Trump / Musk (other than DOGE) Omnibus Thread

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So you're going to lay off thousands of people while preserving billions in endowment money without any effort to ameliorate the situation?

In that case, the Visigoths are right - the system is broken and needs to be torn down.
 
Over the weekend, Elon sent out a Twit post. He is calling for the impeachment of the Federal judge that put a temporary block on DOGE's unfettered access to Treasury systems.

WTH is going on here? MAGAts truly do not understand the Constitution and the purpose of equal branches of gov. for checks and balances. Or they just don't care.

Aa a former Pub who has watched my party die and resurrect as the weird ignorant populist party, I am certain it is the former for the MAGAt cultists, and the latter for the spineless MAGA politicians.
 
Huh? said:
I respectfully disagree.

1. If endowments are giant mutual funds, then they should be taxed. They aren't because their purpose is to support their institutions. Our nation's non-profits bank way too much tax-free money - they need to spend more for the common good or lose their tax status.

2. In what world is it appropriate for taxpayers to fund a university's indirect costs but it's inappropriate to use the university's resources for the same? Especially in an instance in which the university's core research mission will be affected so dramatically?

3. I recognize that this required a sea change in how university administrators view their endowments. That's a good thing.
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Thanks for the reply. Just a note, though, I did not say that university endowments ARE mutual funds, I said that they are similar in that they are comprised of a large number of smaller funds that are pooled and invested. What you are proposing, taxing university endowments or using university endowment funds for purposes for which they were not intended, completely undermines the entire idea of the IRS and government incentivizing private philanthropic investment. If you remove the tax exemption status from universities and other similar entities, you remove enormous tax benefits for a whole lot of people who are able to use their wealth and resources to do a lot of good. Our government does not get much right when it comes to the tax code. Providing tax exemption to universities, public hospitals, and other institutions similar is one of the very best things the government has ever done.
 
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The government incentivizes private philanthropic investment in the expectation that those funds will be devoted to the common good. When should that common good be realized? If a university is going to lay off thousands of people on mission-critical research because the government is no longer stepping up, what greater common good is there?

This is an emergent moment. If endowments don't step up, then they have simply become investment vehicles of self-perpetuation.
 
Huh? said:
The government incentivizes private philanthropic investment in the expectation that those funds will be devoted to the common good. When should that common good be realized? If a university is going to lay off thousands of people on mission-critical research because the government is no longer stepping up, what greater common good is there?

This is an emergent moment. If endowments don't step up, then they have simply become investment vehicles of self-perpetuation.
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With all due respect, I don’t think you are understanding what we are saying. Those endowment funds are, in fact, supporting mission critical areas that promote the common good. What do you think scholarship programs that enable rural, first generation, low income students are? What do you think professorships that study the spread, prevention, and cure of infectious disease diseases are? Those are prime examples of how endowed funds are used and spent. Again, you are advocating for universities to be forced to break legally binding agreements with donors. As I said before, university endowments are not giant slush fund checking accounts, and those legally binding gift agreements are not just for show.

I understand where you are coming from and I think that you are well intended in your views, and I completely agree with you that we are in an emergent moment. I just disagree- and the government and IRS also happen to disagree – with your proposed solution as being impractical and self defeating.
 
Kraftyheel89 said:
Over the weekend, Elon sent out a Twit post. He is calling for the impeachment of the Federal judge that put a temporary block on DOGE's unfettered access to Treasury systems.

WTH is going on here? MAGAts truly do not understand the Constitution and the purpose of equal branches of gov. for checks and balances. Or they just don't care.

Aa a former Pub who has watched my party die and resurrect as the weird ignorant populist party, I am certain it is the former for the MAGAt cultists, and the latter for the spineless MAGA politicians.
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From one fellow conservative and former Republican to another, I just want to say how awesome it is that you, unlike a handful of other posters on here who scream that they are conservative until they are blue in the face but who are actually anything but, were able to put country and constitution over party.
 
CFordUNC said:
From one fellow conservative and former Republican to another, I just want to say how awesome it is that you, unlike a handful of other posters on here who scream that they are conservative until they are blue in the face but who are actually anything but, were able to put country and constitution over party.
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Yes. There's another upshot to this, which is that the rest of Americans understand who is and who isn't a good faith participant in democracy.

I disagree with Krafty on a lot of things. Ten years ago, it was hard to figure out whether his stance was based on principle or some combination of convenience, reflexive opposition and ignorance. It's much easier now. I mean, I still think some of his positions are not based on firm knowledge, but at least I know there's a principle there.

Which is to say, we can still have discourse with Krafty. I'm a liberal in part because for most of my life, conservatives have mostly taken unserious and misinformed positions on most issues. But not all! Conservatives invented cap and trade, and that was a great policy innovation and it's a good thing that back in the 1980s, there were serious conservatives who had serious ideas and took them seriously.

