[trhway]

>We're looking at the US wilfully letting go of the possibiility of remaining the most powerful nation in the world.

many here see it way (me too, though i'm well aware that many times whenever i was critical of Musk, he happened to be right, and in this case - Musk is naturally not anti-science guy, so i'd guess there must be some other reason for him doing that which i'm just not able to see).

I wonder whether somebody from the opposing side can provide a reasonable logical explanation for the Musk/Trump actions. In particular what is the expected state near, mid, and longterm and how the current actions are supposed to result in it. It would be great to have it with some ballpark estimates.

[20after4]

Their actions are pretty clearly to consolidate power, replace everyone with loyalists, cut taxes on the rich, deport and depopulate the country and transfer assets to their associates. Once the economy is tanked they can go on a buying spree and pick up all sorts of private assets for bargain price.

[cancerhacker]

I keep thinking about musks group having all this financial data (that his business competitors do not!) and feeding it into a model to find signal he can use to further his empire / investments. I also see his stated intention to make the “one app to rule them all” (for govt ID, banking, etc) as another route to the same data. His payments to / cleaving to trump really accelerated his underlying goal.

[majormajor]

Musk is interested in money and power. Not science.

His interest in money has led him to beliefs that he gets the most money if he cuts as aggressively as possible and pushes others to do as much as they can for as little as they will take. "Efficiency" to protect him from things like taxes or regulation, at the expense of anyone else's desire to not be cut to the bone.

And he's getting power by making a trade - he gets Republican approval by cutting a Federal workforce that right-wingers have long complained about. In exchange they give him power. So even if those cuts don't make a material dent on the national budget or debt, he'll have taken advantage of that power to make a few specific actions to benefit him personally.

Look at the difference between how he talks about space and how NASA does, say. Mars? Not science, not research, but just a place to plant a colony beholden to him that he can tax (without using those words) as much as he wants.

[throwawaymaths]

> I wonder whether somebody from the opposing side can provide a reasonable logical explanation for the Musk/Trump actions.

i am not on trump's side (i hate trump; i am neutral on musk except these past few weeks i think he's said -- but not yet really done -- things that are a bit beyond the pale, even for him) but i think this will be positive for American science.

as i posted in sibling comment:

> to steelman the issue: what if there was overinvestment in science? as in we chased money after talent that didnt exist, or was mismatched to the difficulty of the available and fundable open questions.

two things: you'd expect a lot of fraud and misallocated science to have been recently uncovered (Reproducibility crisis, amyloid hypothesis scandals e.g.).

after the cuts, you would expect the quantity of science to go down, but the quality to go up.

i guess technically this isn't a logocal explanation since i dont think trump is doing this in good faith but i think the US might be better off in the end.

[frozenport]

No because these cuts do nothing to address fraud.

In the immediate it seems to have cut short the next generation of scientists leaving more of the entrenched old hands.

[throwawaymaths]

im not arguing intent, I'm arguing effect. the effect depends on how bad the rot is. the existing system is so bad it seems incapable of self-policing (tessier-lavigne was exposed by an undergraduate journalism major, not a fellow scientist). maybe it's time to start over, any 'partial' solution will have a hell of a time figuring out who to cut and who to keep.

[bruce511]

Musk's motivations are simple; the rich have been promised tax breaks, which means deep spending cuts. So gutting the parks service means no parks open to the public, but balances a tax break to billionaires.

Same for "science". That's a long term investment with long term returns. Kill that now for immediate tax breaks. Let someone else worry about the fallout 10 years from now.

Then there's direct interest. The CFB regulates companies processing payments to protect consumers. X wants to process payments without that pesky oversight. CFB is gone.

Musk and Trump sell this to the masses as saving money. Which the masses assume means lower taxes for them. Whereas the billionaires understand it's to remove services from the masses to route more money to themselves. The masses are easily duped - this is literally democracy in action.

[jfengel]

In 2016 they had tax breaks without spending cuts. And he's not actually saving all that much money. The employees are only a small part of the budget.

He's doing it because hate for government employees has been a talking point since Reagan. He's getting huge accolades for sticking it to the evildoers. It's popular and fun.

[trhway]

that is the question - for example SpaceX needs FAA permits. With the federal employees severely cut in that future that Musk/Trump builds how that will be solved - 1. no FAA permits required or 2. SpaceX gets same-day service (or even total blanket exception) while everybody else waits 3 years?

[vel0city]

> So gutting the parks service means no parks open to the public, but balances a tax break to billionaires

That's the stupid thing in the end. Gut the parks service, here's your $500 tax break on your several hundred million+ income.

[bruce511]

It's a lot more than $500. For the few. It's $0 for the masses. A 1% reduction in corporate tax means millions in their pockets.

Billionaires aren't the ones going to national parks. So they don't care if they're closed.

[_heimdall]

Well I'm not from "the other side" as I don't align with either party, but I do live in a very red part of the country.

