Truly evil and incompetent.
It fits his approach to everything.
It's not strictly a far right issue either, the dems are feckless and useless for similar reasons being that any sort of long term consequences does not matter to them.
Please elaborate on this.
The average age for republicans and democrats in the house is 57 or so. The average in the senate is 62(r) and 65(d).
While 57 isn't ancient, it's also not young enough to give a shit about 2070. 62 and 65 year olds certainly don't care about a date so far in the future that their kids will be dead.
What's the evidence they don't care?
It's unfortunate, but modern American conservatism is now defined by hating everything that liberals love.
This is a pity, because there should be a balance between "progress" and "government restraint" -- and that is no longer possible.
It is difficult to reconcile that viewpoint with any path to a functioning democracy.
NPR was routinely sounding the alarm back in 2017-18. Inflation typically runs on a ~3-5 year delay vs executive policies.
The crazy thing with the tariffs is that they’re killing investment in domestic production in the US. Check out this graph of private money going to building factories:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/C307RC1Q027SBEA
Any manufacturing job gains over the next few years will clearly be due to Biden’s efforts. (Note that factory construction spending is somehow down slightly for 2025: the deceleration of the investment trend is unprecedented.)
The topic is extremely polarizing by design, and is impossible to discuss without heated emotions, and therefore is never properly explored.
I have no political party allegiance (partisan politics is a toxic waste dump); I try to work from "first principles", and am more than happy to adjust my understandings when compelling evidence is presented.
To circle back to the OP: these program cuts are being made in the name of efficiency, but they're curiously only applied to programs that the admin is ideologically opposed to and applied in a manner meant to kill rather than trim. I find it interesting that the Military Industrial Complex -- a paragon of pork, fraud, and waste -- will not only be untouched but given even more money then before.
Please stop giving this movement a disguise by continuing to call it conservatism. I know that word has had negative connotations to a large segment of liberals/progressives, but conservatism actually has a bunch of worthwhile values - despite being harmful when taken to the extreme, like everything.
What we're dealing with now is better described as populist reactionary fascism. There is nothing conservative about it beyond that the people supporting it used to align with conservatism but then got really angry because their fundamentalist mantras didn't pan out. The current home of actual conservatism is the Democratic party, who still have values like believing in American institutions and America being a force for good in the world.
Did you read the whole of my comment?
As to who to ascribe as "conservatives", the GOP and its voters are a not entirely unreasonable association.
If you have public communicators for "modern conservatism" that you'd care to share I would be happy to check them out as I'm interested in broadening my understanding of the world.
My first point is that the people calling themselves conservatives are nowhere close to those values - the people who remain truer to conservatism get called "RINOs" and pushed out of the party (part of the large trend of othering).
My main point is that this distinction is important because calling this movement "conservatism" ends up supporting it - it gives them cover as if they are merely advocating for some measured stick-with-traditions cautious reform and reverting recent developments, while they are actually actively lighting the better part of a century's American institutions on fire and dancing around the blazes - NASA, universities, scientific research, relationships with our allies, foreign outreach, USD as a reserve currency, etc. Never mind their rejection of much older American freedoms like freedom of assembly, right to keep and bear arms, etc.
Someone asked, ~"what is about those two groups that you like?"
I had to think about it for a minute, but the reply was ~"neither group is perfect, but it's their actual job to find and present the truth."
I have no idea why it took me so long to realize that this is why authoritarians hate both groups so much.
And let me guess, the cops' job is to protect and serve?
The situation is both more simple and less simple than that.
Journalists and scientists effective top priority is to serve their employers. Sure they want to report the news and shape truth in the same way that cops want to catch real criminals but all of these people are employed by organizations that have other priorities that take precedence.
Authoritarians hate these groups because they're effectively a competing power center. It's as simple as that. You see the same adversarial relationship between secular authoritarians and the clergy in countries with religious populations. It has nothing to do with truth and everything to do with power. Media, religious, and educational institutions power comes from shaping what people believe, truth in your words.
Scientists are a problem to authoritarians simply because they are educated and will likely refute the bs of politicians, let alone authoritarians.
The hubris in the second half of your second sentence is chuckle worthy though.
I don't think the idea of looking outside the US for knowledge would be natural to many people of this generation. I wonder what the effects on our culture will be - it would certainly reduce the pride.
Seeing all this unfold is doing amazing things for our national pride, ironically.
Recession, housing costs, restricted immigration choices coming soon. This has been brewing for years but the US trade war sped up the timeline.
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/high-immigration-is-worseni...
