Trump - 4 more years of this at least...

[TheDemonLord]

Come on man, that is a false fact....his ear recovered very quickly and so biggly that you cannot see any lost part.

But it was still shot off by a wannabe assassin aiming at his head.

I think you are missing the wood for the trees.

Another false fact, Trump doesnt have any friends he has business acquaintances.....every interaction is a transaction.

Watch any interaction with any celebrity with Trump before 2014 - all smiles and hugs and full of good things to say. Once he announced his nomination, they all turned on him.

Even if they are business acquaintances - that has still gotta sting.

Just look at him and his besty Epstein the pedo.....birds of a feather flock together.

If Trump was implicated in the Epstein files, they would have been 'Leaked' years ago. In the same way that people suddenly remembered totally being Sexually Assaulted by Trump decades ago, right before a key election time period.

The fact that they havent been leaked gives a very strong indication he is not in there.

[sugilite:Me]

Good morning Dean and tdl, I will answer both of you in one go, a 2 for if you like.
First of all, I do admire a lot of what Musk has done and he has built some spectacular companies no doubt. To TDL, yes he has changed the dynamics of twitter greatly and it is not as much a left wing echo chamber. However, this DOGE gig is neither building a company, or changing social political leanings of a user base. The responsibilities of this DOGE thing is cutting spending and Government structure down to size. A noble endeavor of which I approve greatly of the concept btw. From what I can make out, the closest thing Musk has done to the rigors of that role is restructure twitter. And on the tech front, he did a terrible, terrible job. He came is and slashed and burned the IT infrastructure supporting twitter. He did so without first finding out the best possible way of doing it. Then he displayed great hubris in overestimating what the remaining infrastructure the network could handle. I will list 3 cases below that highlight why Musks combination of impatience and hubris make him a poor choice for the position.
1. He absolutely FUCKED Ron Desantis Presidential nomination roll out. The network crashed big time.
2. His big podcast with trump, the exact same thing happened. He blamed a DDOS attack, which I doubt was the reason, and even if it was, he should of foreseen that. DDOS can be mitigated - if it even was that.
3. This one is a tesla fuck up. He fired his entire super charger team after having a tantrum that it's leader did not cull enough staff, then had to go back cap in hand rehiring a bunch of them.
https://www.msn.com/en-au/money/news...ff/ar-BB1mkEge

The twitter fuck ups 1 and 2, he has no excuse, he is a tech guy. Whether it was infrastructure like i believe it was, or he underestimated traffic and was not prepared for the capacity demands - both scenarios was a big fail - his fail.
The Tesla super chargers one highlights his petulant nature and the damage that does.

The intricacies and interconnections of Government departments absolutely will be very complex and would take a fair amount of time to decipher in order to make well thought out and strategic cuts. Musk is waaaaaaaaay to impatient to learn about those. It is inevitable his slash and burn techniques will do a lot of damage and ultimately hurt the American people.

Now the interesting part for me, when I used billionaires in plural relating to this DOGE initiative, TDL looks to have assumed I was talking about trump, and Dean seemed to miss it entirely. But I was actually referencing Ramaswamy, Mr under the radar. Ramaswamy ran the strangest presidential nomination campaign ever seen. Every time he got a mike in his hand he praised trump like a dizzy cheerleader. Don't believe me, watch the video below.
Clearly he has targeted one of trumps worst character flaws, his ability to be manipulated through flattery. So Ramaswamy clearly was misusing the presidential nominee process for some sort of mechanism to curry flavor with trump. And it worked, look at the position he has now. So a manipulating billionaire with a long term goal carried out in plain view. This guy cannot be trusted, no fucking way. And look how he flew under both of your radars. To me it looks like the guys main qualification was giving trump a very skilled handjob under the table.

Again, I praise the concept of DOGE, but there will for sure be vastly better qualified people trump could of chosen.
I invite the pair of you drop the fanboi stance and open your eyes.

I have no evidence to believe he wouldn’t act in accordance with his roles terms and conditions, do you?

I know it wasnt asked of me, but I think it is an interesting question - and the answer varies wildly between Trump and Elon.

Mr Musk.

Musk is an interesting Character - it is Him that we really have to thank for overcoming some of the roadblocks to EVs. Under his stewardship of Twitter - it has gone from a place that had a demonstrable left-wing bias, to now having a much more neutral stance (which people say is a Right Wing Bias - but I digress).

Looking at how he acts and what projects he invests in, I think it is fair to say he has a vision for a better world. EVs being the obvious example, but I think SpaceX and his goal of a Martian Colony is also key here - in the other thread we talked about resource extraction and ecological damage - if there is no known ecology, then theoretically that should be the greenlight to pillage with wild-abandon.

