But that's not bi-directional is it?

2/14/2025 6:08:45 PM

^^

Quote :

"they have the right to do that and probably prefer employees that are vaccinated against a deadly virus over employees who are vulnerable to dying from said deadly virus every company should mandate it "

Narrator: he does not in fact want to leave people alone.

I wanted to be left alone.

2/14/2025 6:24:33 PM

https://x.com/stclairashley/status/1890554279749951687

2/14/2025 8:12:26 PM

You survived.

2/14/2025 8:54:40 PM

As did 99.99% in our age group and 100% without some kind of comorbidity.

2/14/2025 9:26:27 PM

Jesus we lost Ken too

Sucks for us, but I'm sure your Führer will reward you greatly.

Dude is spearheading a wildly illegal hostile takeover of our federal government where the intent is replacing the civil service with patronage, stealing data for his personal gain, "deleting" agencies and regulations that legally regulate his companies yada yada yada. He's placing 19 year old college students in charge of federal agencies. Please don't tell me you're so fond of technocrats that you think they should be in charge of every facet of government.

I don't need a nuanced take on this dude. Wanna offer a nuanced take on his dismantling of USAID and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau? Or do you just want to join us in calling that shit evil? How many humans will die because of these actions? Guess what - Those are just the first few plays in his playbook. The point is to inflict harm and stoke fear in service of consolidating power.

He's an hypocritical illegal immigrant gutter rat gnawing his way through our federal government in service of his own ego and financial interests, consolidating as much power as possible.

Our only hope is the other two branches of government grow some fucking balls and stop them before they consolidate enough power for there to never be legitimate elections again. Odds of that happening are low as fuck.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/02/doge-civil-servant-purge/681671/

[Edited on February 15, 2025 at 1:14 AM. Reason : ]

2/15/2025 12:50:08 AM

Quote :

" Narrator: he does not in fact want to leave people alone. I wanted to be left alone."

great to see our resident Elon bootlicker compare a choice to something a person is born with

you weren’t born an anti-vaxxer, dipshit

there is no comparison between a person existing vs. someone choosing to actively harm people

2/15/2025 1:58:34 AM

Babies.. before we're done here.. y'all be wearing gold-plated diapers.

2/15/2025 3:35:33 AM

Quote :

"there is no comparison between a person existing vs. someone choosing to actively harm people"

We went over this. I was remote and I relocated somewhere I had no possibility of spreading it. Then when it became apparent everyone was still getting Covid, the gaslighting became "oh it's to stop severe cases."

"Left alone, unless some billion dollar industry has a profit incentive and I'm scared." --tgl

"Born that way" but needs grotesque surgeries and expensive pharma.

Quote :

"Dude is spearheading a wildly illegal hostile takeover of our federal government "

We spend $1 trillion a year now on interest payments to debt, more than defense. Every politician who said they'd do something about it has not or has been blocked. What are our options? Default? Raise taxes to 100%? You could confiscate the top 10 billionaires, assuming you could sell their assets dollar for dollar, and you'd only fund the gov for a couple of months.

Not a fan of the credit bureau shutdown, but something extreme had to be done.



[Edited on February 15, 2025 at 6:34 AM. Reason : A]

[Edited on February 15, 2025 at 6:35 AM. Reason : A]

2/15/2025 6:23:51 AM

Elon Musk having a kid with a Twitter pundit, is... perfect

I wonder how her motherly instincts will come into play -- will she try to distance the kid from it all, or embrace him as an heir of Musk

Again, this is an insight into his mindset. People are all like " where are the conservative values" -- kings of culturally conservative countries have always done this stuff, the rules are only ever for the commoners... there's no point making that point, no MAGA or christian will care. and Elon sees himself as the same -- "the world's savior", look back up to the article I linked

[Edited on February 15, 2025 at 7:16 AM. Reason : 1]

2/15/2025 7:12:06 AM

Quote :

"Jesus we lost Ken too"

sorry, i'm not playing team democrat anymore. the dems let me down with their own nonsense, corruption and incompetence for the last decade, and now we're stuck with trump 2.0. the only way out of this is to try to speak some sense to the dems so they clean up their own act. y'all may not like to hear the fact that YOU may be wrong about some things, that YOU may have been misled and deceived, but somebody's got to say it.

