Fantasy, pure and simple.

[Joeboy]

SWMBO & I watched The Purge last night. Reminded me of Halloween with Jamie Lee Cutris.

Anyway, fired up BBC this morning saw this and a wee pattern recog switch went click in my brain.

"Department of Government Efficiency", that gives me the heebie jeebies. Stumbled into a Phillip K Dick Novella...




P.S, the fantasy in title is in my brain not what he is attempting.

[Stinsy]

I have to admit to being intrigued by someone trying to slim down a bloated and wasteful public sector. Feels very much like we could do with a bit of that…

£100m bat tunnel that doesn’t save a single bat?

[Mart]

Just to say, the name is another one of Musk's 'jokes',* as it spells out DOGE, and he supports the crypto currency DOGE coins.

[Edit - At least I assume that's the reason for the name, as I heard it whilst driving ion the car yesterday, and spotted what (I think) the name spells out.

*Like the university in Texas he wants to fund called the Texas Institute of Technology and Science.

[Bugtownboy]

My wife did have a PT job after we moved area/children starting school etc.

She was the Deputy Information Manager - Trainee Information Technologist



Will be interesting to see what Elon achieved considering all of the fixed costs within the budgets he’s trying to restructure.

I’m sure there are savings, but not to the extent he’s saying.

Doubtless he will profit from it.

[Stinsy]

My wife did have a PT job after we moved area/children starting school etc.

She was the Deputy Information Manager - Trainee Information Technologist



Will be interesting to see what Elon achieved considering all of the fixed costs within the budgets he’s trying to restructure.

I’m sure there are savings, but not to the extent he’s saying.

Doubtless he will profit from it.

Any actual cash savings will be a long time off. Musk is talking about giving 2-years severance pay to the hundreds of thousands of government employees he's about to lay off. But maybe those employees can do something productive with the money (eg invest it or start a business) rather than passing meaningless pieces of paper to one-another pretending that is work.

Musk is angry that the US government spent $43bn on a project to provide rural broadband internet but failed to connect a single home. Every penny was absorbed by the machine. Meanwhile Musk had a product (Starlink) that could've connected every house in the country for a similar cost.

Similarly, when Musk lived in California he was critical of the high-speed rail project that spent $100bn but didn't lay a single yard of track (sound familiar to anyone on this side of the pond?).The French company that tried very hard to deliver the project abandoned it proclaiming there to be less corruption and red tape in Africa (they've since delivered a high-speed rail project in Algeria and the one in California still hasn't laid a yard of track).

More recently Musk has been highly critical of the vast bureaucracy holding back SpaceX. He has talked about needing sign-off to prove that the rocket launch won't be harmful to whales. Despite SpaceX paying for and delivering all the required research and paperwork it still takes longer to get the form back from the government department concerned than it takes for SpaceX to build the rocket.

Let us not forget that Musk fired 80% of the employees of Twitter and the service continued just fine. I know it shocked some people to find out that if you have an organisation where the HR and Marketing and PR departments vastly outnumber the engineers, and you fire the non-engineers, the company carries on just fine!

Don't get me wrong. I've never been a Musk fanboy. And I don't like Tesla cars. But I'm with him on this one.