• Rookwood@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 hour ago

    I mean he certainly is incompetent but the idea that you could actually achieve anywhere near the results he is claiming with a bunch of racist teenagers in a month is absolutely insane.

    It would be nice if we actually had the government audited to find waste and fraud. But it would take probably near a billion dollars and at least a years time and large dedicated team from a respected public accounting firm. Or even simpler, you could just increase GAO’s funding and actually read their goddamn reports.

    It’s so sad that our nation is so clearly being hoodwinked and who knows the long-term damage it will cause as he just destroys any semblance of functional government with his reckless acts. What we are witnessing is pretty much the definition of fraud.

  • the_crotch@sh.itjust.works
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    9 hours ago

    Does he need to lie? When you take an axe to the entire federal hovernment you’re bound to save money, same as the average person would if they stopped buying food and paying mortgage. You may end up homeless and possibly dead but it will reduce your spending.

  • grue@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    No, he’s not. He’s faking the entire premise of “DOGE” being about “efficiency” in order to obfuscate the fact that its real goal is to be a partisan purge, replacing career subject matter experts with MAGA loyalists at all levels of the bureaucracy.

    Hell, he’s not even trying to be sneaky about it! It’s just the barest of fig-leaves, cynically designed to act as an exploit against journalistic ethical standards that naively require “objectively” reporting his claims as if they were being made in good faith. Even though the claims blatantly are not and everyone paying attention knows it, including the journalists themselves, the media can’t call out the bullshit without upending decades of tradition and inviting even more attacks (also in bad faith) against their integrity than they’re already getting.

    • dan1101@lemm.ee
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      5 hours ago

      And he is using it to quell regulations and investigations into Tesla and SpaceX. Which is a crystal clear conflict of interest and instead of the US Marshals deputizing his security staff they should be arresting him.

    • OutlierBlue@lemmy.ca
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      1 day ago

      More importantly to the purge is taking control of all the payment methods of the US government. He can control anything if he controls the money. He can funnel it all to himself, or cut off funds for anyone he doesn’t like or any department that threatens him. Congress has no control and neither does Trump.

  • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    1 day ago

    All this was inspired by the principle – which is quite true within itself – that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.

    It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.

    • Adolf Hilter, Mein Kampf

    Let’s dispel with this fiction that Elon Musk doesn’t know what he is doing. He knows exactly what he is doing.

    (Fuck you, Marco Rubio, I’m stealing your bitch ass quote and detourning that shit.)

    Musk may be an idiot in a lot of ways, but he knows how to leverage his power over others.

    • Nougat@fedia.io
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      1 day ago

      Musk may be an idiot in a lot of ways, but he knows how to leverage his power over others.

      This is comically easy to do when you wield unconscionable amounts of economic power. I don’t think that makes Musk “not an idiot” in any way.

      • TheFogan@programming.dev
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        1 day ago

        He knows how to win a knife fight… step 1, bring 300 allies with semi automatic weapons… 2. Don’t actually step into the arena.

  • astrsk@fedia.io
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    1 day ago

    And after getting called out for ‘mistakes’ enough times, they’ll just stop being ‘transparent’ because “we don’t deserve it” anymore since we were so mean to him and his team.

  • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
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    1 day ago

    Elmo lied? He would never!

    Except.that time of the robo taxies

    And that time about the boring company doing tunnels 100 time cheaper

    And that time with hyperloop causing tens of billions of investment in impossible tech that any 5th grader could debunk

    And that time about rockets on Tesla’s

    And that time that unfounded Tesla

    And that time about solar roofs

    And that time about Tesla full self driving

    And that time about those laughably stupid robots

    And

    And

    And

    And

    And

    And

    And

    And

    And

    And

    And…

  • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat
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    1 day ago

    “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.” -Feynman