[sugilite:Me]

Another false fact, Trump doesnt have any friends he has business acquaintances.....every interaction is a transaction.
Just look at him and his besty Epstein the pedo.....birds of a feather flock together.

Agreed, every one of tdl's items on the trump sacrifice list, he would happily make to get the most prestigious job in the USA.
In fact, trump really missed an opportunity by not getting into the cemeteries business. All the bodies of past allies he has thrown under the bus would of made him far wealthier than he is currently.

I have spoken about trumps "bravery" under fire before, though I would like to add that trumps ego is such that he could not possibly imagine a world without him in it. I think he believes the evangelical line he is protected by god. I suspect he is more likely being protected by the other christian teams leader

[TheDemonLord]

Good morning Dean and tdl, I will answer both of you in one go, a 2 for if you like.
First of all, I do admire a lot of what Musk has done and he has built some spectacular companies no doubt. To TDL, yes he has changed the dynamics of twitter greatly and it is not as much a left wing echo chamber. However, this DOGE gig is neither building a company, or changing social political leanings of a user base. The responsibilities of this DOGE thing is cutting spending and Government structure down to size. A noble endeavor of which I approve greatly of the concept btw. From what I can make out, the closest thing Musk has done to the rigors of that role is restructure twitter. And on the tech front, he did a terrible, terrible job. He came is and slashed and burned the IT infrastructure supporting twitter. He did so without first finding out the best possible way of doing it. Then he displayed great hubris in overestimating what the remaining infrastructure the network could handle. I will list 3 cases below that highlight why Musks combination of impatience and hubris make him a poor choice for the position.
1. He absolutely FUCKED Ron Desantis Presidential nomination roll out. The network crashed big time.
2. His big podcast with trump, the exact same thing happened. He blamed a DDOS attack, which I doubt was the reason, and even if it was, he should of foreseen that. DDOS can be mitigated - if it even was that.
3. This one is a tesla fuck up. He fired his entire super charger team after having a tantrum that it's leader did not cull enough staff, then had to go back cap in hand rehiring a bunch of them.
https://www.msn.com/en-au/money/news...ff/ar-BB1mkEge

The twitter fuck ups 1 and 2, he has no excuse, he is a tech guy. Whether it was infrastructure like i believe it was, or he underestimated traffic and was not prepared for the capacity demands - both scenarios was a big fail - his fail.
The Tesla super chargers one highlights his petulant nature and the damage that does.

The intricacies and interconnections of Government departments absolutely will be very complex and would take a fair amount of time to decipher in order to make well thought out and strategic cuts. Musk is waaaaaaaaay to impatient to learn about those. It is inevitable his slash and burn techniques will do a lot of damage and ultimately hurt the American people.

Now the interesting part for me, when I used billionaires in plural relating to this DOGE initiative, TDL looks to have assumed I was talking about trump, and Dean seemed to miss it entirely. But I was actually referencing Ramaswamy, Mr under the radar. Ramaswamy ran the strangest presidential nomination campaign ever seen. Every time he got a mike in his hand he praised trump like a dizzy cheerleader. Don't believe me, watch the video below.
Clearly he has targeted one of trumps worst character flaws, his ability to be manipulated through flattery. So Ramaswamy clearly was misusing the presidential nominee process for some sort of mechanism to curry flavor with trump. And it worked, look at the position he has now. So a manipulating billionaire with a long term goal carried out in plain view. This guy cannot be trusted, no fucking way. And look how he flew under both of your radars. To me it looks like the guys main qualification was giving trump a very skilled handjob under the table.

Again, I praise the concept of DOGE, but there will for sure be vastly better qualified people trump could of chosen.
I invite the pair of you drop the fanboi stance and open your eyes.

I thought Viveks net worth was like 8-900 Million - however I checked - 1.1 Billion as of 2024 - so you will forgive me for not thinking you meant Vivek.

For Elon - considering how Bloated Twitter was, drastic action was needed. As the phrase goes - cant make an Omelette without breaking a few eggs.

To be honest - as someone who likes Ron, his issue was not his Twitter launch. His issue was that he got absolutely bodied in the Republican Primaries by Vivek. Ron needed to show that in a room full of big personalities, he could stand head-and-shoulders above the rest.

Because if he won the debates, the next opponent would be Trump who is no slouch when it comes to debate.

Vivek was an unknown, came in and just started annihilating the competition - and if Ron couldnt handle Vivek, he could not handle Trump - and that was when he was sunk - IMO.

Reading the article about the supercharger team in full - it says that the head of a department was tasked with shrinking the headcount, they did not - so Musk fired everyone, then rehired a select few people.

