this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2024
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Science Memes

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[–] BigSadDad 54 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

We spend about 90 Billion dollars on corporate welfare each year.

90 Billion.

Yeah but let's focus on the rounding errors.

The Department of Government Efficiency is going to increase the efficacy of giving taxpayer money to the ultra wealthy.

[–] BluesF 45 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Musk continues to demonstrate loud and clear that he is none of the things he claims to be.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Spoiled rich boy who wants to be president and figured out how? Rumor is he hasn’t left trumps side since the win.

He’s an investor and salesman. Given the way he treats his workers, I’d bet money on him being a douche to waitstaff.

[–] bitchkat 5 points 2 days ago

Little spoon wants to be the big spoon.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 days ago

Wait until they hear how much military aviation spends on screws.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 2 days ago (1 children)

It's like the two dumbest kids in your middle school were the only ones that ran for school elections and now they spout inane shit you have to ignore, except they control nukes.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Nah, there was another contender, but they were a fuckin' nerd with big, scary words and headachy sentences and got bullied out of the race.

(The nerd is a general analogy to reasonable people, not any specific person or group)

[–] themeatbridge 229 points 3 days ago (2 children)

This isn't about efficiency, it's about attacking science as a tool for evaluating truth. It's a way to discredit the authority of expertise and shape the course of research with selective funding and demonization.

[–] [email protected] 69 points 3 days ago (2 children)

I think it's because Elon Musk just really wanted to be the head of a department called "D.O.G.E.". The whole attacking science thing is just a bonus.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 2 days ago

Yeah how much is this “office” going to cost the taxpayers? I would guess a lot more than $100k on a sunfish experiment.

[–] ThePyroPython 21 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Elon Musk: now singlehandedly responsible for the US falling further behind China in innovation and research (for the record, fuck the CCP).

I seriously hope the UK takes advantage and offers visas and funding for the research. We've already got a good research sector though it took a hit from Brexit. Taking in these US scientists, even if it's only for four years, would accelerate the UK's growth, suck it Yanks!

p.s. also the EU would love to have them as well.

[–] JusticeForPorygon 4 points 2 days ago

As an American in college right now I also hope the EU takes an interest

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 days ago

Especially if you'd add up all the inefficiencies already introduced in the name of efficiency. All those grant proposals, superfluous fluff articles to bump impact factors, etc. are all required overhead to game a system designed to seem efficient.

[–] umbraroze 31 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Anyone remember the early days of Musk's Twitter takeover?

"I don't know what this 'microservice' nonsense is, I'm gonna remove it"

"...Sir, everything is fucking broken now, could you please stop messing with the system"

"Ur fired lol"

...Expect more of that.

[–] quixotic120 181 points 3 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (4 children)

This is a regularly done conservative tactic. Attack research because it’s frequently stupid sounding. But sometimes stupid sounding research leads to incredible things.

Sometimes you research the mating habits of red eyed tree frogs and you learn a lot for conservation efforts and stuff about the species. Conservatives love this because they can hand wave and go “who cares about this thing I personally don’t care about that most people aren’t personally impacted by”

But those science nerds sometimes do stuff like researching gila venom in the 70s which eventually led to ozempic now, one of the potential major treatments for t2 diabetes, a scourge of our morbidly obese modern society. This has gigantic positive implications for public health and financial benefits

The whole point is you can’t know until you’re done what will be groundbreaking

[–] [email protected] 90 points 3 days ago (4 children)

It's an even more fundamental conservative tactic. What they do is find a single example of something they think they can easily deride and hold it up as representative of that entire thing. Think welfare, immigration, criminal justice, reproductive rights, gender identity, and much more. Right wing media is full of single cases they beat into their viewerships' minds while ignoring all other cases

[–] [email protected] 36 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I heard the explanation "conservatives stop thinking if they like the current result".

If immigrants committed any crime, the obvious solution is to deport all of them. Less immigrants, less crime, sounds great, no further research needed.

But if it's about something like social security, they go to the ninth layer of indirection to "prove" that it's bad, because now they found a study that slightly agrees with one of their talking points (p ≈ room temperature).

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago

This theory implies that conservatives think at some point, so I'm not sure.

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[–] Dasus 40 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Take literally any scientific idea and you can easily imagine a conservative mocking it.

"They want to male a huge bomb, sit on it, and go to space!"

"They're looking at mold from their days old sandwiches and call it science!"

I tried googling whether penicillin was mocked "pencillin was mocked as stupid" just out of interest. The third result (or first after "people also ask") on Google, The Stupid Reason That Elon Musk Is Complaining About Scientists Spraying Bobcat Urine on Alcoholic Rats

Around and around and around

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago (3 children)

The Stupid Reason That Elon Musk Is Complaining About Scientists Spraying Bobcat Urine on Alcoholic Rats

Pretty sure they cribbed most of that article from This Hank Green video from the same day. It's a message worth spreading though, to be fair.

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[–] Anticorp 15 points 2 days ago

They don't want groundbreaking though, unless it's profitable. They want people to suffer unless they can profit from their relief. They don't want the government funding this sort of research. They want the government funding their companies that then perform this sort of research at a 5000% mark-up.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

The Game Theory was considered useless at the time.
It prevented a Nuclear WW3 for so many years.

And it will still prevent stuff from going nuclear until enough world government officials become foolish enough to be unable to understand it.

[–] pjwestin 12 points 2 days ago

It also can't be understated how much private corporations benefit from technology this research yields. We spent $25 billion ($175 billion in today's money) on the Apollo programs alone, and NASA research has led to everything from cell phones and laptops to the rubber molding process used for sneakers. The DoD wasted a ton of money in the 80s on this new technology that involved getting computers to communicate with each other, and now we have the internet.

