a day ago
This transcript reads like it's out of order or section headers or something. I couldn't even follow it but I get the general gist is "departments don't have as much money as they used to and so lots of time is spent applying for grants"?
This would benefit from curation and organization (and, like, taking out -- how do I... -- like, all the filler, like, time wasting words just, like, taking up room on the page).
a day ago
Interesting that Trump coheres disparate ideologies that winds up devolving the US in every dimension. What is the underlying set of goals? To devalue infrastructure and privatize it as in post USSR Russia? Is this simply a new version of RJR Nabisco (Barbarians at the Gate) only at the infrastructure scale?
a day ago
Some people believe (myself included) simply that the government is/was involved in too much stuff, spends too much money and is involved in way too many things that they shouldn't be involved in.
Some of us want a smaller, leaner government. That means it's going to have to get it's fingers out of a lot of pies.
It is possible that may be the only way for us to survive long term as a country.
a day ago
That’s 1890s thinking. We have no viable long term infrastructure planning here. Pretty obvious. Investment in science is part of that.
Leaner? You mean shifting to a third world oligarchical plan. Tariffs on things we don’t produce here like coffee? On things we can never produce in the scale of other economies owing to the shift to scrap traffic like steel? It’s suicide not lean. That’s what lean is in the Russell Vought plan, study it, it’s about privatizing infrastructure that has no revenue sources unless it’s passed directly to consumers; think a 600 dollar private road toll to go interstate while the middle class go local routes. They’ve studied these parameters for decades. This is eviscerating our competitiveness both locally and world stage.
The idea a political ideology of Reagan/Clinton leaner has been narratively co-opted for asset raiding and infrastructure abandonment tells me that laypeople are missing the big picture on a colossal scale.