It is a bit clunky, but I can also see a number of reasons for doing so (making sure other department heads fall in line, for example) - and considering the headcount was over 500, even if the few people they hired back where at massively inflated Salaries, I suspect there was still a net-saving.

There is also the point to be made about walking back an overeach. Some people would be too proud to do it - Musk doesnt seem to care about that and just does what is needed.

Let us for a moment assume Musk does indeed slash and burn, and let us also assume that in some instances goes too far, like Tesla and has to hire some people back - I see that as a net-win for the American Taxpayer and for the American people as a whole.

I am going to use a different scenario - At a company I worked at previously - we had a *LOT* of Bloat - Legacy systems, duplicates, Services that were actively loosing us money (e.g. 1 server costing us several thousand a year to run including licencing etc.) - for a handful of customers paying us $20 a month to use - the list goes on and on.

I spent the better part of 4 years undertaking various clean-up projects. Some where relatively easy - two stand out as having issues - one was due to a missed customer segment when we did the pre-shutdown audit, we turned the system back on - migrated that segment, then shut it down (but it caused a lot of noise). The second was about 70 percent into a migration project, one migration batch had a key mistake, took me most of a day to fix it. One of the Big Cheeses (who was *very* risk averse) tried to stop the project (bearing in mind, it was in the state it was because it had tried to be migrated multiple times and half-assed each time) - I basically used my force of personality to tell him to get fucked - continued and completed it.

There were some customers that were pissed at the migration, it had been very heavy-handed and in hindsight, there were a number of things I would do differently to ease that process.

But... after the migration was done, the reduction in ticket volume was something like 70% for that platform. I saw a decrease in escalations by about 90% - because our T1 team went from having to support 4 different OS versions with 3 different Control Panel versions, each with slightly different configurations and nuances - to 1 OS, 1 Control panel version - all servers built using the same script.

In conversation with a customer who was pretty grumpy about the migration, I happened to talk to them about it afterwards - they begrudgingly admitted that the new servers and control panel were much better than the old one, the system was more stable, better performance etc.

The point of that long-winded segway is to say that sometimes, you have to have a period of short-term pain whilst things are changed, in order to get long-term benefits. I believe Elon will be able to do that.

On Vivek - I will talk about him separately.

[onearmedbandit]

https://www.1news.co.nz/2024/11/26/s...rference-case/

Special counsel asks judge to dismiss criminal charges against Trump

[sugilite:Me]

https://www.1news.co.nz/2024/11/26/s...rference-case/

Special counsel asks judge to dismiss criminal charges against Trump

Justice delayed leads to ultimate justice denied. Well played trump and shame on you usa justice system.

[TheDemonLord]

So Vivek.

What do I make of him?

He is very much in the Trumpian mold of believes in American Ideals, believes in American Exceptionalism, has a big mouth, exceptionally quick and witty with his barbs - and he can't be called an Old White Man - so that is always hilarious.

Bearing in mind, Vivek has only really come to political prominence since the Republican debates - but the thing I get from him, is that he lived the American Dream - and he wants everyone to get a shot at living it too.

He is against the things I am against (anti-woke, anti-ESG and other Marxist claptrap), He is a Hindu (which is interesting in the US political climate) and he seems to hold some beliefs that are religiously informed (his views on Abortion for example), he is concerned about excessive beaurocracy and wants to cut it, including making civil servants to be at-will employees.

Most of those things, I believe will be good for the American people - I am not too hot on the religious stuff, but Abortion - by being a States Rights issue, is out of the purview of the Federal Government.

I don't get manipulator vibes from him - he has admitted he didn't vote until 2020 - to quote JRM - There is far more Zeal in a convert than a believer.

[sugilite:Me]

the only wall actually being built in regards to usa

Culling the government spending affects every American person. This is not some social media adjustment or IT project. This effects everyone. You just covered job losses, but fucking up government departments budgets creating massive down stream consequences are not addressed by you at all. Pretty much your entire post looks to be justifying why the wrong guy for the job could still do the job. Just hire someone more suited in the first place.

[pete376403]

Culling the government spending affects every American person. This is not some social media adjustment or IT project. This effects everyone. You just covered job losses, but fucking up government departments budgets creating massive down stream consequences are not addressed by you at all. Pretty much your entire post looks to be justifying why the wrong guy for the job could still do the job. Just hire someone more suited in the first place.

You talking about US or NZ (Dr of Literature Willis)?

[sugilite:Me]

So Vivek.

What do I make of him?

I don't get manipulator vibes from him

Well, other than perverting the gop presidential process to maneuver himself in a position of power exploiting trumps character weakness.

[sugilite:Me]

You talking about US or NZ (Dr of Literature Willis)?

Indeed there are uncomfortable similarities.

