A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
The appointment of Elon Musk to lead the proposed department of government efficiency raises concerns, given his track record of business management.
His handling of Twitter/X after its $44 billion acquisition has resulted in a significant decline in its value, with some sources putting the valuation around $9bn.
Doesn't seem very efficient to me.
This idea has been around for a while. Make government more efficient by putting a private enterprise person in charge
It never worked because the private enterprise person got efficiency by having a cool project or forceful personality in the private enterprise which let them pay their employees poorly. Or maybe they paid their employees well and had excellent success. But then they have government employees who are hard to fire, have highly specialist knowledge, aren't in it for profit and so the private enterprise maverick is usually [worse than] useless
I don't expect it to work this time either, especially as Musk is more interested in Tesla, SpaceX, and his other companies
Not just significant, I'm pretty sure the loss in value is some sort of a record, for real.
Sure, that's great but it's not even the point. Fundamental research and other type of "useless" scientific endeavors help humanity as a whole to better understand our universe but would never be privately funded because they don't have any concrete and immediate financial benefits. This is precisely what a government should finance, because no one else would do it and yet it's small stuff like that that make us collectively move forward as a species
Oh, they’ll probably publicly fund it for private profit
Musk fans don't want humanity to advance. They hate technological progress.
For OTHERS, yes. But many want the cutting edge for themselves, at no cost to themselves.
In addition, government research in the sciences is miniscule. You could cut ALL of science funding and be no where close to the 1 trillion that Musk claims he'll be able to reduce the budget by
Now if he could start making cuts to the military…
Regardless, he'll claim he cut 500 bajillion dollars no matter what he ends up doing
My bet is that if he expects to cut 2 trillion, he will end up increasing the budget by 4 trillion.
The world just keeps getting more and more efficient at being dumb. Let's just count all the appallingly stupid things crammed into this small meme with 2 million views:
Idiocracy didn't happen because of unnatural selection, it happened because social media unlocked a runaway chain reaction of stupidity.
And so the US lost decade becomes the medieval dark ages
It'd be fascinating as an outsider if the choices made by the US didn't basically impact everything, everywhere.
Say it with me:
No. Research. Is. Useless.
If we say that research is useless because it doesn't bring you mo ey we could stop teaching children math beyond the absolute basics because "it doesn't brinf them anything". This is stupid, because those are the fundamentals that tech children to thing logically and become useful member of society. Same with research. It teaches us the things necessary to maybe invent some of the most useful stuff ever seen
"preventing next corn plague" with resources used being a box of soil and bunch of underpaid grads seems pretty efficient to me, but i guess that since the common clay of the new west already voted they can be safely disposed of
at USDA, they're turning beetles kinky! 😡