No one should have the wealth he does. We sneer that people look up to him for spending a small part of his wealth to benefit others when he should not have enough money to fund $500 million science projects.
I’d like people to sneer and get angry over the fact that he does have the money. In Les Miserables when the rich man gave the begger a penny the bishop says, “Look at monsieur buying a penny’s worth of paradise.”
Evidently I disagree. Apparently not enough people are angry enough. We elected a man who accepted $30 billion in brides the day before his inauguration and his supporters don’t care.
If you want to make an argument against billionaires, you should start by being numerate.
A billion and a million (the actual number for inauguration donations) are very different numbers, and if you mix the two up accidentally, it mean your world model is horrifically broken. One is plausible, one is absurd in this context.
A lot of people are going to sneer at this because they like seeing rich tech people fail, but I think it’s great that he’s trying something.
It is much more efficient for society in the form of its government to fund research. We should not leave it up to rich people to decide whether or not research is conducted.
Until this administration funds were spent at the behest of Congress and allocated through procedures that were set up. There is no evidence of widespread misuse of those funds. Of course having an asshole concentrate power in themselves will lead to bad governance.
There are no instances in the history of the world where the wealthy, out of the goodness of their hearts, have solved hunger, childhood education, funded research programs at scale, provided safe drinking water, etc. These things are handled by government. Government is far more efficient at this than hoping rich people act in the public’s best interest.
However, there is a plethora of instances where the wealthy have addressed these issues, not out of the goodness of their hearts, but in search of revenue.
Rich people didn’t feed the poor. They didn’t provide universal k-12 education. They didn’t fund enough universities to provide higher education for the masses. They didn’t provide clean water. They didn’t get rid of smog or acid rain. They didn’t band together to start space research or build the highway system.
But there are a few instances where a rich person spent a trivial amount of their wealth to fund a project or two in the interest of humanity.
Mass hunger was solved by government. Not charities. There are instances where charity fed someone but the issue was solved when government did something. Nothing works better at scale than good governance.
Government's ability to publicly fund research is directly related to how much it can collect in taxes.
With wealth being hoarded by individuals at unprecedented rates and taxes lower than they've been at almost any time in the country's history, there has certainly been a shift away from public research toward private research.
Is it? Is government really structured to do this funding in an efficient manner? Or do we end up with atrociously useless investments that are made as vehicles for delivery of pork barrel spending?
The top .1% fund very little research. Therefore it is much more efficient for society in the form of government to fund research. We should not rely on the benevolence of a few rich assholes to have research programs.
I wasn't addressing the question of quantity of funding, but rather the efficiency of the funding. Is the research valuable, or is it just pretend-value from spending intended as pork? A lot of government funded research is of that kind. More generally: the market has a way of evaluating research value (did it lead to profit) while the government's actions have no reality check. They depend on the wisdom of officials who inevitably have conflicts of interest.
Simply determining the value of something is difficult. This is a big part of why communism didn't work -- it's impossible for central planners, however wise, to figure out. The communists piggybacked on price signals from other countries but that's not a great substitute for ones own market generating the price signals.
Absent price signals, determinations of value inevitably get corrupted by other interests. Look at the long, sorry history of NASA's manned space program. Value there has become "does this deliver $$$ to my district".
My dad worked on Mercury and Apollo. The first put men in space and the second put men on the moon. There was a shit ton of spin offs from this. We got a step up on GPS because some grad students were saying what if after recording Sputnik ephemerides.
Research doesn't work by central planning. Grants to researchers is competitive. There's corruption not because of the scientific method but rather because of the human condition.
Your view of this is very politicized. I'm done here.
The manned space program was entirely political, so complaining about politicization is hilarious.
Apollo was a national potlatch. It was "look how rich and successful capitalism is; we can put 4% of the federal budget into a pile and set it on fire, we're so good." Spinoffs are an unjustifiable myth. To the extent we can know, they'd have occurred anyway (ICs, for example). The most important thing to remember about Apollo is we didn't go back, which is clear evidence it wasn't needed. But to a true space fan, like a true communist, space programs can never fail, they can only be failed.
Was it accurate or not? Who cares if the presentstion was to your liking? The question is whether or not its claims are accurate. You sound like the Feynman Bros she talks about.
It's amazing how much "galaxy brain 4d chess" these musk huffers play with themselves to justify the stupidity.
"Uh, no, you don't see the brilliance! He's advocating for deorbiting the ISS while calling astronauts retarded to trick people into keeping the ISS up and running!"
SMDH.
You don't have to justify his every thought. The simplest answer is typically the right one.
So the simplest answer is that he is giving up immediate recurring transport revenue to the existing station for a chance at launch contracts for a future station that may or may not be built?
Quite the galaxy brained idea indeed. Keep in mind however that the galaxy is mostly vacuum.
> They are unelected,
So are 2.5 million other employees and advisors in government.
The 2.5 million you speak of operate within agencies whose mandates have been given by Congress and their actions are subject to judicial reciew. There is no Comgressional mandate for DOGE. They are the rogue agency people like you spent years worrying about.
DOGE is an agency, it took over the digital services agency that existed before.[1]. Obama had created the original agency, not Congress, so Trump had the ability to change it.
"The United States Digital Service is hereby publicly renamed as the United States DOGE Service (USDS) and shall be established in the Executive Office of the President."
And I’m not sure why you think a “congressional mandate” is required for the executive to do things, it’s not. Especially for an agency that a former President created on his own.
As for data access, my understanding is the digital services agency already had data access to other agencies through pre-existing agreements (it goes back to the original mandate to fix the Obamacare website which required pulling data from numerous databases).
The mandate and personnel of the Digital Service are completely different from DOGE, so they are effectively different things. Renaming an existing one was just an administrative shortcut taken by an executive that clearly does not care for the spirit or the letter of any law (as stated by the president himself in his infamous tweet).
As you are well aware Washington DC isn’t big on following “the spirit of the law” and is a big fan on quick workarounds for the bureaucracy that slows things to a crawl.
I give credit to Trump and Musk for playing the DC game like professional politicians.
It’s pretty clear you can’t get anything done in DC without it.
There is. It was given during Obama. You might not like it, but it looks like DOGE is likely to be completely legal and working within the frameworks of the government.
Say something like "hey, no, that law is unconstititional!".
What is the purpose of having cabinet secretaries swear an oath to defend the Constitution if the President has the sole authority to decide what this means?