Quote :

"I'm sure your Führer will reward you greatly"

childish.

Quote :

"Dude is spearheading a wildly illegal hostile takeover of our federal government"

why add the word wildly. doesn't make it more illegal. same for "hostile" don't play word games to try to strengthen your point.

the people voted for trump and elon knowing that they were going to clean house. that's democracy. you can say it's illegal all you want, and sure some of it might be, and we'll see what the courts have to say in the end, but we all know that dems were going to bitch and complain about literally any thing trump/elon did. i'm tuning out this round of dems cry wolf. dems should have taken care of these budget issues when they had the chance, now the bureaucracy is getting the machete. i don't know how all this will turn out in the end, but i hope a little creative destruction in the government will revitalize it in the long run. i'll take some pain now if it means my children inherit a stronger country.

Quote :

"the intent is replacing the civil service with patronage"

citation needed.

Quote :

"stealing data for his personal gain"

citation needed.

Quote :

"He's placing 19 year old college students in charge of federal agencies"

don't be ageist.

Quote :

"Please don't tell me you're so fond of technocrats that you think they should be in charge of every facet of government"

let's be clear, i'm not fond of anything that's happening.

Quote :

"I don't need a nuanced take on this dude"

yes, yes you do. but if you want to stay a bot and let other people do the thinking for you, that's your choice.

Quote :

"dismantling of USAID and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau"

do you actually want to talk about USAID and CFPB? because we can do that. but you're gonna need to bring some nuance.

Quote :

"do you just want to join us in calling that shit evil"

one of us. one of us...

Quote :

"How many humans will die because of these actions"

people have agency. the US government is not the master of your fate.

Quote :

"The point is to inflict harm and stoke fear in service of consolidating power."

citation needed.

Quote :

"He's an hypocritical illegal immigrant"

citation needed.

Quote :

"in service of his own ego and financial interests"

citation needed.

Quote :

"Babies.. before we're done here.. y'all be wearing gold-plated diapers."

yep, there's some truth to this. luxury beliefs and affluent progressive activism go hand in hand.

2/15/2025 7:59:52 AM

Quote :

"Elon Musk having a kid with a Twitter pundit, is... perfect"

Isn't it? Especially the seething of the Christian side that has aligned themselves with him.

2/15/2025 10:26:48 AM

^

Yeah

The real 'conservative' people -- gender roles, traditional values -- in today's time don't seek out the limelight, because seeking out controversy or attention is antithetical to the values that they truly embody. These guys are still normal people, they're not radicalized, they're just true to who they are. They don't have "hate" inside them, even if they are a bit racist or sexist "technically". These guys would've been very influential back in the day -- when this was the norm. Today, they'll be no-name senators at best

2/15/2025 10:38:34 AM

I do wonder if and how long it will take for Elon and Trump to have a falling out.

[Edited on February 15, 2025 at 10:48 AM. Reason : and whether it will involve sama]

2/15/2025 10:47:48 AM

https://www.wired.com/story/plaintext-elon-musk-doge-youth-squad/

Quote :

" The DOGE Squad Is Squandering a Once-in-a-Lifetime Opportunity Government tech experts say Elon Musk’s team could have seized the moment to make Washington work better."

2/15/2025 10:50:19 AM

^^ there will be ample opportunity for someone to throw someone else under the bus. I'd assume Elon would be a good target since he's the public figurehead of all these cuts. If some relatable normal looking government employees are crying about their kids and not being able to feed them because they lost their job to Elon, the tide could turn against him.

2/15/2025 11:28:28 AM

Quote :

"The DOGE Squad Is Squandering a Once-in-a-Lifetime Opportunity Government tech experts say Elon Musk’s team could have seized the moment to make Washington work better"

agreed. so far it seems motivated by half-ideological purge, half spending cuts. not ideal by any means.

but the real conclusion should be that DEMOCRATS squandered these opportunities.

