Trump Presidency Round 2

[Sea Turtle]

The only one I object to is Kristi Noem, MAGA probably likes her though.

She's not smart. I've had multiple people who know her well enough tell me that. I heard it speculated that she's just a figurehead who will let more zealous folks call the shots. Hoping that's the case.

What's funny about Kristi is she started out as an establishment shill. I don't generally care if that's the case in big states, but in a state with one house rep, I expect those people to be mini senators and be a good advocate for their state.

Once she went home to SD to be governor she started being a MAGA shill. Which really doesn't make sense. MAGA is a national thing that isn't particularly relevant to South Dakota state politics.

Rant over. Noem sucks.

Rewarding the marines. Just like Tulsi and RFK JR.

 

[JadedDomer]

LFG

 

[ulukinatme]

LFG View attachment 3056952

DOGE to the moon with Elon. It makes perfect sense! This is beautiful.

 

[Sea Turtle]

LFG View attachment 3056952

I know he doesn't sleep but good grief, he is getting spread too thin.

 

[JadedDomer]

Trump 2.0 has immense potential

 

[ulukinatme]

Trump 2.0 has immense potential

Elon trimmed 90% of Twitter's fat, which worked beautifully. Can't wait to see what he does with the government.

 

[GATTACA!]

Elon trimmed 90% of Twitter's fat, which worked beautifully. Can't wait to see what he does with the government.

 

[calvegas04]

Elon trimmed 90% of Twitter's fat, which worked beautifully. Can't wait to see what he does with the government.

Twitter/X is worth 80% less now than when he bought it as well.

 

[Sea Turtle]

He's worth 300 billion. Good grief, was King Soloman worth that much?

 

[ulukinatme]

Twitter/X is worth 80% less now than when he bought it as well.

I could be wrong, but I don't think his plan was to get richer by purchasing Twitter. It certainly had a hand in the latest election.
There's talks (I don't know how serious they are) of Elon going after MSNBC next. Would be quite the shakeup when it comes to mainstream media. I'd love to see Madow's face if that happened.

 

[IrishLax]

People not happy about this pick apparently, I don’t know who he is.

 

[IrishLax]

I could be wrong, but I don't think his plan was to get richer by purchasing Twitter. It certainly had a hand in the latest election.
There's talks (I don't know how serious they are) of Elon going after MSNBC next. Would be quite the shakeup when it comes to mainstream media. I'd love to see Madow's face if that happened.

He certainly didn’t buy Twitter to make money but it’s worse than ever in terms of bots, spam, etc.

It’s better at — not policing one-sided speech, not giving undue platform to irrelevant journalists, etc. Which is why he bought it. People forget that the impetus here was that he liked Twitter and got upset that they banned the Babylon Bee. Twitter before Elon was a place where you could get banned for an inoffensive joke.

Anyways, the reason it has lost so much value is that no advertisers put $$ into it anymore. My wife runs global marketing for a Fortune 100 company and their social team does no media spend on Twitter. I won’t get into the details but the platform just does not produce results relative to other ones and they aren’t a good partner.

My concern with Elon and “Department of Government Efficiency” (I’m assuming this is a boondoggle and won’t actually do much of anything) is that he has billions of dollars in federal contracts. How much you want to bet those are all deemed “efficient”? What about the contracts to his competitors, like the one he lost for rural broadband? By the way, he got totally screwed on that one, and would be in the right lol

 

[JadedDomer]

Twitter/X is worth 80% less now than when he bought it as well.

He didn't buy it for its investment potential. He bought it to preserve free speech, he said it wasn't worth $44B from day 1.

 

[JadedDomer]

The federal govt just spent $42.5 billion for rural internet service. 3 years later, NOT ONE PERSON is connected. They chose against Elon's starlink, which would have covered every single person for the $42B. Him winning govt contracts with far superior products is not a concern of mine.

 

[tussin]

DOGE has potential to be the greatest thing ever or a total waste of time. Will chose to be an optimist and assume it's the former.

 

[NDVirginia19]

People not happy about this pick apparently, I don’t know who he is.

When you look at the immense failures we have had with the DOD lead by the traditional Former 4 Star Current MIC boardmember leader, I really don't think he can do things any worse. That being said, the DOD is one of the most complex and largest organizations on this planet and I completely understand people's worries with him as a pick for SECDEF

 

[NDVirginia19]

DOGE has potential to be the greatest thing ever or a total waste of time. Will chose to be an optimist and assume it's the former.

Just get Ron Paul on board to do the actual leg work on eliminating waste and I will be a happy camper

 

[NDVirginia19]

Just get Ron Paul on board to do the actual leg work on eliminating waste and I will be a happy camper

But the pessimist in me thinks it will actually be more like this

 

[NDVirginia19]

 

[JadedDomer]

DOGE has potential to be the greatest thing ever or a total waste of time. Will chose to be an optimist and assume it's the former.

I'd put the over/under at $1T/year it saves. US Dept of Education going bye-bye is already a quarter of that.

 

[IrishLax]

I'd put the over/under at $1T/year it saves. US Dept of Education going bye-bye is already a quarter of that.

DoE going away is likely to also drive down costs at colleges, which may have short term pain to the economy but major long term benefits.

You can't get to $1T without doing something about one of the following:
-Defense
-Social Security
-Medicare

Pie chart for reference:


Which would you cut and how? I know which ones I would target, but don't know if it's politically viable.

 

[Irish#1]

Elon trimmed 90% of Twitter's fat, which worked beautifully. Can't wait to see what he does with the government.