And sometimes liberals are wrong! The madness in Oregon about drug addiction is an example. But why did Oregon liberals get the opioid issue so wrong? Probably because they aren't in dialogue with conservatives, because conservatives aren't in dialogue with reality. Conservatives were carrying on about mask wearing and false flag school shootings and migrants taking over cities -- that is, they were not serious people to engage with. So when they said, "hey, this idea is going to fail," why should liberals pay attention? When a party is basically all bullshit, all the time, then people rightly stop listening.

This isn't to say that conservatives made liberals screw up in Oregon. Liberals did that. But it might have been avoided had there been two reality-based parties.
 
Huh? said:
I respectfully disagree.

1. If endowments are giant mutual funds, then they should be taxed. They aren't because their purpose is to support their institutions. Our nation's non-profits bank way too much tax-free money - they need to spend more for the common good or lose their tax status.

2. In what world is it appropriate for taxpayers to fund a university's indirect costs but it's inappropriate to use the university's resources for the same? Especially in an instance in which the university's core research mission will be affected so dramatically?

3. I recognize that this required a sea change in how university administrators view their endowments. That's a good thing.
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You need to read CFord's posts more carefully. I can't actually state with confidence that he's correct; I don't know much about this issue. But he's never shown himself to be anything but a good faith poster, and he's not some busy bee with a Cliff Clavin complex. There is absolutely no reason to doubt his sincerity; and since he rarely toots his own horn, I'm willing to believe that he's knowledgeable here.

If we assume that he's correct, then your points here are simply not responsive. They might be right. But they don't address the issue. If a university has a total endowment of $1B, and $750M of that is earmarked for purposes that are not related to research, then the university cannot by law direct more than $250M to making up a shortfall of federal funds. A different set of laws -- those that governs fiduciary responsibilities for trustees -- would probably constrain that $250M considerably more, because trustees generally cannot deplete a fund to cover present expenses. So maybe the university has $50M in flexible funding. Nothing you say can get around that. You can have the best arguments in the world for how that $1B should be used, but it doesn't matter because it can't be used that way.
 
superrific said:
You need to read CFord's posts more carefully. I can't actually state with confidence that he's correct; I don't know much about this issue. But he's never shown himself to be anything but a good faith poster, and he's not some busy bee with a Cliff Clavin complex. There is absolutely no reason to doubt his sincerity; and since he rarely toots his own horn, I'm willing to believe that he's knowledgeable here.

If we assume that he's correct, then your points here are simply not responsive. They might be right. But they don't address the issue. If a university has a total endowment of $1B, and $750M of that is earmarked for purposes that are not related to research, then the university cannot by law direct more than $250M to making up a shortfall of federal funds. A different set of laws -- those that governs fiduciary responsibilities for trustees -- would probably constrain that $250M considerably more, because trustees generally cannot deplete a fund to cover present expenses. So maybe the university has $50M in flexible funding. Nothing you say can get around that. You can have the best arguments in the world for how that $1B should be used, but it doesn't matter because it can't be used that way.
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The Widener Library is a well-known example of a donor’s restrictions on a gift. Harvard had to get the Widener heirs to waive some conditions of the agreement for much needed modifications nearly 100 years later.
 
BlooVooDoo said:
The Widener Library is a well-known example of a donor’s restrictions on a gift. Harvard had to get the Widener heirs to waive some conditions of the agreement for much needed modifications nearly 100 years later.
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What's Perkins Library's excuse? I haven't been there in a long time and maybe it's been renovated, but in the mid 90s it was the Trump of libraries. Unimaginably bad in every relevant way. I never knew a building could contain so much vile graffiti, let alone an academic library (the ratio of graffiti in Perkins to graffiti in Davis had to have been 10000 or more). Also, I don't think it's being too picky to expect not to hit your head on unpadded, exposed metal when browsing the stacks. There were some 6 foot ceilings in that bitch, or maybe 7 foot with pipes and buttresses dipping down into regular human head range.
 

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www.bloomberg.com
Billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has a key ally in the US Department of the Treasury: Tom Krause, a veteran technology executive who’s now a special government employee, or consultant, at the agency. Until a federal judge temporarily blocked DOGE’s access on Saturday, Krause had “read-only” access to Treasury’s payments system, which handles more than 1.2 billion transactions a year. The government calls it “America’s checkbook,” an essential window into the federal spending that President Donald Trump is looking to slash by $1 trillion or more.

Krause, 47, who’s serving as fiscal assistant secretary at Treasury, will keep his day job: chief executive officer of Cloud Software Group, which owns a company called Citrix Systems. His deep cost-cutting there shows why he may have appealed to Trump and Musk, the president’s adviser and Tesla Inc.’s CEO—and also why some people familiar with Krause’s record are unsettled about his new government role.

