• C A B B A G E@feddit.ukEnglish
      2·
      21 hours ago

      How are these people brazillionaires and I’m schlepping away to not get my home taken off me by the bank? I can string a sentence together and do basic arithmetic, and I can count to twenty without taking off my shoes!

    • mosiacmango@lemm.ee
      271·
      2 days ago

      Its even more egregious.

      So far, doge claims it saved 45 billion on its website. When you add up the actual reciepts posted, it’s 16 billion. Of that 16 billion, half is this false 8 billion, which is 8 million, with 2.5 million already paid out, so actually just 5.5 million.

      So even by their records, which are not trustworthy, they may have cut 8 billion. The 100 billion number? Just something Charlie kirk made up. No other hard data at all.

  • Empricorn@feddit.nlEnglish
    58·
    2 days ago

    You can “save” a bunch of money by not paying the Fire Department. It’ll look great on a budget, and then you can enjoy the beautiful skyline of your city burning!

        • Empricorn@feddit.nlEnglish
          9·
          2 days ago

          That’s true! I just looked for the website and there’s nothing! Yay!!! I was worried something like 1.2 million Americans were dead because of it, but apparently not!

          (Satire. The CDC website still exists. For now…)

      • Trainguyrom@reddthat.comEnglish
        4·
        2 days ago

        There is a degree to which wild fires could be solved “just” by ramping up land management significantly to remove invasive species, remove dead growth and overgrowth, etc.

        The wildfires have been so bad primarily because of invasive species changing what grows where and breaking down natural fire protections, combined with climate change and reduced natural wildfires creating higher fire risk conditions

        • ryannathans@aussie.zone
          2·
          1 day ago

          My understanding is they also introduced Australian trees that drop huge amounts of combustible material to contribute to fires because they thrive in those conditions

  • frustrated_phagocytosis@fedia.io
    50·
    2 days ago

    Always ask: saved, for what? The money is appropriated by congress. You’re actively working to cut services and programs, not eliminating fraud, waste, or abuse in any way. Not that you’d know, because you already fired the people who track fraud, waste, and abuse for identifying your violations, repeatedly.

  • Supervisor194@lemmy.world
    15·
    2 days ago

    Why not one trillion? I mean shit, we’re gonna need 4.5 trillion to offset the giveaway to the billionaires. 100 billion is rookie numbers.

  • /home/pineapplelover@lemm.ee
    11·
    2 days ago

    Watch, they’ll cut everything and then they’ll somehow blame the dems for mistreating Veterans, causing huge epidemics, planes falling out of the skies, children dying, instigating genocides, and wars

  • JokeDeity@lemm.ee
    17·
    2 days ago

    I wish there was enough time to sit each of these troglodytes down and teach them the world from kindergarten and up. It clearly didn’t take the first time.

  • atro_city@fedia.io
    121·
    2 days ago

    Is this how nazi Germany started? Cutting all “unnecessary” projects and personnel then introducing “necessary” projects and personnel that they control…

    • AeonFelis@lemmy.worldEnglish
      51·
      2 days ago

      Did they? Do you have any sources? Because I did a quick search and couldn’t find anything about it (though I’ll admit I did not invest too much time into that search)

      The Nazi regime did lots of shitty things over half a century ago. The Trump administration does lots of shitty things right now. There is an overlap - but this Venn diagram is not a circle.

        • AeonFelis@lemmy.worldEnglish
          31·
          2 days ago

          What about it? I don’t see anything there that’s about “Cutting all “unnecessary” projects”, and rather than “introducing “necessary” projects and personnel that they control” it looks like they directly took control on the existing ones.

          The only thing that, if you squint hard enough, can remotely resemble cutoffs was the Law for the Restoration of a Professional Civil Service - which would be better equated to the DEI purge than to the cutoffs that this post is all about.

          • atro_city@fedia.io
            1·
            1 day ago

            It’s the concept, not the individual steps.

            Gleichschaltung is a compound word that comes from the German words gleich (same) and schaltung (circuit) and was derived from an electrical engineering term meaning that all switches are put on the same circuit allowing them all to be activated by throwing a single master switch.[4] Its first use is credited to Reich Justice Minister Franz Gürtner.[5] It has been variously translated as “coordination”,[6][7][8] “Nazification of state and society”,[9] “synchronization”,[5] and “bringing into line”.

            Every country requires different steps, so you can’t copy paste them. Germany was (and still is) a multi-party democracy using plurality voting. Some of the institutions are the same, but not all. Nazification has to be tailored to the system. One important step is to replace opposition at every level. If you haven’t noticed, the US is in the middle of a coordinated cleansing at federal level right now.

            • AeonFelis@lemmy.worldEnglish
              11·
              21 hours ago

              Some generalization is always required when drawing equivalences, but if you generalize too much your logic becomes circular. For example - let’s overgeneralize to the max:

              • We determine that what the Trump administration did was bad because it’s similar to what the Nazi regime did.
              • We determine that what the Trump administration did was similar to what the Nazi regime did because both things were bad.

              Of course, I’m not claiming that you took it that far. Instead of going all the way to “evil”, you’ve only generalized up to “grabbing power”:

              • We determine that the Trump administration is grabbing power because it does something similar to what the Nazi regime did.
              • We determine that the Trump administration something similar to what the Nazi regime did because they were both power-grabbing moves.

              Now, this version does require some non-circular arguing - showing that DOGE’s project cuts are actually power-grabbing moves in disguise. But there are two problems with it:

              1. Power-grabbing is not a Nazi-specific thing - many groups have seized political power during the course of history. And not all these groups were evil - at this level of generalization, one could argue that democratic revolutions took power from monarchs and had to convert the institutions to be democratic. And even among the evil movements that did this - the Nazi were uniquely evil, because of other things they did.

              2. You were trying to masquerade this generalized argument as a more specific argument:

                Is this how nazi Germany started? Cutting all “unnecessary” projects and personnel then introducing “necessary” projects and personnel that they control…

                This is a very specific argument - “here is a specific tactic the Nazis used to grab power, and the Trump administration uses the same tactic!”. The logic here is not circular. The only problem with it is that it isn’t true.

              Comparison to Nazism is the nuclear weapon of debates. Trumps administration did some things that warrant an exemption from Godwin’s law. Concentration camps for immigrants is one of them. Purging minorities from federal jobs is another. But this? The very fact they are trying to grab power? This does not justify a comparison to the Nazis.

  • yarr@feddit.nlEnglish
    410·
    2 days ago

    If your premise is “The government does nothing beneficial” then cutting it makes sense 100% of the time. I wish Elon would take some time to check out Chesterton’s fence. I’ll deliberately not link that here to frustrate readers.