Because, and I say this as one who already decided against the USA in response to Trump's first election, I rather doubt that the new policy of getting in the news for systematically deporting migrants for even minor things — not even offences, theoretically protected things like blogging — is going to put a rather big dent on people willing to go. I mean, right now, I don't even want to visit the US on a holiday, much less live there.
And that's without all the people saying "sure, you get paid 3x on paper, but all of it goes on rent and health insurance that doesn't actually pay out when you need it" that also makes it seem a lot less interesting.
A boring mansion, with a boring lawn, in a boring, gated community? -- and all that while the other neighbourhoods are on fire. But at least you can buy $700 sneakers and leave the big garage in style, to work your ass off with a job pretending to "better the world" -- maybe have one or two weeks to fill your social media account with pictures already taken by the millions (you might as well use generative AI).
Congrats to your final destination: hell.
Yes, there will be occasions where valuable research is funded by the state. It doesn't follow that this is the only way to fund research. Arguments can be made for either case. Depending on your ideological background you may find some of them amenable. Pragmatism may also play a role. However, presentations like this are completely divorced from reason.
You’re rejecting arguments because of ideology, how convenient.
You're being generous. The current administration has no ideology. The cuts are due to partisanship, and they have selected all of science as their political enemies.
Much of the research impacted by cuts is not the type that private industry has typically conducted because it can’t be performed with a specific profitable result in mind. It’s the kind of research that had wound up beneficial in the long run indirectly due to incidental discoveries and unexpected connections.
So there’s a decent chance that this kind of research largely just won’t happen any more, which is a net negative for everybody. Numerous advancements will either never happen or instead occur at the hand of other developed countries’ research apparatuses.
Down thread, you'll find others suggesting that defense spending should be cut. It isn't hard to imagine nor would you need to look far to find a hawkish interventionist. These communities will assure us that defense spending is vital, absolutely vital not only to our own well-being, but to support the globalized trading system as well.
Choose a topic. Pick a niche. Under every rock from K Street to Capitol Hill, you will find a bureaucrat, politician or lobbyist to justify more spending. Some may like to spend more here and less there. Others might like to spend more everywhere. Almost all of them will have particular issues for which spending cuts are beyond consideration.
>...research that had wound up beneficial in the long run indirectly due to incidental discoveries and unexpected connections.
This is a good point. What is missing here, are the missed opportunities in the private sector, which would have also been, unexpected. We don't know the things which were not built. We do not know what all of those scientists and engineers may have discovered or built, had they not been allocated into government funded research. For me, this is a problem with the post-hoc rationalizations.
It’s quite likely that many of them are actually vital, with long term costs outstripping short term savings from cuts to an enormous degree. Nobody is doing the math to figure this out, though. The cuts aren’t calculated, but instead wide and largely blind. Some kind of major fallout is unavoidable when operating in such a manner.
In reality the deepest savings to be had are probably in doing things like cracking down on endless chains of government subcontracting, ousting the numerous middlemen pocketing money the whole way, and cutting places where excess clearly leads to little or no return. That’s a lot of work and takes time, effort, and expertise and doesn’t make a voterbase-placating big media splash though, and so there’s no chance of that happening.
What is the goal of cutting government spending? Most would say it is to balance the Federal budget. The controlling party is planning to do the opposite, so the argument kind of falls apart.
Balancing the budget is useful insofar as it reduces the resources that will need to be drained out of the economy in the future to pay interest on our growing debt (currently 11% of all Federal spending).
You're fractionally engaging in the broken windows fallacy.
Every time we pay for something that wouldn't have got done otherwise it comes at our expense.
That's not to say that some of these things aren't worth doing. But there are a whole great many things the feds spend money on that aren't worth doing.
If two dollars go to invading some stupid sandbox and one dollar goes to Nasa and the NASA dollar pays back a buck fiddy we're half a dollar poorer at the end of the day.
That's not remotely how this works. By this logic, wars are actually free since the money spent goes to defense contractors who use it to buy things and hire employees. We can have an unlimited military budget with no negative repercussions!
As the sibling commenter pointed out, you're engaging in a classic economic fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
To help you avoid this in the future, remember that "the real economy is not money, it is goods & services". Any government spending necessarily takes goods and services out of the real economy and allocates them towards things the government wants done. Some of those things might have a positive ROI, but with government spending there's absolutely no guarantee of that since they're getting those resources through taxes, not through voluntary economic transactions.
Government has no mechanism to ensure the money it spends is on things that have a positive ROI, since the money they spend is obtained by force, not by voluntary transactions.
