working_towards_me

DOGE is dead, and the truth is finally out: it didn’t save money — it burned it. Analysts estimate DOGE’s chaos has COST taxpayers around $135 billion, from mass firings to lost tax revenue.

$135 BILLION.

That’s not a typo. That’s a real estimate from the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service, and it comes straight from the chaos Elon Musk and Donald Trump unleashed across the federal workforce. Those firings, forced resignations, and sloppy “restructuring” efforts? They’re expensive. Really expensive. And guess who pays? Not Musk. Not Trump. You.

DOGE promised to cut $2 trillion in waste. Then Musk lowered it to $150 billion. Now? Independent analyses say even that smaller number was wildly inflated — by as much as 80%. DOGE bragged about canceling “multi-billion-dollar” contracts that turned out to be worth… millions. In some cases, contracts had already expired, and DOGE tried to count them as “savings” anyway.

Meanwhile, the federal government is bleeding talent. More than 260,000 federal employees have been pushed out — fired, bought out, or forced into early retirement. Reuters documented that. Entire agencies are hollowed out. And the IRS might lose a full one-third of its workforce.

Why does that matter? Because when you fire the people who collect taxes, the government collects less money. A Yale Budget Lab report found that if 22,000 IRS workers leave, the agency will lose $8.5 billion in revenue in 2026 alone — and nearly $198 billion over ten years. All because there aren’t enough people left to conduct audits or chase down wealthy tax cheats.

So DOGE isn’t saving money.

It’s losing money.

And not quietly.

The “efficiency” Musk promised has instead created a bureaucratic demolition derby. Productivity has cratered. Agencies can’t function. Workers spend hours each week responding to Musk’s emails demanding lists of their “five accomplishments,” costing an estimated 165,000 hours of lost time. That’s not efficiency — that’s ego.

And here’s the punchline: After just ten months, DOGE has now been quietly dissolved.

Its own numbers never added up. Its projects collapsed. The workforce cuts caused more financial harm than good. Even experts who believe in cutting government waste say DOGE did the exact opposite — slashing randomly, creating confusion, and leaving taxpayers “holding the bag” while Musk strolls back to his private ventures.

This is the future Trump and Musk are selling: a government so gutted it can’t serve the public, collect taxes, or even function — but still somehow costs more.

They promised a revolution in efficiency.

They gave us a massively expensive mess.

So a question for my followers: Give your best guess as to why this could have worked without looking it up.

So how did a blood transfusion treat syphilis? Well, in the 1700s, blood transfusions were not done with human blood- they were done with animal blood, usually lamb or calf blood. Since biblically calf or lamb blood was pure and contributed to the sweet nature of the animals, it was thought that if given to someone who was experiencing paranoia and hallucinations, the psychotic symptoms would decrease. This was not the case.

If you are a socially anxious person, you have to socialize. Your panic/anxiety attacks will only get worse and trigger more frequently if you constantly avoid contact with The Public. Not saying that you need to be a social butterfly- but there is a genuine problem with not being able to order your own meal at a restaurant. And it cannot be solved by always having someone else do it for you.

I also remember the nurse who checked on me extra during the night with a hospital stay in the middle of covid because they kicked my mom out and I have trauma about being in the hospital alone. She made extra visits to make sure I was okay just like she promised my mom. I remember the nurse who held my hand and called me honey as my limbs trashed and shook from spinal shock.

"This is Ankh-Morpork, you know. We've got extra pronouns here."

"Female? He told you he was female?" "She," Angua corrected. "This is Ankh-Morpork, you know. We've got extra pronouns here." She could smell his bewilderment... "Well, I would have though she'd have the decency to keep it to herself," Carrot said finally. "I don't think it's very clever, you know, to go around drawing attention to the fact." "Carrot, I think you might have something wrong with your head," said Angua. "What?" "I think you might have it stuck up your bum."

Sir Terry Pratchett - "Feet of Clay"

This is CARROT being the asshole. Carrot who has, throughout all the prior books, been depicted as basically the best of all possible people. He is noble, brave, considerate, kind. He is the good guy in the entire City...

... and yet, he grew up dwarf, and has picked up their more conservative views on gender identity.