In the short term, as I understand it, the goal is to root out fraud and abuse. For decades many people from both sides of the aisle have believed the government wastes money, that is nothing new. The current moves somewhat rhyme with the early Clinton administration. Whether that is Trump's goal or not is largely speculative, but those I've talked to that support him see this as the goal.

The mid and long term goals vary wildly depending on who I talk to. Some still view it like old school republicans, small government and states' rights. Others want a government just as large and powerful as today but focused on different goals and moral views.

The question I've yet to hear raised or disavowed by the Trump supporters I know is whether this is leading to fascism. A supposed billionaire running the country with his billionaire friends in toe sure seems like industry take over of government.

Similarly though, I rarely heard the other side of the aisle acknowledging whether the other path was intentionally leading to Marxism - a similar number of parallels existed there as well and in either case the outcome is authoritarianism and massive federal powers.

[watwut]

This has zero to do with rooting put fraud, this is literally making goverment more corrupt.

And the whole "democrats are Marxists" talking point is ridiculous. There are no paralels here, just a authoritarian and anti democratic movement successfully demonizing other side regardless of truth.

[_heimdall]

You're being too black and white here in my opinion.

From what I've seen we don't yet have a clear vision of what their end goals really are. They've talked about waste and fraud, and what they've done so far could be to that end. Going out a layer and you find people around them, and Project 2025, that seem to talk much more towards privatizing the government. I haven't seen enough to know which way it will go, but its been moving so quickly that I can't keep up with everything.

I didn't say "democrats are Marxists" and I didn't intend to imply that. To say there are no parallels is disingenuous at best. Wealth distribution is a great example that is common in both groups, as is anticapitalist and anti-meritocratic views and policies.

That doesn't mean democrats are Marxists or that the party is Marxist. It does, though, mean that there are policies many Democratic voters or politicians support that align with arguments Marx made (and that doesn't inherently mean the ideas are bad ones).

[crusty]

If you are a person who thinks diversity, equity, and inclusion are by definition determinants or waste, fraud, and abuse, then sure, you aren't going to see this as something totally different. So when Trump threatens to disrupt and destroy funding streams to agencies and institutions merely for referencing or addressing those things, i guess that's just part of the government being efficient.

Waste, fraud, and abuse are completely subjective and at this point arbitrary terms to a guy who thinks Putin is aces, calls Zelynsk is a dictator, and claims Ukraine stayed the War with the country that invaded them... twice. If he's unwilling to recognize a shared reality and set of objective truths with us, how would we not be complete idiots to believe his version of waste, fraud, and abuse comes straight from the upside-down and its real value is as a catchphrase that capitalizes on people's preconceptions of the government.

[watwut]

1.) If you did not seem enough, it is because you was avoiding it. Project 2024 also literally describes much more then just privatization.

The goals of conservative movements were always visible and open, alteought enablers preferred to demand everyone uses euphemisms.

2 ) You did used those words. You knew it was exaggeration and even now you are exaggerating. Plus even milder claim is purely false. You got what you wanted politically, so this strategy of false equivalencies, of blaming democrats of what conservatives do and plan to do is getting really hollow.

Bo sides were not the same, you just create such impression by using euphemisms for one side and exaggerations for another one.

3.) No one on the right has any business to use the word meritocracy. They never wanted ine, occasionally using that word to manipulate. Right now, qualified woman amd black man were removed from leadership position amd replaced by mediocre unqualified man.

Right now, qualified people are replaced by unqualified loyalists.

[_heimdall]

You're still being too black and white here.

I live in a mostly red/republican state. I don't know anyone who had actually read Project 2025 or could tell me what's in it. For sure it shows the intentions of those who wrote it, but you are generalizing far too much by saying it makes clear the motivations of a broader conservative movement.

> Similarly though, I rarely heard the other side of the aisle acknowledging whether the other path was intentionally leading to Marxism - a similar number of parallels existed there as well and in either case the outcome is authoritarianism and massive federal powers.

This is an exact quote from my earlier comment so we aren't out of context here. I did not use the words "democrats are Marxists." I do raise the potential that some Democratic policies lead towards a Marxist end, but in no way does that say they are Marxist or prescribe an opinion of the entire party or voting block.

What euphemisms are you claiming I made earlier? Some context there would help, I was trying to give clear examples and make direct statements but maybe I didn't do that well

> No one on the right has any business to use the word meritocracy.

Well I'm not on the right or claiming what the right (or Republicans if that's what you mean) can or can't say. I agree that at a minimum the Republican platform right now is pretty contradictory with regards to merit and that's a problem. That again wasn't my point though - I was making the claim that some Democratic voters and politicians support are opposed to meritocracy and that view aligns with Marxist writings. Are you disagreeing with me there, or just wanting to deflect to what the Republicans are doing?

[malcolmgreaves]

The Democratic Party is about as far away as you can get from any sort of Marxist political ideology as you can. There’s not a single even minor US political movement that is even remotely related to Marxism.

