This is exactly right. DOGE deserves no praise. Their goal is not to cut spending to bring money back to the people. Their goal is to gut the government itself and make it ineffective in improving people's lives. They don't actually care whether these departments are "wasteful", and anyone who thinks they do has bought and drunk the snake oil.
I personally wouldn't want my government run by unchecked people who get the value of something off by three orders of magnitude. In a meritocracy private company someone confusing 8M with 8B is at best put in a closet job. More likely getting fired, and probably getting sued. When Jerome Kerviel was off by 5B he went to prison.
Unchecked means without oversight and without the checks and balances.
The various lawsuits against the actions in the last month alone show a blatant disregard for process and legal procedure.
The media coverage I have seen falls into these 2 categories.
1. Declaration of great success in short one liners. This comes without evidence every time. This comes as tweets or from the administration.
2. When evidence is looked into we see that the numbers fall short, the "alleged" corruption is not corruption at all or the entire claim is a falsehood.
I don't doubt there is waste in the federal government. I also don't doubt it is largely in programs that tend tend to be lavishly funded, not squeezed to death, so agricultural subsidies, construction projects, and defense. These are programs conservatives love. DOGE is concentrating its "waste, fraud, and abuse cutting" to ideological enemies. In other words, it isn't about finding and cutting waste or fraud; it's about the ideological capture and remolding of government outside of any framework of accountability or democratic input.
A lovely example of their creative approach to their alleged project:
> In another case, DOGE claimed $232 million in savings on a contract providing information technology support to the Social Security Administration. But The Intercept reported that only a sliver of the contract was canceled — a program to let users mark their gender as “X” — bringing the actual savings closer to $560,000.
They lie about what they accomplished, and what they did accomplish was just performative cruelty with negligible effect on the budget.
And honestly it’s been both parties who have been more than happy to pay lip service to the problem but instead of paring things add additional oversight that has no enforcement power so they only add more weight to the bureaucracy with a few reports no one reads to show for. In the face of deficits, they don’t retrench as individuals and private entities have to.
You have to be blindly partisan to be unable to recognize basic facts about the debt load and that republican governments are responsible for the vast majority of it.
You forget they talk about responsible budgeting when Dems are in office. Talk talk talk. Then they balloon the debt when they're running the show. Sure did talk though...
There were women's spaces (bathrooms / changing rooms) for example that kept women safe from predatory men.
Who should be allowed in those? Is it defined by the clothes?
If a predatory man / bad actor decides to put on those clothes to abuse the system, then what? What if the predatory man / bad actor decides to hang just below the bar of illegality, and creep on women long term?
Is this something that you spent a lot of time worrying about prior to this bizarre trans panic? All of the existing laws that prevent predatory men from creeping on women in those spaces also apply to trans people..
Totally disagree, it’s now entirely legal in many places for a predatory man to say he identifies as a woman, and change in spaces previously created to keep women safe.
And yes, thanks, I do like thinking about issues of justice, morality, and politics.
Excellent example. Is it possible for a convicted criminal to game compassion to be moved from a men’s to women’s prison. Would anyone lie in that situation? There is probably a whole lot more people to take advantage of if your a convicted predator in a woman’s prison.
I took the question as being about "moral trustworthiness" rather than about having any specific moral code. In my view, "moral trustworthiness" is having a moral code that you adhere to, regardless of what that code actually is. It's the opposite of "moral opportunist", or someone whose moral code changes according to what happens to be the most advantageous at the time.
> If you don’t consider the capital of a panel then sure free / cheap as dirt.
That's what I meant, the capital cost is already so low that you could use them as fence panels. They will only get lower with the looming supply glut.
Your math is off a bit. The panel you linked is 1.722m by 1.134m, or $34 per square meter. It's wild that it's in the same ballpark as a fence panel, though
uhh, you're right. I took their first listed dimensions, but if you look at the specs, it's your size. Anyway, same ballpark. I was actually considering using some second hand panels to build a fence, that's how I know.
Plus inverter costs, plus interconnection costs, plus mounting hardware, plus permitting costs, plus installation labor costs, plus disconnect hardware, etc...
You're glossing over the inherent danger of solar panels in that they are relatively high voltage devices that can't be turned off easily. This means they get saddled with expensive safety regulations. The glorious utopia where you buy a pallet of the things from Wal*Mart with your pocket change and stick them everywhere the sun shines runs into some logistical hurdles.
This is blown out of proportion in the US. EU has stronger laws for environment, worker protection, historical buildings protections, you name it. Yet they can easily install solar under 1 dollar per KWh. This is a self inflicted problem created in the US, and the solar roofs became a scam. For a 9KW system, installers can pay 2500 to the sellers/marketers. That is MORE than the cost of panels, this should tell you everything you need to know https://www.quora.com/What-are-commissions-like-for-a-solar-...
