Trump / Musk (other than DOGE) Omnibus Thread
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Carolina Fever
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And too stupid that all of this is for Trump and Musk to line their pockets. These people have also never heard the phrases throw the baby out with the bath water, and cut off your nose to spite your face.
Carolina Fever
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Maybe Trump and Musk will tear each other's throats out soon.
MOUNTAINH33L
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Not Hyperbole Anymore: Musk Is In Charge of the US Government
“… I had not had a chance to look at the new DOGE executive order the President signed this afternoon with Elon Musk standing beside him. I don’t think it’s too much to say that it puts Musk functionally in control of the U.S. government. I know that sounds pretty wild. And that may not apply to high-profile policy — two budget bills or one on Capitol Hill, plans for Gaza.But let me explain what it does.
A DOGE operative, called a “DOGE Team Lead,” will be assigned to every agency, department, etc., of the federal government.
That team lead, who will presumably report to Elon Musk since Musk is the head of DOGE, will be in charge of all hiring and firing decisions at their particular department.
The EO lays out a government downsizing plan in which only one new government employee can be hired for every four who leave service. It adds various new reasons for termination.
And it puts the overall plan for the downsizing in the hands of DOGE, which is to say, Musk.
And note here the relationship between the “DOGE Team Leads” and the heads of the various departments …
I tell ya, I’m tryin’, dear friends. I’m struggling here not to engage in hyperbole.
But I don’t know what else to call these people besides political commissars. And again, they report to Elon Musk.
He’s already very clearly operating here as an independent actor whose actions the President blesses after he’s found out what’s happened. This is a parallel overlaying of authority over the entire structure of the U.S. government. …”
Not Hyperbole Anymore: Musk Is In Charge of the US Government
These are wild times at TPM because they’re wild times in the...
talkingpointsmemo.com
HintonJamesHeel
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Politics are rough but this DOGE stuff is going to play. I’m convinced that Harris was unelectable when she said the thing about taxpayer funding prisoners trans surgeries. How often would that even happen? Doesn’t matter. Play the ad enough and that’s all folks hear.
$50m of my money for condoms? Folks will be outraged.
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Treasury Officials Admit Musk’s Racist DOGE Minion Had Power to Alter Payments
“A 25-year-old member of Elon Musk’s DOGE squad who resigned after his racist social media account came to light was “mistakenly” and “briefly” given the power to alter a federal payments database, a Treasury Department official said.
President Donald Trump’s administration had previously claimed Musk’s government efficiency task force DOGE, which has been tasked with recommending spending cuts, was limited to “read-only” access to a Treasury system that oversees $5 trillion in annual payments.
But on Feb. 6, officials discovered that a day earlier, DOGE member Marko Elez, 25, had “mistakenly” been given read/write permissions for a Secure Payment System used for large dollar amount transactions, according a court filingsubmitted Tuesday.
… On Feb. 4, WIRED magazine reported Elez was able to alter the code the government uses to make Social Security payments, issue tax returns and pay government contractors.
… An initial forensic investigation found Elez hadn’t used the “write” privileges on the SPS and “was likely unaware” he’d had them, according to a sworn statement from his DOGE supervisor Thomas Krause.
… A deeper investigation was still in progress when the documents were filed on Tuesday. They were submitted as part of a lawsuit brought by 19 state attorneys general arguing that DOGE had been given improper access to millions of Americans’ sensitive personal and financial data. …”
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Not a pardon, and these prisoner exchanges are always asymmetrical in favor of Russia getting international criminals back for American hostages accused of bogus to de minimus crimes, but another case of Trump releasing a crypto criminal (in addition to doing Putin a favor).
abcnews.go.com
“The United States is preparing to return cybercrime kingpin Alexander Vinnik to Russian custody as part of an exchange for American Marc Fogel, a U.S. official said Wednesday.
… The owner and operator of one of the world's largest currency exchanges, Vinnik was allegedly instrumental in facilitating the transfer of billions of dollars for criminals across the globe, supporting drug trafficking rings, ransomware attacks and the corruption of public officials.