Hope they go after the Military contractors first. $75 hammers and $1,500 toilets need to go. You could make significant cuts in the military without really effecting its capabilities.

 

[JadedDomer]

DoE going away is likely to also drive down costs at colleges, which may have short term pain to the economy but major long term benefits.

You can't get to $1T without doing something about one of the following:
-Defense
-Social Security
-Medicare

Pie chart for reference:


Which would you cut and how? I know which ones I would target, but don't know if it's politically viable.

I have no idea but I trust Elon to find it if there's waste. Only one that's clear is the Dept of Education.

 

[sixstar]

Elon trimmed 90% of Twitter's fat, which worked beautifully. Can't wait to see what he does with the government.

step 1: eliminate the motivators that encourage orgs to spend their entire budget every year.

Every org gets a yearly budget via the POM process. If the org doesn't spend the entire budget, they will 1) lose current year money to another org who needs it, and 2) have their budget cut in future years. This intrinsically forces every org to spend everything they get. And it leads to "end of fiscal year Christmas" in AUG-SEP, where nearly 70% of Government spending occurs as orgs try to allocate excess budget. It's normally very wasteful spending.

 

[Giddyup]

Your future boss. At first I didn’t know what to make of this pick since I just knew him as the guy on Fox. But he does actually have a pretty impressive resume and two bronze stars from actual combat. He’s a major?? Princeton, Harvard guy. Most DoD chiefs have had no military experience since Reagan. We’ll see.

 

[IrishLax]

Your future boss. At first I didn’t know what to make of this pick since I just knew him as the guy on Fox. But he does actually have a pretty impressive resume and two bronze stars from actual combat. He’s a major?? Princeton, Harvard guy. Most DoD chiefs have had no military experience since Reagan. We’ll see.

At minimum, he has the veneer of being a serious, forward-looking person.

 

[IrishLax]

I have no idea but I trust Elon to find it if there's waste. Only one that's clear is the Dept of Education.

^some additional food-for-thought on DoE and higher education

Simply put, the wokest of woke academic positions are the ones furthest away from business and hard sciences. The most "normal" professors deal in things that involve math or real world applications. The growth of thought policing, DEI, and other nonsense is rooted in student loans. People who take out student loans for degrees with no career prospects are subsidizing DEI administrators and advanced degree programs in women's studies, gender studies, AA studies, sociology, etc.

If you take away student loans for worthless degrees or worthless schools, then what will happen is that the "demand" for these courses will drastically shrink. And once that starts happening, the "supply" of these cancerous higher academics will start to shrink. This is even more so true if you cut or limit federal research grants for things outside of science and engineering.

 

[TorontoGold]

^some additional food-for-thought on DoE and higher education

Simply put, the wokest of woke academic positions are the ones furthest away from business and hard sciences. The most "normal" professors deal in things that involve math or real world applications. The growth of thought policing, DEI, and other nonsense is rooted in student loans. People who take out student loans for degrees with no career prospects are subsidizing DEI administrators and advanced degree programs in women's studies, gender studies, AA studies, sociology, etc.

If you take away student loans for worthless degrees or worthless schools, then what will happen is that the "demand" for these courses will drastically shrink. And once that starts happening, the "supply" of these cancerous higher academics will start to shrink. This is even more so true if you cut or limit federal research grants for things outside of science and engineering.

I studied educational economics in university and the degrees with the lowest ROI were the "non-professional" ones. I won't say social science because economics is a social science and I can't grapple with it being grouped in with gender studies lol. They still provided a positive ROI over not having one no matter if they entered into their field of study or not - ie. someone with a gender studies degree is still better off than someone without a degree.

I worked on a research project for a professor in developing a policy proposal for the government to remove funding entirely from post-secondary schools. Eliminate all subsidies provided from the province/feds and have these institutions operate as a business because if they're going to have special exemptions on taxes and endowments then they shouldn't also get gov funding.

We found very preliminary findings based on case studies around the world that this approach would more beneficial in long term development of the population only if the savings were re-invested back into the population through better elementary/high school resources. Basically - if you take the money saved and put it towards young kids it will go further and be more beneficial, you can't just take the money and blow it on more bombs or government pet projects.

Another key finding which is interesting (something the Cons on the board will like) is that subsidizing education will not lead to more people going to university. The case study for this was Quebec as it is most heavily subsidized post-secondary province/state in NA and the enrollment stats lineup with other provinces. The conclusion found was that if you have subsidized education like some European countries the Gov needs to also provide guaranteed work for them on graduation so that they can pay back some of their degree costs and also earn a bit of money to help them start off.

All this to say - giving money to Colleges/Universities is the dumbest shit that neoliberalism has given us. The appearance of benevolence without doing anything good. The debt forgiveness is good policy for growing household debt but should only be down if there is a long term solution for tackling higher education.

 

[Blazers46]

^some additional food-for-thought on DoE and higher education

Simply put, the wokest of woke academic positions are the ones furthest away from business and hard sciences. The most "normal" professors deal in things that involve math or real world applications. The growth of thought policing, DEI, and other nonsense is rooted in student loans. People who take out student loans for degrees with no career prospects are subsidizing DEI administrators and advanced degree programs in women's studies, gender studies, AA studies, sociology, etc.

If you take away student loans for worthless degrees or worthless schools, then what will happen is that the "demand" for these courses will drastically shrink. And once that starts happening, the "supply" of these cancerous higher academics will start to shrink. This is even more so true if you cut or limit federal research grants for things outside of science and engineering.

So many stupid “educated” people. I agree.

 

[IrishLax]