orcrist

I agree with your conclusion. It was the statement in the middle, where you said you would be hard-pressed to find people who wanted the government to be efficient and without waste, that's the statement where I'm telling you that here I am saying I don't need a government that's efficient and I don't mind a government that has some waste. I really don't.

What I do mind is a government that's inefficient and wasteful in ways that are throwing money at the rich. That's something I mind a lot. Certainly we both agree that we shouldn't be trying to crack down so hard that we're depriving people of support that they clearly ought to be receiving based on the law and morality.

Let me go an obvious step farther. Suppose there's some office somewhere that has 100 employees and they might be able to get by with 95 if they streamlined their process. And maybe those employees are making $40K or $60K whatever. I'm just not hugely worried about that 5% inefficiency. I'm happy enough knowing that they're probably supporting themselves and pushing that money right back into the local community. I'm also happy knowing that if you tried to replace them with a private company, it would cost twice as much and you would get a fraction of the service. People love to talk about the magic number, efficiency, but most of us are not living to be efficient. We have other goals in life. The actually important things. That's what our governments should be pushing for. When efficiency is a reasonable step towards making life better for the people who live in that country, then we can focus on efficiency, but we should never ever think that efficiency is the goal when so often it's the opposite of the goal.

Holy shit, dude.

That is the other kind of contempt.

Oh my friend, midterm elections won't matter unless he is stopped much sooner.

Only white male employees are allowed.

God bless DCVS.

Well then, let me be the first for you. I don't think the government should be without fraud and waste. I think it is inevitable for a large government to have some. Better to give people too many food stamps than too few. Better to have too many free student lunches. Better to have extra pension payments. I 100% support not worrying too much about small money inefficiency or waste. Aiming for perfect efficiency and zero fraud on that level guarantees that you will be killing people, making them homeless, or destroying their education.

It's the rich bastards who steal our money and freedom that we need to stop. The military contracts. The Starlink. The tax fraud by Google and Amazon and Coca Cola and every other large corporation. That shit is what I think almost everyone in the country wishes we could eliminate.

He knows exactly what he did to anger others. So he's just lying about the shock. It really is that simple. Of course he thinks his actions were justified, but that's a different issue.

Yes he really does understand why people hate him. He has enough awareness of the effects of his actions to realize that he is destroying people's lives and his policies are killing people in real numbers. He also has enough awareness to realize that those things don't make human beings particularly happy.

They're talking about avoiding legal liability, not about actually doing the right thing. And of course you can see how it would help them avoid legal liability. The lawyers will walk into court and honestly say that at the time of the accident the human driver was in control of the vehicle.

And then that creates a discussion about how much time the human driver has to have in order to actually solve the problem, or gray areas about who exactly controls what when, and it complicates the situation enough where maybe Tesla can pay less money for the deaths that they are obviously responsible for.

It's not exactly new, it's just that we're seeing clarification of changes that have been in the works for the last 20 years or longer, depending if you want to go back to Reagan.

And not surprisingly, he has to try to grab power as quickly as possible. If things collapse slowly then the people will still have the ability to rise up against him.

First of all, they won't arrest everyone. Even extreme governments on the tail end of their horrible leadership don't arrest everyone. They need some citizens to be there working jobs. Rather, they would aim to arrest enough people to scare everyone else and then some other people randomly just for the hell of it.

But if you think staying under the radar is going to make your life better, maybe you should read some history books. Who do you think is coming to save you? Who do you think is coming to make your community better? When do you think they're going to arrive? Outside forces will not fix contemporary US political problems. It doesn't work that way, not when everyone has armies and nuclear weapons.

Sadly, quite possibly things could get far worse before they get better, so if you want to plan for some unfortunate eventualities, that might be a reasonable decision. But don't think for a second you can run from them. And even if you could, what kind of human would that make you? What kind of person do you want to be?