Last year, Vinnik pleaded guilty to conspiracy to launder billions of dollars through cryptocurrency exchange BTC-e. The Department of Justice alleged under Vinnik's operation, BTC-e facilitated over $9 billion in worldwide transactions, serving as one of the main ways for cyber criminals to launder and move their criminal proceeds.
BTC-e has been implicated in multiple wide-ranging crimes, according to the Department of Justice, which alleges Vinnik himself was responsible for more than $120 million in losses.
… Vinnik was arrested in Greece in July 2017 after he was charged in a 21-count indictment that implicated the Russian cryptocurrency operator in the infamous 2014 hack of Mt. Gox, which at one point handled more than 70% of the world's bitcoin transaction. The DOJ alleges Vinnik laundered money he received as a result of the hack to conceal his involvement in the subsequent investigation of Mt. Gox's collapse.
Vinnik and his lawyers have been outspoken about their interest in a potential prisoner swap, making the unusual request in 2023 to be released from a protective order so they could lobby for an exchange. …”
US to swap Marc Fogel for Russian cybercrime kingpin Alexander Vinnik: Official
US to swap Marc Fogel for Russian cybercrime kingpin Alexander Vinnik: Official
Detained in Russia since 2021, Fogel landed back in the U.S. on Tuesday.
“The United States is preparing to return cybercrime kingpin Alexander Vinnik to Russian custody as part of an exchange for American Marc Fogel, a U.S. official said Wednesday.
… The owner and operator of one of the world's largest currency exchanges, Vinnik was allegedly instrumental in facilitating the transfer of billions of dollars for criminals across the globe, supporting drug trafficking rings, ransomware attacks and the corruption of public officials.
Last year, Vinnik pleaded guilty to conspiracy to launder billions of dollars through cryptocurrency exchange BTC-e. The Department of Justice alleged under Vinnik's operation, BTC-e facilitated over $9 billion in worldwide transactions, serving as one of the main ways for cyber criminals to launder and move their criminal proceeds.
BTC-e has been implicated in multiple wide-ranging crimes, according to the Department of Justice, which alleges Vinnik himself was responsible for more than $120 million in losses.
… Vinnik was arrested in Greece in July 2017 after he was charged in a 21-count indictment that implicated the Russian cryptocurrency operator in the infamous 2014 hack of Mt. Gox, which at one point handled more than 70% of the world's bitcoin transaction. The DOJ alleges Vinnik laundered money he received as a result of the hack to conceal his involvement in the subsequent investigation of Mt. Gox's collapse.
Vinnik and his lawyers have been outspoken about their interest in a potential prisoner swap, making the unusual request in 2023 to be released from a protective order so they could lobby for an exchange. …”
ChapelHillSooner
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Old so apologies if already posted.
This has major creepiness going on.
This has major creepiness going on.
Paine
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Weird. Even if there wasn’t anything shady going on, sowing discord about our elections serves Musk.
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Elon Musk’s A.I.-Fuelled War on Human Agency
Musk seeks not only to dismantle the federal government but to install his own technological vision of the future at its heart—techno-fascism by chatbot.
Elon Musk’s A.I.-Fuelled War on Human Agency
Musk seeks not only to dismantle the federal government but to install his own technological vision of the future at its heart—techno-fascism by chatbot.
“… Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla software engineer who is now a deputy commissioner at the Federal Acquisition Service, recently told workers at the General Services Administration that the agency will be driven by an “A.I.-first strategy,” which includes plans for a chatbot to analyze its contracts.
doge is reportedly using A.I. software to identify potential budget reductions at the Department of Education. Anecdotes are circulating about A.I. filters that scan Department of Treasury grant proposals for forbidden terms—including “climate change” and “gender identity”—and then block the proposals.
“Everything that can be machine-automated will be,” one government official told the Washington Post. “And the technocrats will replace the bureaucrats.”
The federal government is, in effect, suddenly being run like an A.I. startup; Musk, an unelected billionaire, a maestro of flying cars and trips to Mars, has made the United States of America his grandest test case yet for an unproved and unregulated new technology.