Sure they do, elections.
This is the key, and it has nothing to do with being private or public. You have brought that bias into the discussion.
It has everything to do with being public or private. Private companies exist to generate a positive ROI; that's literally their whole purpose. Companies with high ROIs attract massive investment and expand, companies with low or negative ROIs cease to exist. It's a self-optimizing system.
Government programs have no concern for ROI and that's precisely the problem; they just siphon more resources out of the private sector and keep going regardless of whether there's any return or not.
You have inserted your personal bias and declared it a fact. Many government programs have ended. Many programs have very specific concern for ROI. Government has an ROI timeline lasting generation-to-generation (see: moon landing, interstate, quantum investments), a company has a timeline lasting quarter-to-quarter (see: SEC filings).
Different entities can also measure ROI differently. To you ROI means positive net income and growth. It could mean patent or litigation protection for a large company.
You don't cut government budgets because it's intrinsically righteous, you do it to save money that you can then spend on other things. You could cut the NASA budget to zero and it wouldn't get us out of our current fiscal hole.
And it is incontrovertible from any reading of the history that government support is the reason we have modern air travel, the internet, and GPS, among many other facets of modern life. There is no compelling argument I've heard that the private sector can or would develop such things on their own, unless you're arguing that we should be completely reliant on the occasional eccentric billionaire having an interest in something scientific and setting up a foundation.
This will not work because fundamental research is high risk, and even if it is successful it takes decades to turn into profit. No lender or investor is going to finance that kind of pipeline given the opportunity cost; the returns are just not high enough.
So even completely eliminating these agencies wouldn't put a dent in the US government's deficit. But doing so would be sighted, because these agencies and programs also have a long-term return on investment. They are economic wealth generators, not money-spenders, and they are being cut.
So there are two reasons that this debate has clearly nothing to do with cutting spending. This is simply factual. Why do you and others keep claiming it does? Especially when the Trump administration is proposing a new budget that cuts all of these things and also greatly increases the US debt?
The federal budget is not hard to balance, and there are basically three paths: (a) raise taxes, especially on the rich, (b) cut defense spending, (c) cut Medicare and Social Security spending.
I just wish we could have the actual argument. If you do not like new medicines, clean water, space travel, saving millions of lives in Africa from HIV, then say so, and let's have that debate! But can we stop pretending it is about fiscal conservation?
Well first and foremost to these people:
https://pepfar.impactcounter.com/ https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/children-die-after-usaid-... https://www.bu.edu/sph/news/articles/2025/tracking-anticipat... https://www.npr.org/2025/05/28/nx-s1-5413322/aid-groups-say-... https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01191-z
Despite becoming insular and retreating to being a hermit nation, already outrageous military spending is increasing by $100B+. Add a few trillion in tax cuts for the mega rich.
In the context of those things, dismissing the harm to NASA, with its relatively tiny budget, seems absolutely perverse.
Keep in mind, NASA accounts for ~0.4% of the national budget. We're not saving a ton of money here, just killing expertise and ceding space excellence to other countries
Trump has a massive ego and I would have expected him to want the biggest rockets, and to pain them gold.
If he did then I would denounce him for spending money on space when America has trillions of debt.
I don't disagree with him on everything he says just because he said it.
So, with space, my honest take is that it was all just a Cold War thing all along. The space race never was about science and exploration, it was always about rocketry for making more devastating missiles. Sure, Voyager went somewhere, but it was all a cover.
It seems to me that China and India are doing space science things now. They can get on with it. We are never going to Mars or the moon to live, earth is our home, and always will be.
You can see this clearly in certain individuals with obvious narcissistic personality disorder where withdrawal of approval results in an insanely irrational tantrum where they basically revert to toddler-level psychology. If you're like "wait, is this a grown man/woman?" the answer is yes -- but it's one having a "drug" withdrawal fit.
Unfortunately this often makes narcissists very successful at social climbing. They're hyper-motivated to advance because that's how you get the next fix.
There's some evidence that neglectful or abusive parenting during certain developmental phases might predispose one to it, basically creating a very deep emotional imprint of "you aren't good enough and must constantly earn love." There's probably more to it than that but I could see that being a factor. For adults there's probably also an ideology / belief system dimension.
If you read that the Secretary of Defense of Turkey declined to commit to obeying court orders, you'd call it authoritarianism.
If you read about Viktor Orban sending actual troops rather than police to a city because of a flimsy pretext, you'd call it authoritarianism.
It's happening here, and it's real. It isn't consolidated yet, but it's pretty obviously what they want.
