties. This whole charade is nauseating with everyone sucking off Elon, when this is CLEARLY a conflict of interest. He's benefitting more than anybody. 

[Offthemat]

 

[Le duke]

It's kind of rich that he, a crypto evangelist, would complain about lack of transparency when crypto's main use case is the financing of terrorism, organized crime (drug trade, human trafficking) and other black market activities. 

5 minutes ago, Offthemat said:

 

 

[RockLobster]

14 hours ago, jross said:

Explain to me like I am stupid.  What is the non classified data and functions that they have access to and what could they do with it that will harm me?

The Musk DOGE derelict hackers are collecting full legal names, social security numbers, financial history, detailed medical history, bank account information, etc. and will be able to do whatever they want. Sell to the highest bidder? Absolutely they could. Trade with a hostile foreign country? They could do that. Sell bits and pieces to insurance and medical companies? Yes that, too. (Note that they have no obligation to follow HIPAA regulations and such.) Or some combination of all of them. Or more? Yes. Train AI? Yes, likely. 

Google is the 5th most valuable company in the world. And what do they primarily do? Collect and profit from collecting data. Something the typical US citizen still has no clue about.

The government knows better, and they should be protecting the US citizens rather than trying to put themselves into a position to profit from them.

[RockLobster]

44 minutes ago, Le duke said:

It's kind of rich that he, a crypto evangelist, would complain about lack of transparency when crypto's main use case is the financing of terrorism, organized crime (drug trade, human trafficking) and other black market activities. 

That one's easy to explain.

Musk buys a bunch of DOGE coin when it is low. Then he gets on xwitter and posts about what a great investment DOGE coin is. The DOGE coin value spikes up in value, then Musk sells his off. Instant profit. No cost, no consequence. This isn't fictional, this actually happened.

But isn't that illegal? It should be, but cryptocurrency is 'somewhat' anonymous and doesn't have the protections and oversight that traditional financial institutions have.

So why use crypto? No good reason, unless you are a criminal trying to bypass the law.

Wait - so why does Musk like crypto so much? See the line above in bold.

Remember, Musk is the guy who stood up in the recent presidential inauguration and did a couple Nazi salutes. He seems to relish having enough money to do terrible things in front of the world and to be able to get away with it.

[Husker_Du]

 

[Husker_Du]

 

[Husker_Du]

utter nonsense. so obvious. 

[1032004]

1 hour ago, Husker_Du said:

 

Yes and he has said recently he still agrees with that, he just wants more visibility to what DOGE is doing 

 

 

 

Edited 22 hours ago by 1032004

[1032004]

8 hours ago, pokemonster said:

This is much ado about nothing until they take on actual big spenders like the DOD and healthcare. Trying to dunk on democrats for finding wasteful spending from USAID, which in it's nature is meant to be donations / aid to foreign entities struggling, and accounts for 0.7% of the budget, is a waste of f'ing time.

Yes, our government is inefficient as hell, everyone knows it and it's because of both parties. This whole charade is nauseating with everyone sucking off Elon, when this is CLEARLY a conflict of interest. He's benefitting more than anybody. 

Honest question, besides not cancelling his companies’ government contracts, how is he personally benefitting?  When he tanks the economy less people will be able to buy electric cars.

[jross]

6 hours ago, RockLobster said:

The Musk DOGE derelict hackers are collecting full legal names, social security numbers, financial history, detailed medical history, bank account information, etc. and will be able to do whatever they want. Sell to the highest bidder? Absolutely they could. Trade with a hostile foreign country? They could do that. Sell bits and pieces to insurance and medical companies? Yes that, too. (Note that they have no obligation to follow HIPAA regulations and such.) Or some combination of all of them. Or more? Yes. Train AI? Yes, likely. 

Google is the 5th most valuable company in the world. And what do they primarily do? Collect and profit from collecting data. Something the typical US citizen still has no clue about.

The government knows better, and they should be protecting the US citizens rather than trying to put themselves into a position to profit from them.

That concern is understandable.

Personally I am not worried about well paid engineers having access to my personal information.  They cared enough about the mission to leave good situations to focus on benefiting the country.

DOGE is less risk than low paid legacy government workers with preexisting access.  It is less risk than the customer service agents at banks, medical record providers, etc. that are low paid.  Regardless of employee training and audits, it is person ethics that matter.