[_heimdall]

That seems like a hard claim to stand behind when Harris's father was a Marxist economist. BLM was also a very popular movement among the Democratic party, and it was organized and run by Marxists.

How do you land on the party being as far from Marxism as a party can be?

[dashundchen]

What Marxist policies was Harris promoting?

Elon Musk's parents and grandparents were adovactes and beneficiaries of a violent, racist apartheid South Africa. His dad had children with his step-daughter.

Fred Trump was arrested for participating in a KKK rally and prosecuted for racist discriminatiory housing practices.

How do you land on Trump and Musk being far from violent ugly racism?

[_heimdall]

> The Democratic Party is about as far away as you can get from any sort of Marxist political ideology as you can.

The last comment or set the bar pretty high here. Many of Harris's policy ideas were more focused on the collective well-being than the individual, all of those are more Marxist than they could be.

I'm not sure why you're jumping to Musk or Trump comparisons here. I agree with you in some areas that they both may be dangerous, that just wasn't the topic here.

[Larrikin]

You were called out and obviously don't have a valid response. You should have not responded and used one of your other accounts to reply elsewhere when backed into a corner.

Now all it does is make people think that's a ridiculous defense and look through your post history and it becomes obvious the purpose of your account.

[throw939449]

> opposing side can provide a reasonable logical explanation for the Musk/Trump actions

Maybe it is like with Mozilla. You send money to Firefox development, but it pays for Marxist get-away conference in Africa.

Once academia gets rid of bloat, there will be far more money for science and engineering!

[watwut]

They slashed grants that pay science. Science ia going to be cut.

[bcrl]

Science has this pesky problem of generating facts. Where we're going, we don't need facts!

[btilly]

Trump I have no explanation for except corruption.

But Musk and DOGE, there is a simple explanation. Musk has learned that you take a chainsaw to sacred cows, then fix the 10% that were really bad mistakes, and that is the easiest way to cut through bureaucracy. So he's trying that, at scale.

Unfortunately it doesn't seem like he'll notice most of his bad mistakes. Because it is at scale, and his attention doesn't go that far.

[MyOutfitIsVague]

Yeah, this slash and burn approach is legitimately good in many circumstances. You cut through cruft, break down old unneeded processes, and things that are needed but were undocumented become quickly documented and maybe refurbished. Things that break are quickly noticed and reinstated.

It really doesn't work for huge complex systems where the breakages aren't felt fully for many years, and building the systems back up take decades, and things break so far down the line that it's impossible to even tell what needs to be fixed.

I have to hope that the intentions are actually good, because the appearances from the outside look a lot like the start of a dictatorship.

[cancerhacker]

When you’re refactoring a system (which is really what he’s claiming to want to do) you don’t just delete the repository and start with main(). You figure out where the edges are, how they fit together, where are the Chesterton Fences and how can we protect them until they’re understood. A/B unit testing.

This takes a non-zero amount of time and it takes careful consideration by subject experts.

I can’t really speak to your hopefulness of good intentions - as a parent that relies on government agencies to help my special needs child with the tools she needs, I see no hope here.

What does success look like? How long should the chaos and pain last before you’re beyond hope? Will there be remuneration for people that are materially hurt by this scorched earth policy? How will you be hurt, personally?

[MyOutfitIsVague]

I generally agree with you, but I have worked with many balls of mud that actually can not be understood even with experts and research without an unreasonable amount of time. Things like a program that runs in a database that was bought from a vendor that has since gone out of business, and the program ostensibly formats some rows and puts them into another table, but we don't know and can't know if anything else is actually using it because observability is not a part of this product, and we can't reach anybody who actually was involved in making it or setting it up. In these cases, a scream test is easier, faster, and more effective than "proper" research. And nearly the entire system is built on these inscrutable processes that nobody understands.

Sometimes it involves people, too. I did consulting work at a company that maintained an entire department of dozens of people who did nothing but mechanically opened spreadsheets that were dropped into a share, copied a specific set of rows from them into another spreadsheet, and then copied that spreadsheet into another share. It turned out the entire process was redundant, because what it was built to temporarily fix had already been permanently fixed elsewhere, and they still kept growing this useless department for years. Happily, the majority of these people were reassigned rather than fired.

For a collection agency, breaking these things is temporary pain. For a government, it can be deadly for constituents.

> I can’t really speak to your hopefulness of good intentions - as a parent that relies on government agencies to help my special needs child with the tools she needs, I see no hope here.

I am really sorry to hear that. It's not a good position to be in. I have a trans child myself, and I am also worried about being able to care for them in an environment that is increasingly hostile. I've spent weeks of this past month depressed and panicked over the current "governance". I'm just trying to cope, and sometimes that involves a bit of denial.

> What does success look like?

Don't get me wrong here. No success is possible. If their intentions are good, they're still destroying things that will kill people and take decades to repair. There will likely be no remuneration. I'm just hoping for the outcome that is least bad. I have zero hope of anything good resulting.

[cancerhacker]

Thank you for the thoughtful response- and best of luck to you and your child.