Nope, that's just your brain on right wing propaganda. Nothing of the sort has happened to justify throwing away the rule of law as this administration is doing. It is like murdering someone because you're annoyed that they chew with their mouth open, just an absolutely, wildly disproportionate response to what has happened. Coincidentally (to riff on the GP) it is almost word-for-word the propaganda Orban used in the mid 2010s to consolidate his authoritarian rule of Hungary.
[0] https://apnews.com/article/chicago-migrants-black-latino-bid...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/07/nyregion/adams-migrants-d...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/investigations/an-american-education...
[4] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/02/15/how-american...
Here I was expecting data about how all these illegal immigrants are causing crimes everywhere at higher rates than americans, or how many cats and dogs they've eaten but I guess there's no actual evidence of a crisis.
You know what illegal immigrants do?
Work. For shitty wages.
You know what that does?
Boosts the US' labor force and economy, which buffers the declining fertility rate [0].
The fact that anti-immigration (of any sort) folks never think beyond first-effects is mind boggling. Illegal immigration causes some problems; it also solves others.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_terr...
I'm also not sure we see the math the same way.
Illegal immigrant = working, not consuming social services (outside of guaranteed entitlements like EMTALA), paying payroll and sales taxes
Tax cuts = ??
You think COVID stimulus would have made people understand that flooding more money into a system with limited supply capacity will just lead to price inflation.
The way to address quality of life for parents and promote having children is to decrease the economic cost of doing so.
PS: Bolding actual americans made me laugh. Actual Americans are anyone who works hard in this country.
https://timesofsandiego.com/military/2025/06/12/afghani-who-...
The guy worked with the US in Afghanistan. Do you not think he has a real case here? He'll get killed if they send him back.
Illegal immigration = the difference between legal immigration supply and demand for immigration (both external and domestic)
And the rioting / nativist arguments are political theater to score points.
It's a fact that most illegal immigrants don't commit crimes or riot, in the same way that most people in general don't. But distorting frequency and total count has long been a popular pathos argument.
Similarly, enculturation and assimilation is a broader topic than a flag. And more over, the US explicitly and unambiguously grants freedom of expression as a right (all persons in America, not just citizens). So saying "I hate this country; I support ____" is and has always been an option as an American.
The effects you describe have higher order effects as well that can indeed have negative effects. Not saying republicans would give a crap about them, but they are undeniable. For wages developments and housing prices, topics that fundamentally influence basic needs very much in contrast to GDP growths, even if there are positive side effects as well.
I think compared to the EU these immigrants can only be a net positive because people are forced to ultimately care for themselves.
Putting aside the moral qualms about underpaying someone for hard, physical work, it's hard to argue that the American economy (and the average American) loses more than it gains from cheaper labor.
Housing would be a clusterfuck without illegal immigration, so I'm also hesitant to draw that connection too boldly. Would stopping all illegal immigration ease prices? A bit. Would it fix an undersupplied housing market and overconsolidated rental market that's driving price inceases? No.
that's a lie.
there were fewer illegal immigrants in 2022 (under Biden) then in 2018 (under Trump) [0]
[0] https://ohss.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/2024-06/2024_0418_o...
Authoritarianism means oppressing the masses, having an undemocratic government and acting against the will of the people. It happens in Venezuela. It happens in Turkey. It happens in Hungary. It doesn't happen in the US.
If anything, what is happening in the US is exactly the opposite: Trump, who won the popular vote, therefore a representative of the oppressed majority, is waging a war against their oppression (as masses seems it) by the authoritarian deep state.
If I go to any American factory right now and ask random blue-collar workers how they feel about, for example, public NASA's commitment to "unity, diversity and inclusion in workforce recruitment, hiring, training and management", what will be their average position on this question?
So if we try to be fair with terms, here it is quite obvious on which side we have an authoritarian institution, whose views are shared only by a narrow group of the elite and those sections of the population that receive money or are otherwise influenced by the authoritarian government, and which side is fighting against those authoritarianism
You should learn more about the electoral system under authoritarianism. In any free election, Orban or Erdogan have no chance.
Heck, Orban was already prime minister in 1998 before the current stint, similar to Trump.
Orban and Erdogan do win elections, but the playing field is far from level.
