Summary
$150 billion: that’s the grand total of savings Elon Musk revealed last Thursday that he and his DOGE team are “expecting” to make after months of ruthless and often mindless cuts.
To call this a monumentally unimpressive number doesn’t do it justice. Musk’s “savings” here — which are already error-ridden and inflated in the first place, created by totaling up spending that never actually existed or that was, alternately, either already cut or never actually was — represent just 15% of the trillion dollars he originally promised he would slash.
In fact, government spending so far under Donald Trump has actually gone up compared to the last two years under Joe Biden.
“Musk will have effectively crippled the modern American state and ripped vital services away from ordinary Americans in order to pay for more waste at the Pentagon.”
They increased the budget of the Pentagon. You should be worried about where the funds are being moved-to
The military budget doesn’t seem to have gone up by anything that hasnt been trending the last decade or 2, and despite all the talk about going to fight other countries, I don’t think there is enough support for anything other than Iran, and even that I dont think would be done directly by the US military.
I do worry more about a more internally agro surveillance state, but with facial recognition and a camera on every doorbell, I think we’ve already long traded privacy for security. I keep learning about previous rebellions and having covert places to gather, plan, and stage have really been crucial, and I don’t know how one does that in the modern world.
You’re being defeatist. There’s not cameras everywhere. There are loads of blind spots, even in major cities.
It’s a fact that the majority of square feet in the US has places where there are no cameras compared to where there are cameras.
There are groups that map this. You can help identity the cameras on OSM.
I don’t feel defeatist. I think my feelings on America as a whole are higher than many I’ve been seeing here. But tech has come a long way since a lot of these types of movements have taken place.
I love getting inspiration from people like the Maroons the bands of people hiding out in huge areas of Appalachia before the Civil War and others, but stuff like thermal optics and night vision and whatever other stuff the military and even local police likely have these days is pretty intimidating. It’s also way quicker and stealthier to deploy. There’s license plate readers that can grab the plates of anyone driving to a protest and databases of faces, etc.
I’m not as tech savvy as maybe a lot of you are so I don’t know real life limitations of all this stuff or how to avoid it, and I just keep it in mind.
Use drones. Use public transportation. Use cash. Use Tor.
The power has always been asymmetric, but many advancements in technology actually help resistance of the oppressed more than the oppressors.