Trump / Musk (other than DOGE) Omnibus Thread
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Turd Ferguson
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Have them all arrested and impeached for breaking the law and contempt of court.
gtyellowjacket
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I don't think we know that, but even if you're right, is ISS the best form factor for that? There are no facilities to build anything on that station. Any materials like fuel or foodstuffs can be kept in orbit on an unmanned station or location for a whole lot less than ISS. You can house a few people and keep them out in space while you wait for something, but I can't think of too many scenarios where that's going to be the right solution for the mission to Mars.
Mulberry Heel
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I seriously doubt that these Trump voters who have lost their jobs or don't like what Trump/Musk are doing are going to suddenly vote Democratic, but they could easily stay home in 2026, which is what happened in 2018.
The science is really clear. Getting out of a gravity well consumes a tremendous percentage of the fuel it takes to go anywhere in space. Jerry Pournelle wrote a long treatise on this back in the 1980s that still essentially holds.
Now, whether ISS is relevant to that , I don't have a single clue. I know that some sort of orbital station is going to be essential at some point in the development of space exploration.
gtyellowjacket
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Certainly much fuel is consumed leaving the earth but it doesn't necessarily follow that a space station is going to be essential for space exploration. We didn't use a space station for our moon missions and we haven't used a space station for any of our more recent missions to Mars, Venus, Mercury, Jupiter or Saturn.
Not going to argue this on a message board. I don't know enough physics to explain it properly and you don't seem to amenable to the obvious logic. If you're interested , there's a lot of discussion of the whys online. They can give you an educated POV.
It's true that this might not be important to us for 25 or more years but, barring some tremendous breakthrough in propulsion, it's going to be. We'll never properly utilize space as long as everything has to be launched out of earth's gravity well. We might as well lay the foundation as soon as possible.
He can’t name another former President.
StrangePackage
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Interesting that he doesn't seem nearly so concerned about his child when he's in a secured area...
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Homophones aside, the notion that Apple wouldn’t invest in America except for Trump policies is ludicrous on its face.
But the Apple announcement is a significant expansion of its existing efforts to increase its advanced mfg footprint in the U.S.:
“Apple AAPL -0.11%decrease; red down pointing triangle said it plans to spend more than $500 billion over the next four years to expand its manufacturing footprint in the U.S.
… The new factory is to produce servers supporting Apple Intelligence, the company’s generative-AI system.
Apple also plans to double its U.S. Advanced Manufacturing Fund, which was created in 2017 to invest in U.S. companies that do advanced manufacturing. …”
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More than 150,000 Canadians sign petition to revoke Musk’s citizenship
Parliamentary petition launched due to billionaire’s link to Trump, who has repeatedly threatened to conquer Canada
As the Canadian Press noted, petitions like Reed’s require 500 or more signatures for them to gain the certification necessary to be presented to Canada’s House of Commons and potentially garner a formal government response. Reed’s petition evidently had no trouble clearing that threshold, having collected about 167,000 signatures as of early Monday, with no indication that the number would soon stop rising.
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Good move mods. Honestly I'm doing my best to not become subhuman and put myself on the level of Elon and those who revel in his contemptuous nature.
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“… Musk himself has recently tried to associate himself with the Clinton effort: “What @DOGE is doing is similar to Clinton/Gore Dem policies of the 1990s,” he posted on his social platform X, using his acronym for the effort in charge of the cuts, the Department of Government Efficiency.
But the Reinventing Government project was nearly the opposite of the abrupt, chaotic Musk effort, say those who ran it or watched it unfold. It was authorized by bipartisan congressional legislation, worked slowly over several years to identify inefficiencies and involved federal workers in re-envisioning their jobs.
“There was a tremendous effort put into understanding what should happen and what should change,” said Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service, which seeks to improve the federal workforce. “What is happening now is actually taking us backwards.” …”
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“…
Those familiar with the Clinton-era Reinventing Government push say it holds lessons for both how to remake the federal bureaucracy and the comparatively meager savings that can be achieved from such an effort.
“We did it without a constitutional crisis,” said Elaine Kamarck, who ran Reinventing Government as a senior Gore adviser in the 1990s. “Unlike these people, we didn’t think there were vast trillions in efficiencies. ... Their mandate is only to cut. Our was: Works better, costs less.”
Kamarck said the initiative grew to a 400-person staff recruited from existing workers within the federal agencies. They set about making the government more efficient and focused on customer service, introducing private sector-style metrics such as performance standards for workers.
The Reinventing Government team also pushed the workforce to embrace a brand new technology — the internet. Many governmental web sites and programs, including the electronic filing of income taxes, date back to the Reinventing Government initiative.
… The Clinton administration also worked with Congress to authorize $25,000 buyouts for federal workers and ended up eliminating what Kamarck said were more than 400,000 federal positions between 1993 and 2000 through a combination of voluntary departures, attrition and a relatively small number of layoffs.
Kettl said the job cuts didn’t save money because the government had to turn around and hire contractors to perform the tasks of workers who left — something he worries will happen again if Musk and Trump continue to slash the federal workforce.
…Kamarck estimated the total savings of Reinventing Government at $146 billion — a considerable amount, but still only a tiny sliver of the federal budget. She contrasted the slow, deliberative and collaborative approach her team took with Musk’s breakneck pace, led by a team of young outsiders he has brought in to slash agencies and their workforce.
The reason Reinventing Government moved slowly, Kamarck said, was that it didn’t want to interfere with the myriad crucial roles of government while restructuring it. Musk seems to have few such concerns, she fears.
. …”
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How Trump’s government-cutting moves risk exposing the CIA’s secrets
“The CIA is conducting a formal review to assess any potential damage from an unclassified email sent to the White House in early February that identified for possible layoffs some officers by first name and last initial and could’ve exposed the roles of people working undercover, a source familiar with the matter told CNN.
That’s just one of multiple aftershocks from President Donald Trump’s push to take a jackhammer to the federal government – including the CIA. The administration’s efforts to cut the workforce and audit spending at the CIA and elsewhere threaten to jeopardize some of the government’s most sensitive work, current and former US officials familiar with internal deliberations say.
Across the river in Washington, a senior career Treasury Department official delivered a memo warning Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent that granting a 25-year-old computer engineer with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency access to the government’s ultra-sensitive payments system risked exposing highly classified CIA payments that flow through it.
And on the CIA’s 7th floor — home to top leadership — some officers are also quietly discussing how mass firings and the buyouts already offered to staff risk creating a group of disgruntled former employees who might be motivated to take what they know to a foreign intelligence service. …”
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“… There is also a concern that some US embassy positions that are actually filled by CIA officers under cover may now be at risk of being revealed — potentially angering the host nation and exposing companies or endangering CIA assets who are known to have met with past occupants of the role.
The internal review — known as a damage assessment — will almost certainly assess not only whether individual officers are now at risk if they go to their intended posting, but whether the positions themselves have been compromised and can no longer be filled by agency officers going forward, former intelligence officials said.
“Your predecessor was in that position, as were the five officers before them. Now the host country and adversaries know this person going to this position in the embassy is agency,” said one former CIA officer, speaking hypothetically. “They now assume the predecessors were the same [and] work backwards and find out their collective footprint.”
“The position is now burned.” …”
heelinhell
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Assuming that our democratic republic survives, our next Democratic president is going to have a much larger task cleaning up the mess left to him or her than Obama had cleaning up after Bush or Biden cleaning up after Trump 1.0