In both Hungary and Turkey, the judiciary has been systematically brought under the control of the ruling party. Independent courts are a cornerstone of democracy because they ensure that laws are applied fairly and check the power of the executive. When this independence disappears, so does accountability. Free press is another essential pillar. In these regimes, the government or its allies own or dominate most media outlets. Critical voices are marginalized, harassed etc. As a result, voters are often exposed to only one narrative, the government’s making truly informed choice nearly impossible. NGOs, academic institutions, and opposition are often harassed, defunded, or labeled as enemies of the state. This further reduces checks on power and narrows the public discourse. Gerrymandering, changing election laws, and limiting opposition access to media or funding are common tactics. Even if voting itself is not rigged, the entire process leading up to it is skewed.
So when you say "in any free election, Orban or Erdogan have no chance" you're implying the elections are genuinely free and competitive. They are not. These leaders win not because they represent the will of a fully informed and free electorate, but because they control the information environment, the rules, and institutions that should hold them in check. That’s not democracy, it’s authoritarianism dressed in democratic clothing.
We have an undemocrstic government. Thousands of polling stations have shut down since the gutting of the Voting Rights Act. Voter rolls have been purged in key swing states. As a result of these things millions of people were unable to vote. Trump has unilaterally rescinded monies appropriated by Congress and duly signed into law. That alone is authoritarian.
…therefore a representative of the oppressed majority, is waging a war against their oppression (as masses seems it) by the authoritarian deep state.
Only a delusional person can possibly believe this. There is no oppressed majority in the U.S.
By similizing the American electoral system to those in authoritarian countries, you trivialize the suffering of people oppressed and often physically exterminated by authoritarian regimes around the world. Millions? Seriously? Try talking to any refugee from an authoritarian country about this. Just please be as polite as possible and choose a smaller person, I'm afraid that because of your extremely offensive position towards their suffering, they may try to cause you physical harm.
>There is no oppressed majority in the U.S.
Of course not, the US seems to be a fairly authoritarian-free country. It's just that if we assume that the US has these tendencies and try to be fair with the terms, it is quite obvious from whom they come, and against which majority the attempts at oppression are directed.
You don't get to ignore due process just because crimes are alleged. That's the whole fucking point of due process - to ascertain exactly what has happened and not just take some thug's word for it when they want to boost their arrest numbers.
There’s a spectrum of authoritarianism. Not all instantiations involve mass murder or other forms of mass suffering.
Your argument boils down to: others have it worse therefore you have no right to complain.
Consider that if we don’t stand up now and complain now that the foundation will be set for the infliction of mass suffering. Your reasoning is quite bad.
This much is accurate.
Once again, how would this be described in the press if it were another country:
"Secretary for the Homeland said 'We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city'"
And then had a sitting Senator thrown out of the room and handcuffed.
Yeah, that's authoritarianism.
This is an absolutely wild way of framing what's happening. The oppressors trying to paint themselves as the oppressed. Who exactly are "the right" oppressed by, and how exactly are they being oppressed? Immigrants? Gays and Transsexuals? Science researchers? DEI HR departments? Because that's who they seem to be going after. These guys historically have not been oppressors.
What's happening in the US may not be authoritarianism, but it is definitely a powerful group, now that they are in power, inflicting cruelty against many smaller, weaker groups who cannot fight back.
Countries have laws that govern how they are nominally meant to operate.
When the ruler of a country breaks the laws that are supposed to constrain his behavior, and faces no consequences, what do you call that?
For the fight against terrorism or any other shit de jours that caused the current outrage.
So now any reference to laws sound hollow. It doesn't mean anything. What mattered is what governments used their power for.
Are you arguing that the Cold War being the driver of our investment into space invalidates further attempts to explore it?
Also, as per the debt, NASA's is a fraction of the military budget, and the current budget proposal would increase the debt further, so any argument for decreasing science funding in the name of fiscal responsibility rings hollow.
Sure, but he has to weigh the cost of funding intellectual elites against the benefit of what they can make for him. His base wants smaller government and doesn't want intellectuals. So, the move is to defund NASA and fund a military parade on his birthday. This undermines the future, but the future past 3.5 years is not his problem.
Senile or not, he is most definitely in charge of the chaos.
Surely you understand that narcissism doesn’t somehow exclude authoritarianism? Rather the opposite, right?
> I don't disagree with him on everything he says just because he said it.
At this point, doing so is a better strategy than deferring judgement, while even more "shit" continues to "flood the zone". I'm a libertarian, and I gave this guy a benefit of the doubt for far too long. When looked at from a non-partisan view, all of his policies have been somewhere from neutral to bad to terrible for America. Referencing real problems and frustrations, yes. But completely ineffective or even self-defeating for actually helping with those problems.