...
Using a time-honored playbook, Citrix’s new owners financed the purchase mostly by loading up the company with debt—and then started eliminating thousands of employees to cut costs. Its financial results are improving.

But investing in cybersecurity isn’t like buying, and turning around, a struggling chain that sells groceries or furniture. It means handling risks to critical services more like those of owning a hospital or medical practice—matters of life or death where PE cost-cutting has provoked congressional inquiries.

At Citrix, employees raised an alarm about Krause’s approach and say their fears were borne out. Losing personnel left security software and hardware more vulnerable as bad actors stepped up their attacks, according to interviews with a dozen former Citrix staffers. They include executives, managers and software engineers involved in security. Many were dismissed after the buyout, and most asked for anonymity to discuss sensitive internal matters.

Hugh Boyd worked for 14 years at Citrix as a product security engineer before he lost his job in January 2024. Boyd, who says he’d been planning to retire anyway, notes that the company’s software includes millions of lines of code and complicated systems that have to work together to provide protection.

“What they did is probably one of the single biggest mistakes you can make in a security organization,” he says of the new owners’ staff reductions. “If you start running people off who are highly qualified and who have been doing this at the company for years, you’re really putting yourself in a precarious position from a security standpoint.”

...

After the company instituted cuts, intruders infiltrated Citrix’s products in two major hacks. In 2023, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, the US government’s top online watchdog, ranked two vulnerabilities in Citrix software as the No. 1 and No. 2 most exploited flaws by hackers.
 
altmin said:

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www.bloomberg.com
Billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has a key ally in the US Department of the Treasury: Tom Krause, a veteran technology executive who’s now a special government employee, or consultant, at the agency. Until a federal judge temporarily blocked DOGE’s access on Saturday, Krause had “read-only” access to Treasury’s payments system, which handles more than 1.2 billion transactions a year. The government calls it “America’s checkbook,” an essential window into the federal spending that President Donald Trump is looking to slash by $1 trillion or more.

Krause, 47, who’s serving as fiscal assistant secretary at Treasury, will keep his day job: chief executive officer of Cloud Software Group, which owns a company called Citrix Systems. His deep cost-cutting there shows why he may have appealed to Trump and Musk, the president’s adviser and Tesla Inc.’s CEO—and also why some people familiar with Krause’s record are unsettled about his new government role.

...
Using a time-honored playbook, Citrix’s new owners financed the purchase mostly by loading up the company with debt—and then started eliminating thousands of employees to cut costs. Its financial results are improving.

But investing in cybersecurity isn’t like buying, and turning around, a struggling chain that sells groceries or furniture. It means handling risks to critical services more like those of owning a hospital or medical practice—matters of life or death where PE cost-cutting has provoked congressional inquiries.

At Citrix, employees raised an alarm about Krause’s approach and say their fears were borne out. Losing personnel left security software and hardware more vulnerable as bad actors stepped up their attacks, according to interviews with a dozen former Citrix staffers. They include executives, managers and software engineers involved in security. Many were dismissed after the buyout, and most asked for anonymity to discuss sensitive internal matters.

Hugh Boyd worked for 14 years at Citrix as a product security engineer before he lost his job in January 2024. Boyd, who says he’d been planning to retire anyway, notes that the company’s software includes millions of lines of code and complicated systems that have to work together to provide protection.

“What they did is probably one of the single biggest mistakes you can make in a security organization,” he says of the new owners’ staff reductions. “If you start running people off who are highly qualified and who have been doing this at the company for years, you’re really putting yourself in a precarious position from a security standpoint.”

...

After the company instituted cuts, intruders infiltrated Citrix’s products in two major hacks. In 2023, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, the US government’s top online watchdog, ranked two vulnerabilities in Citrix software as the No. 1 and No. 2 most exploited flaws by hackers.
Click to expand...
Fyi, Citrix provides security products for thousands of hospitals.
 
I will just respond to Super with 2 things and leave that discussion for another time and place. Otherwise, we derail the thread.

1) I am as anti-Trump as anyone here, so of course that makes me more acceptable than pre-Trump.

2) My views have not changed dramatically from my former party, the party itself has. Furthermore, I am much more involved in following, and studying political principles, as well as learning from many informed people here. My posts (I think) are more thoughtful and less combative/mud-slinging than 10 years ago.

But I assure you, there are many policies and political theory that we would very much disagree on, still. Nothing wrong with that. Unfortunately, we have an absolute self serving corrupt THREAT leading our country again. Real policy discussion doesn't much matter now, when we have a group of total lunatics in absolute control (regardless of party or politics.)
 

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www.cnbc.com

  • President Donald Trump will sign an executive order directing the Department of Justice to pause enforcing a nearly half-century-old law that prohibits American companies and foreign firms from bribing officials of foreign governments to obtain or retain business.
 
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