Quote :

"When news first broke about Elon Musk’s tech takeover of the United States government, a number of people who had spent years trying to transform federal IT practices were surprisingly hopeful. Maybe, they dreamed, Elon Musk and his team at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) would provide a long-needed jolt to an intransigent and antediluvian bureaucracy. “It’s beyond debate that a more aggressive approach was necessary if we were ever going to make any progress in our lifetimes,” says Mikey Dickerson, who was the founding administrator of the United States Digital Service, which has now been refashioned into Musk’s US DOGE Service. (He left in 2017, before Trump was inaugurated the first time.) Dickerson says the executive order that Trump issued on day one of his second term, which established DOGE as a temporary organization within the government, was actually something he would have liked to see in Obama’s founding charter for the agency."

Quote :

"Before the inauguration, Jennifer Pahlka, former deputy chief technology officer under Obama and one of the USDS founders, wrote an essay called “Bringing Elon to a Knife Fight,” which summed up the feeling: “A lot of the government tech community … don’t see DOGE as their savior, but they are feeling vindicated after years of shouting into the void.”"

we always knew republicans and especially trump were not going to be responsible stewards of the US government and of liberal American values. we should be pissed at ourselves for letting it get to the point where voters wanted MAGA instead of whatever the Dems were offering. biden and team should have seen the threats coming and neutralized the maga talking points. take the border seriously. get the budget under control. deal sternly and publicly with in-party corruption. call out the excesses of the activist class. don't alienate would-be allies. for god sake don't let the 80 year old run for re-election. it shouldn't have been that hard. even if you couldn't achieve it all, at least make it clear that these things are honest priorities.

all this complaining about maga is mostly a waste of time. focus on preparing a winning vision for 2026 and beyond.

[Edited on February 15, 2025 at 12:51 PM. Reason : let em off the hook]

2/15/2025 12:25:03 PM

If spending cuts were the goal, why not send accountants instead of SW developers?

2/15/2025 2:19:24 PM

^ it's not just cuts. It's people, spending cuts and regulations. There are a few finance ones if you look through the public lists
Lots of HR and gov workers too.

https://www.businessinsider.com/doge-staff-list-white-house-2025-2

2/15/2025 2:52:17 PM

^^Or at least send accounting SW developers.

2/15/2025 3:06:33 PM

At this point they need more finance since they need to forecast in the future what they are doing. The accounting side is also needed for the controls after they figure out what they are keeping and to hopefully recover some money in places it's not needed.

2/15/2025 3:18:59 PM

You act like these people have a coherent plan

2/16/2025 4:30:36 PM

I just hope that Elon-toxicity doesn't further fuck up the price of my TSLA stock, and I hope he doesn't fuck up my AAPL stock (due to Apple partnering with Starlink for iPhones)

2/16/2025 11:36:05 PM

He caught a rocket with chopsticks. Not guilty!

2/17/2025 7:34:58 AM

https://www.disruptionist.com/p/elon-musks-x-blocks-links-to-signal

-1

2/17/2025 8:58:27 AM

Such a free speech absolutist

2/17/2025 9:06:39 AM

^^
-1 indeed. what a shame!

but they've been doing small stuff like this since he bought it. I remember seeing people who criticised him get banned

2/17/2025 11:26:20 AM

https://defector.com/the-country-that-was-here-is-gone?giftLink=97d04d7c168a65dd979caa8710068cc8

2/17/2025 12:42:59 PM

I don't accept your gift to "defector.com"

2/17/2025 3:46:17 PM

https://bsky.app/profile/whstancil.bsky.social/post/3lihy5xvguc2j

2/18/2025 2:23:15 PM

"guys, you really should stop calling people Nazis, it's so tired and totally not accurate at all, they barely even follow self-avowed Nazi accounts on social media, I mean, just stop with the hyperbole already"

2/18/2025 4:24:26 PM

You forgot "This is why your side lost"

2/18/2025 4:28:04 PM

^^ you have to scroll back to January 16th to find those posts. The account In question posts multiple times a day, so at a minimum you're talking 500 posts to get to the Nazi content. 99.9% of the content looks like scantily clad women in bathing suits in summer looking environments.