> So, with space, my honest take is that it was all just a Cold War thing all along
> It seems to me that China and India are doing space science things now. They can get on with it
So you're content to just give up on the current cold war then? Throw in the towel and hand world leadership to China? Why?
To just blatantly ignore the decades of widely documented science NASA has done or contributed to is wild. I understand it raises your taxes by 0.5%, but really?? NASA is responsible for a significant portion of what we know about space and our neighboring planets, and that's if you ignore the amount of research and discoveries they've made about Earth, the planet that "always will be" our home.
Even if you ignore the actual scientific discovers, NASA and the space race are (partially or) directly responsible for inventions that benefit your everyday life. CT Scans, improved insulin pumps, scratch-resistant lenses, baby formula, memory foam, etc. You can find a collection of their contributions to your life here[0], though the page seems broken for me.
In 2021, for every dollar we put into NASA, it generated ~$3 in economic value. To say all NASA does is build rockets is just incorrect, NASA's benefit comes from the science they actively do with satellites, telescopes, probes, rovers, etc.
> Sure, Voyager went somewhere, but it was all a cover.
Past a small "Trajectory Correction Maneuver" thruster (which was fired only in 2017 and then 1980 before that), Voyager 1 isn't a rocket or have any other military impact. I'd happily argue the Voyager program is one of the greats feats of human achievement in history. It's in interstellar space for crying out loud!
Frankly, why even call yourself a hacker if you're anti-scientific progress and anti-technology?
I figured that was obvious after Trump and Obama were all buddy-buddy at Carter's funeral.
I mean, typically you don't have a friendly relationship with someone you think is ending democracy in your country.
I think you should go up this comment thread and read this[0], it's not the words of Trump but the actions his administration take, they are authoritarian, it's clear to most people outside of the USA with a decent education.
Cynicism about "political mudslinging" as if these actions are all normal and could be taken by any administration, and would be condemned anyway by their opposing side is exactly the shift in Overton Window which legitimises authoritarian overtakes.
Please do read about any authoritarian rise to power in democratic countries in the last 100 years, even better if you read about "competitive authoritarianism" to understand why it might just so be this time is a little different...
Looks like those dividends are finally starting to pay out.
What's your point?
You're defacto not a wannabe dictator because you did anything ever that wasn't dictator-y?
That seems like a low bar.
Which is why when Obama and Trump looked like they were best friends, that action spoke way louder than Obama's words.
Please tell me this isn't the only data point you're basing your conclusion on.
It's social protocol that funeral attendees treat each other in a civil manner, even if they intensely dislike each other. I'm autistic, but even I know that social rule.
Obama had made his comments about "wannabe dictator" only a week or so earlier.
Actions speak louder than words.
Obama knows this; he's been on the receiving of Trump's petty vindictiveness too many times to count. And he could just as easily be placating Trump so that he doesn't issue an executive order to, say, require every publicly-funded university in the US to offer a "men's rights studies" major, simply out of spite.
And in reality he’s happy to have Trump as a friend and isn’t really worried about a dictatorship?
We got exactly what we voted for — worldwide tariffs, sending the military to round up migrants, a military parade with tanks in DC, antivax boards — all of these things he talked about before election. Everything happening now with the dismantling of science programs and universities is exactly what Americans voted for.
Yes, just under half the voters will say they didn't vote for him. But more people did, and that's how democracy works.
After the vote it's easy for people to blame the media, or to claim that he's doing things they didn't vote for. It's easy to just say "I'm not responsible for this".
But democracy means the people vote. The winner is the ones with the most votes. If you voted wrong, that's on you, and you need to understand that, and acknowledge it. Only by taking responsibility can you understand the power you wield, and maybe wield it more carefully in the future.
And no, none of the things he's found are a surprise. His character is no secret. His approach to politics is no secret. His policies are no secret. His willingness to grift is no secret.
A plurality of those who voted chose him. Those that didn't vote decided he deserved half their vote.
In truth I don't think it's stupid to say "Americans want this". Moderate Republicans are scared of being primaried. They know what their constituents want.
I don't think all Americans want this. But I think a lot of them do. No one is predicting a Blue senate in 2 years. Those red seats are safe. Because deep down a big chunk of America is happy with this.
This is the very essence of democracy. A govt of the people, voted by the people. Look at the govt. It's a mirror of the people who got them there, and keep them there.
I get this is frustrating if you are a minority voter. Minorities get stomped on by majorities- that's the very core of democracy.
So forgive me, but at least for 2 years we need to keep saying it - you voted for this. Because until lots of voters figure out just how responsible they are, they're not going to change. If you voted for this, take some responsibility.
