Why I'm Mad at Elon and DOGE, A Metaphor

[seawasp]

Snipped for length...




A lot of people, as I noted before, want to frame this whole thing as "But he's finding waste! Why are you mad at him instead of the people doing the waste?"

Well, first, a lot of what he's finding isn't waste. Second, the "waste" totals to a minuscule fraction of the actual Federal budget, while the damage he's doing is much worse. 

To describe it in another way: I am living in an apartment building and the building is sold to a new landlord. This landlord decides that he needs to do a top to bottom inspection of the building, including all the apartments. He hires a few guys and tells them to go to the inspection. 

Now, first, the guys he's chosen aren't qualified inspectors. Sure, anyone can find some things that are bad when they look, but a lot of other things that are either up to code, or not covered by code, are things they aren't qualified to judge. 

Second, these guys don't follow the basic rules of my lease: rather than wait for me to be home, and allow me to watch them when they're in my private space (something legally required barring specific emergencies, which this is not one of), they break the lock on my door and barge in. They then enter every room in the apartment, again without my permission or presence or legal authorization, and in addition to just looking at the apartment, they start poking into my personal effects. They shuffle through my papers, crack their way into my home computer to look for financial records (again without authorization), and in the process they damage some of the files. 

They then make COPIES of the stuff I have in my apartment, including my personal ID information like my birth certificate, Social Security card, and so on. 

They DO find a surprising amount of money in the couch cushions that I hadn't noticed -- enough that I might get a dinner or two out of it -- and they point out three Amazon purchases I made that were suspicious. 

At the same time, they subtly, or not so subtly, threaten my wife and kids about complaining, and say that anyone who wants to live in the apartment building shouldn't be talking against the owner. They also make comments about some of the other residents being "unsuitable" or "suspicious" based on nothing more than being a different skin color than I am. 

They then initiate "repairs" which include tearing out stuff that I had installed for my comfort and support, with the permission of the prior owners, stuff which is perfectly legal and which they don't have the authority to tear out, but they instruct people to start doing so anyway.

And then, after all this, some of the other neighbors, who aren't being intruded on as much or who have convinced themselves that this is going to result in a brand-new sparkling building, ask me why I'm mad at them after they handed me all that money from the couch cushions.

THAT is the situation here, except that it's on the scale of my entire country and it's not just annoying me, but it's gonna get people killed. 
 
And THAT is why I detest Musk, DOGE, Trump, and all their apologists in this specific case.
 




 

Comments

[ninjarat]

Yeah. They're "finding" pocket change, a few million here, a few million there, all the while ignoring the $1.8 TRILLION deficit mostly due to military spending. By the way, military spending accounts for approximately 65% of the national budget.

And what "they" don't want you to know or remember is that the last time the US had a balanced budget or surplus was 2001 under Bill Clinton's administration. George W. Bush squandered that on the Iraq wars and the War on Terror, and contributed to The Great Recession which Barack Obama inherited. Obama's bailout was costly but necessary to get the people back on their collective feet. Then Trump's first term tax cuts (for the wealthy) lead to even more debt than George W. without the excuse of multiple wars to pay for. He left that for Joe Biden to try to deal with, which he... didn't do so well largely due to partisan politics.

And now the self-styled King of Debt is going to balance the federal budget by finding pocket change in the couch.

[seawasp]

Not quite. Military spending accounts for 65% of the *DISCRETIONARY* budget, but of the whole budget (including Social Security, Medicaid, etc.) it's about 25%.

Naturally, they believe military is a legitimate function of government, while social programs are not. That means they've got a huge target for cuts that don't affect what they want.

[claidheamhmor]

Spot on.

As a system administator, the whole thought of what these DOGE (pronounced "douche") kiddies are doing gives me chills. I work in a financial institution. If that happened to us, we'd be out of business due to data breach penalties and lawsuits. I would wipe those systems and restore from a good backup, but all the data would be assumed compromised. Honestly, they do not have a clue what they're doing.

[seawasp]

And I doubt that there IS a backup in anything like the ordinary sense. I'm guessing you'd need dozens of backups to cover that ramshackle assemblage of systems that have been put together over something like half a century.

[claidheamhmor]

Yep, exactly. And I'm sure that the mainframe "backups" and nothing like I'm used to from smaller environments.