The government spends money in ways that could never be justified by cooperations, then the cooperations enrich themselves with that research and use the profits to lobby Congress for lower taxes and limited spending. It's absolutely infuriating.

[–] [email protected] 56 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Take that, already meager science budget! They will definitely be used to make society better.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 2 days ago

Thank God we are cutting out this wasteful science. It will pay for half of an F-35. We're buying an extra F-35, of course, so it's a net loss, but our budget is unlimited for the military.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 days ago

I'm thinking the outcome of this may be even more sinister.

I know there is already plenty of corporate hands in science, doing what they can to fund research they want and making it more difficult for potentially damning results to come out.

Fun wild experiments won't go away, they'll still get funded, but only at the mercy of the corporation that bankrolls their study.

[–] brlemworld 105 points 3 days ago (1 children)

How much do we pay for politicians and their security to go golfing?

[–] Anticorp 21 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I personally don't think that politicians should be given elaborate security details. Their performance or lack of performance should determine how safe they are from the populace they're tasked with serving.

[–] pennomi 21 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Ehhh, with a large enough population you’re bound to find someone crazy enough to do it for no reason at all.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Rather have an assassination problem than a school shooter problem. If we let those crazy people shoot the president instead of a school, they can work out their hatred of humanity without harming anyone important.

[–] pennomi 5 points 2 days ago

Oh absolutely! Making politicians fear gun violence at a personal level is the only way to enact actual gun control policies.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

Drag has a point, I bet gun control laws would follow quickly.

(said from the safety of New Zealand)

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 days ago

808 Billion for maintaining an army

[–] lemmy_get_my_coat 12 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I think many of these people would be perfectly happy for a woman to not have definitive knowledge about whether or not she's pregnant. I suspect there might be some overlap with the group that's trying to get rid of all contraception and abortion measures.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

they don't need to know they're pregnant, the body has ways of shutting that down

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 days ago

Doesn't "DOGE" literally have a budget of nothing?

[–] [email protected] 48 points 3 days ago (2 children)

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4263280/#:~:text=Results%20showed%20that%20male%20quail,test%20(Coc%20%E2%86%92%20Sal).

Sunfish I can't find the actual study, it appears it was done in 1975, and was a big thing that congress at the time used as the examples of wasteful spending.

First 2 I can't really say the value or lack of value of. I mean they were studies on effects of dangerous substances on behavior. and yes of course like all studies you pick animals that you might be able to get the effects of. Obviously a lot of science is just randomly probing around looking for oddities that give you a hypothesis to try and refine later into something useful. Obviously addictive substances is an important topic to understand, and poking around randomly might actually give solutions that could be discovered IMO.

Now the last one is the only one I'd agree, isn't exactly super useful.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/2033014/feds-blow-700k-to-find-out-what-really-happened-on-the-moon/

was done in 2016.

All that being said... lets also take a serious statement on cost here... a million dollars in 2016. That's like, 15 minutes of iraq war money.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

Another comment explains the moon landing one. It's a hexbear comment and probably not federated to a lot of instances, so copying it here:

The Moon landing line is a pretty important thing to study, actually, since we know what the rehearsed line was: “One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” Without that “a” it’s a very silly line.

Armstrong for years claimed he said the line right and that it must’ve been garbled in the radio transmission, and in recent years has been vindicated as better signal:noise algorithms processed the recording and found the missing word. Researchers aren’t blowing money to find out if Armstrong was a liar, they’re using it to develop more sensitive receivers, better transmission protocols, and more advanced algorithms to parse signal out of noise, all of which have massive impacts in other domains. An algorithm that’s better at parsing data out of noise in particular is going to be useful in loads of places like MRI machines where improving resolution will take billions in research but improving parsing is just updating the software.

Can't really blame people for defederating though. It's a slog to find the treasure in the shit. In this same thread there's both "Death to America" and "kill all honkeys" non-sequiturs. I can see why they drove off their admins in a stupid struggle session recently. I'm just waiting for another struggle session when they discover the etymology of "bad" and have to rename [email protected]:

It is possibly from Old English derogatory term bæddel and its diminutive bædling "effeminate man, hermaphrodite, pederast," which probably are related to bædan "to defile."

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 days ago

wow, yeah thanks for the repost of it then, and yeah seems even further to go in there, when conservatives comb for examples of the terrible things they are fighting... and it seems like over and over again, even their cherry picked examples seem to fail

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 days ago (1 children)

How much is it gonna cost us to create this new “D.O.G.E.” Department and pay Musk? The cost of these studies is completely irrelevant to the situation, like others have said the GOP props up ridiculous situations and makes it seem like they represent the entire situation, and they do it to disguise what they’re doing which is fleecing taxpayers money to private corps.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 days ago

I was furious when I learned about the "Schools are offering litter boxes to trans students who identify as cats!"

Not because it was a lie, but because it was based on truth.

The truth? Schools in areas with heavy gun violence now have litter boxes so that pooping can be done in the advent of a school shooting.

It's absurd, but because of a problem the Right made, not because of a "misguided solution" of the Left

[–] [email protected] 33 points 3 days ago (7 children)

Well, that was something that benefitted women, so it's clearly not efficient for any of the grey, white men in this committee

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[–] iAvicenna 22 points 2 days ago

instead give it directly to Elon, he will know what to do with the extra money!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago

That frog was Elon Musk’s mother.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago

So less than 20 Hummers.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 days ago

Studying fly development has led to cancer treatments targeting the sonic hedgehog pathway.

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