[TheDemonLord]

Culling the government spending affects every American person. This is not some social media adjustment or IT project. This effects everyone. You just covered job losses, but fucking up government departments budgets creating massive down stream consequences are not addressed by you at all. Pretty much your entire post looks to be justifying why the wrong guy for the job could still do the job. Just hire someone more suited in the first place.

I agree it does effect every American person - less Inflation, lower taxes etc.

Okay - so I am gonna use Vivek wikipedia page for this - it lists the following departments:

Education Department - Education is handled at the State level, from what I can tell, this exists as basically a glorified Teachers Mafia and leans heavily in one direction politically.
FBI - I feel this is more to do with the way the FBI has handled themselves in regards to Trump vs Hilary vs Biden. Without rehashing old arguments - my sincere belief is that the FBI has not been politically neutral - and as such have tarnished their reputation.
ATF - This is a relic of Prohibition and should have been disbanded when the Volstead act was repealed.
IRS - I think this is more aligned with the FBI, they have been doing politics over the years - targetting right-leaning groups IIRC and the expansion of the IRS as a pseudo-law enforcement arm is of concern.
Nuclear Regulatory Commission - This one, I do not know what the issue here is, I know many people have accessed the NRC as being captured by the industry - so maybe that is his issue
USDA's Food and Nutrition Service - I suspect this is due to his dealings with it when he ran a pharmaceutical company, probably also has shades of RFK-esque influence.

Of the six departments, 1 being repealed would benefit Americans absolutely (Dept of Education) - as I dont think it does anything useful. 1 should be repealed on principle (The ATF) - Pets and Pet owners around American would be much safer for a smaller fed.

The FBI and the IRS I dont see them getting disbanded per se, but I do see them getting a very severe wrap across the knuckles and told to pull their fucking head in. I see this as benefitting the Average American - because I believe the reason for the expansion is to target the individual who is indulging in a little bit of victimless grey area enterprise.

The NRC - I don't agree with this one, but also have not heard him talk about it in depth as to what his issue is. For me, the US Navy and the Atomic Energy Commission (which I think morphed into the NRC) have been pretty consistent at using Nuclear Power without fucking it up. They seem to be working well, this one I wouldnt touch.

the USDA and FDA - My thoughts are this - there is a theory that many of the US health related issues have causal factors in the preservatives and additives in food - especially when you compare to the likes of say Italy, where many Americans eat the same type of food (Pasta, Pizza etc.) but with vastly different outcomes (Homemade in Italy vs Store bought in the US) and the average health in the Med is better.

Same goes for Pharmaceuticals - I think this is a deeper problem, partly stemming from a for-profit healthcare system - which is if I have to pay the full cost of seeing a Doctor - you can be sure I want a solution for $3K, I don't want to be told that I need to exercsise more and eat less, I want a pill that will fix my problem - otherwise what the hell did I just waste $3K on?

That notion aside, I think the US population has an over-reliance on Medication and there are consequences for this. I am assuming a good faith interpretation here that what is being proposed is some form of RFK style reform.

To answer the question would it be better for the American people - to which my retort would be: I dont think it could get that much worse, therefore I am willing to take the risk that it would make things better.

[pritch]

Indeed there are uncomfortable similarities.

There are currently billionaires and economists warning about the US economy. It has been doing fine since Obama hauled it out of the wreckage caused by Bush's GFC - the COVID blip excepted. The markets though are apparently considered to be becoming unstable, a "correction" may be due. The last thing needed is heavy handed amateurish interference by the likes of Trump or Musk. If the US economy crashes the damage will be widespread. All the way to NZ.

If they put huge numbers of civil servants out of work that'll take money out of the system. If they start rounding up all the people with brown faces, crops will rot in the fields and the construction industry among others will grind to a halt. Wealthy people might have to do their own house work and Mar A Lago will need new staff.

Musk has no qualifications or experience for his new role. Even if his new "panel" has no power as such it can still do a lot pf damage. We could run a sweep on how long it will take before he stipulates that all US federal offices use Tesla cars.

Ramaswamy may know about the biotech industry but he doesn't seem to know much about how the world works. The only report I have seen of his intentions regarding his new job is that he wants to get rid of Veterans Affairs. That'll go down well. He also wants to make changes to the FDA that would benefit him personally of course.

Trump doesn't become President until 20/1/25 but he's already done so much damage that there's likely to be chaos even if he chokes on a late night cheeseburger before then.

Ah well, there's nothing much we can do, except minimise personal debt so as best to navigate any local financial upheaval. Good luck all.

[Laava]

Well, other than perverting the gop presidential process to maneuver himself in a position of power exploiting trumps character weakness.

Is he a roman?

[onearmedbandit]

They're going to round up all the people with brown faces?