He is hardly alone in his efforts to frame A.I. as a societal savior that will usher in a utopian era of efficiency.
The tech investor Marc Andreessen recently posted on X that wages will “logically, necessarily” crash in the A.I. era—but that A.I. will also solve the problem, by reducing the price of “goods and services” to “near zero.” (Any explanation of how that would happen was not forthcoming.)
Last month, Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI and perhaps Musk’s primary nemesis, launched a five-hundred-billion-dollar data-center initiative called Stargate with the coöperation of Trump.
… In a recent article for the advocacy nonprofit Tech Policy Press, the respected A.I. researcher Eryk Salvaggio labelled Musk’s activities as an “AI coup.”
… A government run by people is cautious and slow by design; a machine-automated version will be fast and ruthless, reducing the need for either human labor or human decision-making.
… Trump and Musk both love to blame the country’s problems on the so-called deep state, the federal employees who maintain the government’s day-to-day operations.
As many of those people now find themselves locked out of their offices, with their work phones deactivated, a new, inherently undemocratic deep state is moving in to fill the void: a system imposed by machines and the tiny élite who designed them.
With doge, Musk is not only sidelining Congress and threatening to defy the courts, helping to bring the country to the point of constitutional crisis; he is also smuggling into our federal bureaucracy the seeds of a new authoritarian regime—techno-fascism by chatbot.
… the Muskian technocracy aims for something more expansive, using artificial intelligence to supplant the messy mechanisms of democracy itself.
Human judgment is being replaced by answers spit out by machines without reasoned debate or oversight: cut that program, eliminate this funding, fire those employees.
One of the alarming aspects of this approach is that A.I., in its current form, is simply not effective enough to replace human knowledge or reasoning.
Americans got a taste of the technology’s shortcomings during the Super Bowl on Sunday, when a commercial for Google’s Gemini A.I. that ran in Wisconsin claimed, erroneously, that Gouda made up more than half of all global cheese consumption.
Musk, though, appears to have few qualms about touting A.I.’s conclusions as fact. Earlier this month, on X, he accused “career Treasury officials” of breaking the law by paying vouchers that were not approved by Congress.
His evidence for this claim was a passage about the law generated by Grok, X’s A.I. model, as if the program were his lawyer. (Actual human legal experts quickly disputedthe claim.) …”
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Trump Advisers Look to Shift US Foreign Aid to Wall Street Ally
- Potential shift could give Wall Street a greater role
- Comes as Elon Musk dismantles main instrument of US soft power
“… The new approach would see reduced humanitarian assistance and a greater role for private equity groups, hedge funds and other investors in projecting economic might as the US competes for influence and strategic projects overseas with China.
It comes as billionaire Elon Musk has been pushing - with Trump’s blessing - to shut down the $43 billion US Agency for International Development, long a centerpiece of aid efforts. …”
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—> 
Paine
Iconic Member
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Elon Musk: Austerity for Thee but Not for Me
This week, as Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” was attempting to further gut the US government, his rocket company SpaceX was cementing a NASA contract adding millions of dollars to its already massive deal with the space agency.
jacobin.com
“As Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was reportedly canceling Department of Education contracts in the name of frugality, Musk’s rocket company was this week cementing a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) contract adding millions of dollars to its already massive deal with the space agency, according to government documents reviewed by the Lever.
The new ‘supplemental’ contract dated February 10 adds $7.5 million to SpaceX’s NASA work, according to Federal Procurement Data System records. The government has already committed $3.9 billion to SpaceX as part of its NASA deal, which is projected to cost up to $4.4 billion by the middle of President Donald Trump’s term.”
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- Messages
- 15,320
Elon Musk’s A.I.-Fuelled War on Human Agency
Musk seeks not only to dismantle the federal government but to install his own technological vision of the future at its heart—techno-fascism by chatbot.