Discworld dwarves start out in the books as basically a people without visible gender differences (thanks to the woman growing beards just like the men) and using "he/him" pronouns as their default. Anything else is seen as breaking the most basic of social conventions. (Dwarf dating is described early on as being two dwarves who like each other spending an inordinately long time trying to find out, as tactfully as possible, what gender the other dwarf is)

Carrot does immediately adopt the "she" pronoun for Cheery, which is but wishes she didn't make such a fuss about it. He's prepared to tolerate her choices, but he doesn't APPROVE of them, and thinks that that is enough.

Carrot, because he IS Carrot, does learn to open his mind on this subject, perhaps his final frontier of bias, but I do love that it's addressed as something he has to work on, and succeed.

1) I don't have the book to hand, but when Cheery comes out she changes her name to Cheri, because "sometimes, when you shout who you are to the whole world, you need to do it quietly." It's such a beautiful expression of coming out being a process, and one that needn't be undertaken all at once.

When I was a child what scared me most was monsters; hulking creatures the colour of ink, yes following me like a hunter might watch its prey.

Now I’m no longer a child scared of my own shadow but I’m still scared of the monsters.

Monsters wearing fake and honeyed smiles, feigned concern- monsters that enslave, desecrate lands, destroy cultures and genocide entire ethnic groups because of their beliefs, their religion.

Now it seems the monsters have grown with me, becoming far too real, far too human- no longer an elusive whisper of smoke. They sink their razor claws into our souls taking what we cherish from us with facaded lies and poisoning our very beings.

Yes it seems the real monsters are humans

And it’s no longer a matter of if they will get you

Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov was a lieutenant colonel of the Soviet Air Defence Forces who became known as “the man who single-handedly saved the world from nuclear war” for his role in the 1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm incident. The incident was unknown to the public until it was revealed shortly before the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

On 26 September 1983, during the Cold War, the satellite-based early-warning system of the Soviet Union reported the launch of multiple intercontinental ballistic missiles from the United States. At the time, tensions with the U.S. were on edge, and high officials of the Soviet Union, including General Secretary Yuri Andropov, were thought to be highly suspicious of a U.S. attack.

Petrov checked ground-based radars which had not detected a launch, noted that the warning system had detected only 1-5 missiles instead of the hundreds that would have been expected in the event of a first strike, and chose to mark the system alert as a false alarm. This decision is seen as having prevented a retaliatory nuclear attack, which would have probably resulted in immediate escalation of the Cold War stalemate to a full-scale nuclear war and the deaths of hundreds of millions of people. Investigation of the satellite warning system later confirmed that the system had indeed malfunctioned.

While it is highly probable that if Petrov had reported this incident to his superiors they would have come to the same conclusion, it was a point in time when many people feared that the Cold War might become hot. Andropov, the new Soviet leader, was considered weak by the US president Ronald Reagan, and the Western countries were deploying new missile installation in Europe to counter existing missiles in the Eastern Bloc. This fear of nuclear war meant that at this time the peace movement in most western countries reached one of its highest levels.

Shit used to be wild, and this is just what I could find that had decent sources, I've heard a lot more horror stories.

Grenoble, France, in 2014 banned any new billboards and took down the city owned ones in a step towards de-advertizing public spaces. They swapped out the billboards with trees btw!

The city of Nantes in western France has recently banned most electronic billboards, dismantling 110 in one night. The municipality is also cutting digital advertising in shop windows and on the public transport system. It’s also banned all advertising near schools. Which is apart of Frances over all goal to reduce visual noise and light.

In 2009, Chennai, India prohibiting billboards, digital banners and placards in public spaces.

São Paulo Brazil created a law "Lei Cidade Limpa" (Portuguese for clean city law) in 2006

Several states, namely Maine, Vermont, Hawaii, and Alaska have banned Billboards and have been working on other electronic ad bans.

This article goes over what some other locations might look like without such advertising

He thinks climate change can be lumped in with acid rain and the ozone layer of "things that were overblown and not really important because no one talks about it anymore."

It didn't even occur to him that we actively fixed the problem. Here's the EPA page on acid rainfall.

From the page:

Don't overlook the online processors - even more than Visa and Mastercard they are the ones pressuring online retailers. PayPal is the one that's been pressuring Patreon over the last year or so.

(US): +1 (888)-221-1161 (outside US): 1-402-935-2050 Customer Service: +1 (877)-569-1116

CONTACT STRIPE:

(Headquarters): +1 (888) 963-8955 (France): +33 805-11-19-67 Stripe: [email protected]

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