I know you love to live in fantasy Gotcha! Nazi land but it looks more like someone trolling for baby mammas. The probability someone following a thousand accounts would see nazi content with that kind of ratio is super low.

2/18/2025 4:48:41 PM

Oh yes, we gotta go all the way back to....let me see here...one month ago to see evidence of Nazi support. GTFO here with that BS. It's like saying Hey, I'm not a murderer...I haven't murdered anyone since last month!

2/18/2025 6:29:07 PM

The argument was actually that out of 500 posts of the account 2 are Nazi content. He would have had to followed the account that day to had any chance in seeing it when you factor in he follows over 1000 accounts.

2/18/2025 6:56:14 PM

Quote :

"If spending cuts were the goal, why not send accountants instead of SW developers?"

RIGHT? FFS, the whole notion of DOGE doing this is patently absurd. An outfit whose mission is modernizing federal IT infrastructure is suddenly tasked with eliminating vast swaths of government and rooting out fraud waste and abuse, and we're supposed to go "well, we've needed to modernize our IT for a while?" Seriously, qfred?

Whether US bureaucracy is out of control and needs to be reigned in notwithstanding, this is an asinine way to go about it. We've got wholly unvetted individuals with unknown or inadequate skillsets commensurate to the task at hand being given wholesale control over the IT systems of multiple massive federal agencies at once and being tasked, supposedly, to root out fraud waste and abuse in government programs they know nothing about. These are individuals I likely wouldn't trust to maintain a software system without supervision, as they likely haven't yet learned not to delete code at random, yet they are being allowed to "delete" whole government agencies. That's fucking absurd at every level. It's how you wind up firing the people who manage and maintain our nuclear weapons without knowing they fucking manage and maintain our fucking nuclear weapons.

Add to that the total lack of transparency about it, the haphazard way things are being conducted, and the demands for vast swaths of personal and confidential data, coupled with no knowledge of who has access or what they are doing with it, and people are right to be screaming bloody murder.

2/18/2025 8:22:26 PM

Maybe they should say they are going to form a committee and research it another forty years when we pay 100% of our income to the debt interest.

Using the US Digital Service is probably the only practical way to do any of it. Delete the servers and the agencies cease to exist. A government "Chaos Monkey".

2/18/2025 8:44:36 PM

Quote :

"The argument was actually that out of 500 posts of the account 2 are Nazi content. He would have had to followed the account that day to had any chance in seeing it when you factor in he follows over 1000 accounts."

that’s assuming that the algorithm didn’t direct him to the nazi account based on previous twitter interactions with nazis

[Edited on February 18, 2025 at 9:13 PM. Reason : .]

2/18/2025 9:09:13 PM

^^^^Just stop with the BS already. NOTHING about the point I made is refuted by what you just said. I mean, I've only killed two people out of over 8 billion...so my murders are even LESS frequent than 2 out of 500, by MAGNITUDES. So I'm not a fucking murderer because of that?? That's equivalent to what YOU are attempting to argue, so GTFO, your "argument" is complete BS.

Look, you gotta understand that if you do x, even if rarely, you still did x. That is undeniable. So just quit your gaslighting BS here; every bit of it is wrong, and you can't fix it to be right. A person that merely dabbles in Naziism is still a fucking Nazi.

[Edited on February 18, 2025 at 9:12 PM. Reason : ^]

2/18/2025 9:12:31 PM

Right, I feel pretty confident that the number of times I have posted Nazi propaganda to social media is considerably less than "2." It's not just a "ehhh, sometimes some Nazi shit slips in there" sort of thing.

2/18/2025 9:17:15 PM

This wasn't a post by Elon. It's an account he followed that if you go to today you will see post after post of scantily clad girls. There are no discernable Nazi images until January 16th. One a flag, the other a video which would not be apparent unless you watched the video.