Elon Musk’s A.I.-Fuelled War on Human Agency
Musk seeks not only to dismantle the federal government but to install his own technological vision of the future at its heart—techno-fascism by chatbot.www.newyorker.com
“… Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla software engineer who is now a deputy commissioner at the Federal Acquisition Service, recently told workers at the General Services Administration that the agency will be driven by an “A.I.-first strategy,” which includes plans for a chatbot to analyze its contracts.
doge is reportedly using A.I. software to identify potential budget reductions at the Department of Education. Anecdotes are circulating about A.I. filters that scan Department of Treasury grant proposals for forbidden terms—including “climate change” and “gender identity”—and then block the proposals.
“Everything that can be machine-automated will be,” one government official told the Washington Post. “And the technocrats will replace the bureaucrats.”
The federal government is, in effect, suddenly being run like an A.I. startup; Musk, an unelected billionaire, a maestro of flying cars and trips to Mars, has made the United States of America his grandest test case yet for an unproved and unregulated new technology.
He is hardly alone in his efforts to frame A.I. as a societal savior that will usher in a utopian era of efficiency.
The tech investor Marc Andreessen recently posted on X that wages will “logically, necessarily” crash in the A.I. era—but that A.I. will also solve the problem, by reducing the price of “goods and services” to “near zero.” (Any explanation of how that would happen was not forthcoming.)
Last month, Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI and perhaps Musk’s primary nemesis, launched a five-hundred-billion-dollar data-center initiative called Stargate with the coöperation of Trump.
… In a recent article for the advocacy nonprofit Tech Policy Press, the respected A.I. researcher Eryk Salvaggio labelled Musk’s activities as an “AI coup.”
… A government run by people is cautious and slow by design; a machine-automated version will be fast and ruthless, reducing the need for either human labor or human decision-making.
… Trump and Musk both love to blame the country’s problems on the so-called deep state, the federal employees who maintain the government’s day-to-day operations.
As many of those people now find themselves locked out of their offices, with their work phones deactivated, a new, inherently undemocratic deep state is moving in to fill the void: a system imposed by machines and the tiny élite who designed them.
With doge, Musk is not only sidelining Congress and threatening to defy the courts, helping to bring the country to the point of constitutional crisis; he is also smuggling into our federal bureaucracy the seeds of a new authoritarian regime—techno-fascism by chatbot.
… the Muskian technocracy aims for something more expansive, using artificial intelligence to supplant the messy mechanisms of democracy itself.
Human judgment is being replaced by answers spit out by machines without reasoned debate or oversight: cut that program, eliminate this funding, fire those employees.
One of the alarming aspects of this approach is that A.I., in its current form, is simply not effective enough to replace human knowledge or reasoning.
Americans got a taste of the technology’s shortcomings during the Super Bowl on Sunday, when a commercial for Google’s Gemini A.I. that ran in Wisconsin claimed, erroneously, that Gouda made up more than half of all global cheese consumption.
Musk, though, appears to have few qualms about touting A.I.’s conclusions as fact. Earlier this month, on X, he accused “career Treasury officials” of breaking the law by paying vouchers that were not approved by Congress.
His evidence for this claim was a passage about the law generated by Grok, X’s A.I. model, as if the program were his lawyer. (Actual human legal experts quickly disputedthe claim.) …”
Callatoroy
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I will admit it takes some big balls and a "fuck any appearance of hypocrisy" to start this thread and post all the faux anger / indignation that is sure to come given how joe weaponized the justice dept and his pardon power. I thought you guys had accepted you lost the moral high ground here but hell no. You just ran up the back side of the hill and now pretend you never tumbled down the front Can't hide all the shit stains on your clothes though as they tell the truth.
At least I know my buddies lawtig and WM won't be offering much in this thread because I remember their previous condemnations of joe's use of pardons. My prediction is either this will be a really short thread as people care about not being hypocrites, or It will be a very large thread because the left doesn't give two shits about hypocrisy because its ingrained in their DNA.
At least I know my buddies lawtig and WM won't be offering much in this thread because I remember their previous condemnations of joe's use of pardons. My prediction is either this will be a really short thread as people care about not being hypocrites, or It will be a very large thread because the left doesn't give two shits about hypocrisy because its ingrained in their DNA.
dukeman92
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Take notes, Zen. THIS is how you troll.
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I'd be fine if they just got on the wrong airplane together.
BillOfRights
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