Edit: I see you're getting down voted. I disagree either that too. Your point is coherent and a common part of this conversation. Voting here is about conversation, not agreement.
1. And why would voting for Trump get that?
2. It didn't happen either way
3. Stupidity is not an acceptable excuse
4. You vote for a person not a specific policy
You're not wrong as general rule of thumb imo, or in a straight sense of reality, but tell that to the evangelicals who spend their time slandering abortion.
However in this case you're presenting a false equivalency. Yes, there were issues with BLM. the people got out of control. But that's not authoritarianism- if anything it was a lack of authority with caused dome of those problems.
What you see with protests now is those with authority over-using that authority and wielding it as a weapon against the public.
And I'm not sure COVID lock downs are a useful measure of anything. It was a unprecedented event and countries all over the world had all manner of restrictions, lock downs, and so on. Millions of people died, over a million Americans. It's always going to be easy in hindsight to blame those in authority for doing too much, or too little, too fast or too slow.
Unlike most places, the US politicized the response, and even within the US the death rates varied from one state to the next. Anthropologists will be disecting covid data for generations to try and determine which approach was best.
For example At the first hint of a scandal democrats get pushed from office, whereas we've had plenty of Republicans continue in office despite obvious wrong doing etc.
So no, I don't think the next president would behave in the same way - there are fundamental differences in the way the parties are behaving.
Why do you think it's appropriate to say "Americans want..." and "We got exactly what we voted for..." when only 32% of Americans voted for Trump?
But yes, a big part of not voting people decided to not vote. If one decides to not vote one accepts the outcome and it it was know that the outcome would be Trump, and that Trump (or the people around him) would be more prepared and more unhinged than in the first term.
Take the derivative of this chart, you see the boomer decline is accelerating to a crescendo. They're about to experience a lot of loss in their lives. They already are. I think their impending doom has a lot to do with what's going on now, given their generation is and has been in charge for the past many decades. If you know you're not going to live to see the next decade, and you're in charge of the whole world, what would you do? What wouldn't you do?
The future is going to be interesting. We have a whole generation of millennials and genx who have had to live in the shadow of boomers for decades, and now that it's fading we're not ready for the spotlight. The boomer generation has been in charge since 1993. And yeah, I had to look it up but Obama is a boomer as well, albeit on the younger side. But we're expect to take over this whole ship pretty quickly, within the next decade or so. Personally I don't feel ready at 40 years old.
Exactly. The past 163 days have only been about hurting people and cutting things down. There's no hopeful or optimistic rhetoric. Its just hate after hate after hate and blame.
You cannot build a great country on this. But you most certainly can tear one down.
Same choice faces everyone but there are no Lincolns around. Its a nation of hustlers, podcasters and youtubers who dont really fight for anything other than views, upvotes and likes.
https://www.planetary.org/articles/nasa-2026-budget-proposal... ("NASA's disastrous 2026 budget proposal in seven charts")
It should be SpaceX, Rocket Lab, and Blue Origin, and maybe soon Stoke Space.
Boeing has been on the same path to decline as old GE was for decades.
Single vendor commercial rockets are a recent (2000s) invention.
Using your analogy, if I do hire a contractor I'll talk with them a lot about what they're going to do and make sure it's generally in line with what I want, but they're generating most of the ideas and just incorporating what I say.
There were instances where NASA engineers brought up issues with designs and were told it wasn’t their role to drive the design. The concept of CCP was they were buying a ride, not a rocket. Just like you don’t tell Airbus what engine they should use when you buy a plane ticket.
* IMO the goal of CCP was to find a mechanism to informally circumvent many requirements. NASA could always waive requirements but I don’t think many people were willing to sign on the dotted line even if they disagreed with the requirements. CCP unburdens them from the same requirements while also allowing them to avoid full responsibility for the decision. (More charitably, it also allowed them to avoid some political costs, like having to spread projects across multiple political areas to avoid funding cuts.)
Again, you don't want two different organizations trying to design one thing.
I personally think we need at least a second reliable launch provider, probably rocket lab, just for redundancy.
What are you saying?
Where we see waste in government is in big, entrenched, dinosaurs where competition is very difficult and/or limited. What we need is a little more free market capitalism in those areas. Greed is not the driver of waste imo, incompetence is a far bigger contributor.
If you'd like to make tangible arguments instead of vaguely ranting against capitalism then I'm all ears.
Edit: also the multi-billion dollar compensation package was in stock, so it didn't actually waste any money
Edit 2: by the way you're still dodging my original legitimate question about what the government has ever actually built without private contractors. There are real answers to that question and if you are such a big proponent of the government building things themselves maybe you should know something about them.