If you happened across the pictures of hot chicks and followed the account because of a couple of hot chicks you saw you would have no idea it ever posted anything about Nazis. No one looks at every post of an account to check for wrong think.before following it.

Even the Nazi salute shit is a stronger indicator than that dumbass post which means absolutely fucking nothing.

It's sadder he followed a thirst trap account.


[Edited on February 18, 2025 at 9:53 PM. Reason : A]

2/18/2025 9:45:33 PM

you’d had a point if there wasn’t a mountain of evidence of him interacting with nazis on enough of a basis that is way more than a single “oops!!”

2/18/2025 9:57:34 PM

the Elon glazing is unreal. Must be a symptom of Long COVID.

2/18/2025 10:19:45 PM

From page 2 I called this. An autistic billionaire who has his rockets threatened will be a formidable force. A force that has a track record of getting big, previously thought impossible things done. In politics or government he will cut through it like a freshly forged sword through butter.

I think there are plenty of opportunities to argue whether Elon is a net good. Those are pretty interesting. All this haranguing over Nazis does is detract from legitimate criticism. Would the new fucking software please get developed and uploaded so we can discuss something else?



[Edited on February 18, 2025 at 10:40 PM. Reason : A]

2/18/2025 10:36:27 PM

there is no argument for Elon being a net good unless you are a bootlicker

and you can lick that boot as much as you want, but he’s not gonna give you a pat on the head, man

2/18/2025 11:41:21 PM

Bootlicker is a good descriptor for caelncsu

2/19/2025 12:28:19 AM

^^ why try when you can just repeat bottom of the barrel misleading propaganda and not think critically at all.

^ the guy that didn't do the thing the media and 80% of people wanted you to do in face of great pressure is the bootlicker. Got it. Would love to see how you derive that.

2/19/2025 6:20:55 AM

Quote :

"We spend $1 trillion a year now on interest payments to debt, more than defense. Every politician who said they'd do something about it has not or has been blocked. What are our options? Default? Raise taxes to 100%? You could confiscate the top 10 billionaires, assuming you could sell their assets dollar for dollar, and you'd only fund the gov for a couple of months. Not a fan of the credit bureau shutdown, but something extreme had to be done."

What Elon is doing doesn’t even amount to a drop in the bucket of spending. And you’ve got Trump saying he wants to spend more on military. not make any cuts to Social Security, Medicare, orMedicaid and he wants to pass tax cuts. The DEI culture war stuff, the foreign aid cuts…that’s not actually drastic change to US spending.

2/19/2025 9:13:19 AM

^ Regarding military rebuilding, Trump has expressed intentions to strengthen the military. In line with what Elon Musk has suggested, this could involve shifting focus towards smaller, more agile drones and AI-based systems rather than investing in expensive, human-piloted fighter jets costing billions. By removing the need for human pilots, the overall cost would decrease since there would be no requirement for life support systems designed for human crew members.

As for Social Security and Medicaid, there are indications that changes might be on the horizon. Note the fraud and old people being paid they mention over and over. It's possible that these programs could be portrayed as being riddled with fraud or inefficiency, potentially leading to claims that the funds have been misused or depleted. This could be used as a justification for restructuring or rebranding these programs, possibly in exchange for other benefits or reforms.

Additionally, there may be pressure from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), potentially influenced by figures like RFK, to reform end-of-life care. This could involve limiting expensive treatments, such as dialysis costing $100,000 or prescribing numerous medications (two dozen pills) for elderly individuals nearing the end of their lives. The proposed reform might restrict patients to fewer medications and require increased scrutiny for treatments paid for by the gov.

2/19/2025 10:17:33 AM

You could probably cut the entire federal workforce and still not account for a drop in the bucket.

People don’t realize just how much 1 trillion is. It’s just a word.

I’m conflicted. I’m somewhere between “”These cuts are doing nothing but cause pain” and “gotta start somewhere””

2/19/2025 10:20:28 AM