> they are relatively high voltage devices
On the contrary, they are low voltage (12V), which makes them more dangerous (because you need higher amps to carry the same amount of energy). To make them safe, you can install inverters closer to the panel, to raise the voltage to 110 or 220, making them much much safer.
> The glorious utopia where you buy a pallet of the things from Wal*Mart with your pocket change and stick them everywhere the sun shines runs into some logistical hurdles.
That can work if you install them as fences, or just on the ground in general. If you install them on rooftops then yeah, you need some serious consideration. The installations are still grossly overpriced, if both EU and Australia can do it under 1USD per Watt, so can the US.
> On the contrary, they are low voltage (12V), which makes them more dangerous (because you need higher amps to carry the same amount of energy). To make them safe, you can install inverters closer to the panel, to raise the voltage to 110 or 220, making them much much safer.
And the original post was talking about cheap installs, so you would string several together to put it on an inverter. You hit high voltages very quickly. Even just 4 panels and you're up to almost 200V at full sun. It's more typical to put 8-12 panels on a string. The voltages hit dangerous levels very quickly.
Again, the dangerous part is the intensity, the amps. Look at your panel in the link, it's at more than 9 amps. If you put them in parallel, you will keep the low voltage, but quickly rise the amps, if you have 5 panels in parallel you are at 45 amps!! That can cause the fires, not the voltage.
You want to tie them in series first, to increase the voltage and keep the amps as low as possible. 110V or 220V are not dangerous voltages, that's why houses are wired at these higher volts. People all over the world handle cables carrying 220V with very few issues. If you wired the house at 12V-48V, some wire in the wall would catch on fire every-time you wanted to toast a slice of bread, lol.
They are typically first wired in series to increase the voltage as early as possible, to make them safer. If you were to wire them in parallel you would keep a low voltage and increase the amperage, which would make their wires glow like Christmas lights.
That's the whole reason why they started selling micro-inverters that go on each panel: to increase the voltage and decrease amps before even leaving the panel area, to make them safer.
You aren't going to achieve your goal of ultra-cheap panels everywhere if you're sticking expensive microinverters on each one. It's weird that you say "I'm wrong" then laboriously explain to me how I was right. The panels are wired in series. The voltages are up in the 100s, which will easily overcome the resistance of your skin.
If they were actually 12v they would be safer. You could handle them with dry skin. It's the same reason people aren't electrocuted while working on cars. The danger would be starting fires as you noted.
Anyway, in the real world when you have panels wired in series you typically need to shield the connection wires in conduit because both the voltage and amperage reach dangerous levels and you can start fires or kill people if they try to handle the wire, and you can't easily turn them off. This is part of the expense of installing solar panels that you can't really avoid. You will always need someone who knows what they are doing to handle the electrical part or you will kill people.
It's also DC - arcs won't self extinguish like AC will. Modern charger/inverters are trending towards nominal 1kv voltages for the individual panel strings too which is pretty impressive. 20amps at 1kv is 20kw!
Add in the large number of storage options that are coming to market besides lithium ion, from sodium to iron to straight up thermal storage, and we may still have gas turbines on the grid in 20 years but it's unlikely they will generate more than a few percent of a year's electricity.
We are seeing the first disruption of the electricity industry in a loooong time and it's going to upset all other energy processes too, as electrical sources of process heat become cheaper than burning gas or anything else.
Looking at where prices are today misses the picture, look at where they will be in five years or ten years in order to understand our future.
if 30% of chemistry and physics papers can't be replicated, and something more like 70% of sociology and phycology papers can't be replicated, do you think that clinic trials might have a less than 100% trustworthy due to the possible monetary gains from the company conducting them?
To add to your point, this erodes trust in science too. Public perception of complex topics is very, very important. People effectively have to "trust" science. When it's corrupted there are ripples of distrust sown through the populace. Vaccine deniers, climate deniers, etcetc - distrust is just one of the fuels that fan these flames.
The people sowing distrust ARE the vaccine deniers and climate deniers. People comparing vaccine trials to cigarettes, like the person you are agreeing with here, ARE the problem; they were not created by "corporate funded vaccine trials".
You don't think perverse incentivized trials/studies/etc do damage to public perception? I'm not well versed in this subject (or versed at all), but if anything i feel like i am the public we're speaking about. Pro science, but scared of bad faith science.
For example, my perception is that the push for pro-sugar doctrine "back in the day" has caused significant health problems and a distrust in the process.
I have a Ph.D. in a hard science, so I guess I'm not totally unaware of how science works. Let's say, I have lived experience as to why 30% of physics and chemistry research can't be replicated.
Putting 100% faith and trust in a "corporate funded vaccine trials" is something I would suggest against given the potential monetary gains from those conducting it.
Way past anything scientific. Spend 2 minutes googling “anthrophemoric co2 percentage”