I never said that the government should never use private contractors (always need janitorial services), but when tax dollars are being used to fund technology and research, the government should never cede ownership of those outputs to private business.
Idk, call me crazy but I saw that post and never believed it would actually happen. Call me when something of that magnitude does.
No tweets as sources.
Space X is literally the best in commercial space right now and its not even close, and they already have starlink which basically cash cow that if somehow US cut off spacex
they would just fine, they lost funding sure but they would happy to take foreign customer
The James Webb Space Telescope has performed beyond expectations, and is making fundamental discoveries about the history of the Universe and the properties of planets outside our Solar System. NASA has had a string of highly successful scientific missions.
Yet the Trump administration is proposing to completely gut NASA's science funding. If these cuts go through, there basically will be no new NASA scientific missions. It's game over for astrophysics and planetary science in the US.
Worth watching the whole interview ~1 hour.
[0] Jared Isaacman: What went wrong at NASA | The All-In Interview https://youtu.be/6YdOjoaQTOQ?si=FUeL8mJ6LwHwO_B4&t=1275
The concept of a "DOGE" would be wonderful if it actually focused on efficiency of government spending rather than cover to destroy all ideological enemies.
It's been positioned as "Affirmative Action 2.0" by its detractors, and that re-branding is clearly effective as you have been receptive to it.
Now I could be wrong, and there could be cases where it has functioned as you suggest. I'm willing to be corrected if compelling evidence is shown. Are you willing to do the same?
If the proposed budget cuts go through, NASA's scientific research will be eviscerated. Nearly every planned telescope will be canceled. Most grants for students, postdocs and professors - the people analyzing the data from NASA's missions - will be cut.
We're talking the end of astrophysics and planetary science in the United States. It will just cease to exist.
> The New Horizons spacecraft [...] reached Pluto in 2016 and is currently exploring other distant features of the system [...]. Keeping it running today by receiving its transmitted data and making sure it remains on course costs about $14.7 million a year, or less than 2% of its total price tag.
Does anyone know why this would be so expensive? A slice of Deep Space Network time must be expensive but it still sounds like an outrageous figure to me.
You need people for mission operations, to calibrate the data, and to do science with the data. You need access to the Deep Space Network. Beyond that, there is outreach.
This can easily come to several million dollars a year. It's a tiny fraction of what we pay on completely meaningless stuff. More is spent on the average US Congressional race every two years, and there are 435 of those. Surely we can spend this much to keep one of humanity's most distant spacecraft working.
You would be surprised how much science can be done with an old mission like this, both with the data they already have on hand and with new data. It looks like they have several dozen scientists working on the project (not all necessarily full time).
In any case, putting this into perspective, I don't see how it could be a waste to spend $14.7 million / year to keep one of the most distant probes humanity has sent out into space working.
duxup•8mo ago
Actual policy: "America... whatever..."
The scale of anti-science policies is historic in their scale and even breadth of topics.
pixl97•8mo ago
whatshisface•8mo ago
vkou•8mo ago
philipov•8mo ago
sorokod•8mo ago
The murders are the visible symptoms of the various factions fighting each other.
FuriouslyAdrift•7mo ago
pixl97•8mo ago
jasonwatkinspdx•7mo ago
The FSB secure the oligarchs, and prevent them from being prosecuted for siphoning off billions from the Russian economy. These get distributed down through to FSB leadership as bribes. The whole thing stays loyal to whatever leadership coalition keeps it going. Putin has proved quite good at that.
This arrangement is also underscored by a sort of modern descendent of Chekism. There's an ideological component besides all the corrupt money making.
mistrial9•8mo ago
exe34•8mo ago
dyauspitr•8mo ago
reginald78•8mo ago
exe34•7mo ago
nashashmi•8mo ago
Actual Words: None of this stuff is Great.
Sentiment: "I don't understand all this stuff. Just cancel it! We don't need it."
Intralexical•7mo ago
When Trump says "America First" or "Leftists hate our country", what he really means is himself. He's not really lying; "America", in that context, is just an extension of his own ego. Likewise when Putin talks about the "Russian state" or "Russian world", that's something that he conceptualizes as an extension of his own physical body. The channels run by Vlad Vexler on YouTube have an accessible discussion of some of this if you're more interested.
It's not that he wants to hurt federal workers, set back science, or destroy US state capacity. But he does so anyway, because his concept of "America" is one that stops at his own ego. Other people aren't really real to him.