DOGE shared more problems publicly than the people in place, and transparency is a signal of trust… 

My personal information is already for sale on the black market…  The best I can do for protection is to use a password manager tool that enables complex unique passwords… and monitor my credit / finances.

There should be education and oversight.  I will assume oversight is limited and I fully support this mission regardless.

[jross]

24 minutes ago, 1032004 said:

Honest question, besides not cancelling his companies’ government contracts, how is he personally benefitting?  When he tanks the economy less people will be able to buy electric cars.

Every company Elon is majorly involved with is about helping humanity. This fits well with his mission. 

He is a problem! He is a threat!  /s

Do people hear what they are saying?

[1032004]

37 minutes ago, jross said:

That concern is understandable.

Personally I am not worried about well paid engineers having access to my personal information.  

Black people might be worried about someone having access to their personal information that within the last year has said “they were racist before it was cool”

[Caveira]

9 hours ago, pokemonster said:

This is much ado about nothing until they take on actual big spenders like the DOD and healthcare. Trying to dunk on democrats for finding wasteful spending from USAID, which in it's nature is meant to be donations / aid to foreign entities struggling, and accounts for 0.7% of the budget, is a waste of f'ing time.

Yes, our government is inefficient as hell, everyone knows it and it's because of both parties. This whole charade is nauseating with everyone sucking off Elon, when this is CLEARLY a conflict of interest. He's benefitting more than anybody. 

Pepe le duke makes this point later in this thread.  

lefties heavily criticized Elon for spending 40b+ to buy twitter because he could solve world hunger instead of buying twitter 

now he’s saving the us way more and lefties are criticizing him for it not being enough.   Bla bla it’s only 1% of the budget   

Politics are fascinating.  

[jross]

25 minutes ago, 1032004 said:

Black people might be worried about someone having access to their personal information that within the last year has said “they were racist before it was cool”

Racists already have black people's information.

What have they done with it in this digital age?

Edited 20 hours ago by jross

[Caveira]

34 minutes ago, 1032004 said:

Black people might be worried about someone having access to their personal information that within the last year has said “they were racist before it was cool”

Dude black people cant even get a drivers license or state ID to vote.  Don’t be racist man.   No drivers license limits the ability to steal their PII.

[jross]

31 minutes ago, 1032004 said:

Black people might be worried about someone having access to their personal information that within the last year has said “they were racist before it was cool”

I looked into this.

A 25 year old engineer on DOGE said these things IN 2024!?

• "Normalize Indian hate"
• "Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool."

Yea he shouldn't be on the DOGE team.

Its one thing if it was said 10 years ago but this was yesterday.

There is definitely Indian culture that DOES NOT FIT American culture but that isn't all Indians.  You would not believe the emails my HR group had to send out about behaviors after our explosive VISA growth.

[1032004]

14 minutes ago, jross said:

I looked into this.

A 25 year old engineer on DOGE said these things IN 2024!?

• "Normalize Indian hate"
• "Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool."

Yea he shouldn't be on the DOGE team.

Its one thing if it was said 10 years ago but this was yesterday.

There is definitely Indian culture that DOES NOT FIT American culture but that isn't all Indians.  You would not believe the emails my HR group had to send out about behaviors after our explosive VISA growth.

He resigned, then Elon publicly said he was going to bring him back.

[jross]

2 minutes ago, 1032004 said:

He resigned, then Elon publicly said he was going to bring him back.

I'd have a lot less concern if many years had passed. 

The engineer being 24/25 years old changes things.  

We know what people think versus how they act are often different.  

My bias would be to leave the guy resigned, but the HR context matters.

DOGE is also under public scrutiny and there has been a scary amount of cancel culture for several years.

It turns out Musk took a poll on Twitter, which is central (1% left majority in 2024), and 78% of 385K pollsters said the engineer should be employed.

The public has spoken and a decision made with data.

I am not worried about this guy doing bad stuff with personal information against any demographics.  

My concern is how he behaves to his coworkers.

[1032004]

3 minutes ago, jross said:

Twitter, which is central

Lol

 

 

 

[jross]

1% left courtesy of Pew Research Center and CNN.