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@Phil i think you are blind to how much you rely upon it, and how much better our world could be if we did much more with it. perhaps we’ll see.

@interfluidity I rely on about 35% of it and pay 50.1% of my income in taxes for it. In my lifetime it has added a huge number of agencies and departments and programs. I did just fine before they were added and dont rely on a single one of them.

@Phil have a nice flight. (replacing reliable, high bandwidth fiber with flakier, lower bandwidth starlink makes total sense.)

will that hurricane hit?

is that drug safe + effective? (it’d be better if FDA were faster. many clinical trials—including of unpatentable compounds—should be publicly funded. we need more people evaluating new pharma. more, not fewer, resources.)

enjoy giving your kid Vitamin A and hope for the best after their “study” tells us vaccines cause autism.

@interfluidity you twist facts. The fiber is having problems so starlink is being used (free) as a stop gap measure.

The FDA is wrong as often as not, faith in it is unwarranted and the sense of safety it gives is false.

What if giving so many vaccines so quickly does contribute to Autism? All the NIH website says is that the issue hasn't been studied. FDA has tried to discredit the idea with studies on individual vaccines. This is deliberately misleading as this says nothing about cumulative

@Phil the issue has been very extensively studied.

@interfluidity NOT the cumulative effect. IT ABSOLUTELY has not. I have an autistic son and have read everything the government has put out and it has not been studied in any kind of reasonably thorough way and what studies they do have are by vaccine companies which have a conflict of interest and some if which are proven to cheat on studies and trials.

@Phil do you have any reason to suspect a cumulative effect of vaccinations over all the other cumulating factors that have changed over time? i do know, for example, autism diagnoses have continued to rise even after childhood vaccines were stripped of thimerosal that had previously been alleged the cause. i’m not saying some difficult-to-detect cumulative effect is impossible. i’ve no idea why anyone would especially suspect one, though.

@Phil i rely on NOAA to protect my life and property with hurricane tracking and forecasts. it has done an amazing job.

contemporary weather forecasts are reasonably accurate out to seven days. your claim was true when i was growing up, maybe when you were too, but it has not been for some time. weather monitoring and prediction is remarkably good now, and we rely upon it for everything from tornado warnings to flight routing. https://ourworldindata.org/weather-forecasts

@interfluidity good for you. I have experienced 2 storms in my life that caused injury (and some death) and extensive property damage. Neither one was predicted. You should pay for it with a subscription, I'll pass.

@Phil as i said, perhaps we’ll see how you like this brave new world your political movement is bringing on. i could be wrong, but i suspect you won’t (though even if so i wonder if you’ll attribute blame to malicious compliance or some other excuse). what if there is nothing as good as NOAA and plane crashes become more common again, in part because they fly blind into weather? oh well, you might say. price of progress.

i’m proud of NOAA, want to keep and even expand it.

@interfluidity why would planes fly blind into weather? They have radar on board and at every airport. There are ways to do things, often better, outside of govt.

And I won't mourn condoms to Mozambique. And so you are relying on bait and switch. They're cutting the shit and you're bemoaning the little good. Nobody's advocating eliminating all govt; just the failed/useless/evil shit. Its amazing to me that anybody would grumble/murmur/complain about going after waste/fraud/corruption/abuse.

@Phil they don’t have a clue what they are doing and what they are cutting. they are indiscriminate, firing on the basis of easy to fire (ie new or recently promoted) rather than any evaluation of merit. what roles have they killed just a bit less obviously important than nuclear weapons protection, oopsie? they miscompute and outright lie constantly about their “savings”. they themselves are waste, fraud, and a mothereffing ton of abuse. physician, heal thyself.

@interfluidity any given job cut, has a 75% chance of being useless and the biden people over hired, so cutting new jobs makes sense. And since a fed employee typically counts for 25% of a private sector employee, no matter who they cut there is another person to fill in. They simply can't make it worse. Most of the people are dishonorable loons. Its glorious to see them dumped to the streets. They scarcely need to be experts at cutting since the target is gigantic and can't be missed.

@Phil yeah, these are your priors. they are ill-informed, but we will all pay the price for them.

Can you explain what the federal government does today that it didn't do in the Clinton administration that justifies spending more than 3x as much per year as Clinton did?

Even if doge hits it's target of cutting 2 trillion, that would still leave the federal budget at over 2x the Clinton administration's. Is there anything the federal government does today that it didn't do in the Clinton administration that is worth spending over 100% more than Clinton's entire federal government to have?

@nicholas @interfluidity and it was bloated even then. I dont think there is even a word for the monstrosity it has become. It makes morbidly obese seem svelte and buff by comparison.

I dont think there is even a word for the monstrosity it has become.

"Cancer".

It is a sclorotic body, concerned only with its own growth with total disregard for the damage it does to its host, while its metastasization throughout every aspect of American life and commerce disrupts the normal functioning of society and economy.

@nicholas @interfluidity INDEED