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Elon Musk says he's shocked at the level of Tesla hate and vandalism happening: 'I've never done anything harmful'
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2025
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politics
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No one is the bad guy in their own story.
Morality isn't black and white. Anything that happens has good and bad. Personally, I believe that many can't understand the balance of side effects with the greater good. It's something doctors literally have to balance every day. Every medication and treatment has side effects and risks. Even taking Tylenol. So they have to balance "this vaccine might cause x" with "but this will keep the kid alive and a kid with x is still better than a dead kid."
But I'm sure they could say the same about me. If Musk really believed their was fraud and waste in government. The pain and suffering of those he is firing and those who are being hurt by his policies are the side effects. In his mind, he thinks he's the good guy. He thinks what he is doing is the "right thing" from his perspective.
I would be hard pressed to find someone who doesn't believe the government should efficient and without fraud and waste. But since it's literally filled with people who believe that, it's far more efficient than certain media portray it as.
In regards to you leaving work early or calling off, if your world view taking care of yourself is doing the right thing. And sometimes you need to "do something wrong" like leaving work early in order to do the right thing like taking care of yourself.
The government shouldn't be run as a business. That's a lie that's been told to us for far too long. How many people hate their jobs? Do people really want to hate being a citizen as well?
I firmly believe Government is a collective tool to take care of it's citizens. It's to protect them from individuals who want to hurt and take advantage of them. To protect them from foreign actors who want to influence and hurt them. To take care of their medical problems. To take care of their security, such as housing and food. To provide them with the collective infrastructure their daily lives need, like roads, water, electricity, trash services, and gas. To take care of their education. To create a fair playing field giving everyone an opportunity to achieve their dreams.
I don't believe that capitalism cannot be a part of that. But it cannot be unbridled and unregulated. Private businesses have literally no obligation or incentive to provide a service or good if they can get money without doing so. They have no incentive to provide it cheaply. Their only incentive to being efficient is so that the people at the top can make more.
If governments take that approach, the people at the top like the President are the ones who get more money. And we the citizens, the employees, are used and abused.
Paying taxes, in my opinion, should be a source of pride. You should be able to look around at the roads, ambulances, parks, playgrounds, hospitals, and schools and say "I did that." You should look at your neighbor smiling and say "hell yea, I helped them."
Will some people try and take advantage of a government like that? Yea, of course. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't help the 99% of those that need it to keep 1% of people defrauding us. We should identify ways people do, find ways to single them out and address them. And even if someone gets away with it, I believe that is worth it so the other 99% are taken care of.
Well then, let me be the first for you. I don't think the government should be without fraud and waste. I think it is inevitable for a large government to have some. Better to give people too many food stamps than too few. Better to have too many free student lunches. Better to have extra pension payments. I 100% support not worrying too much about small money inefficiency or waste. Aiming for perfect efficiency and zero fraud on that level guarantees that you will be killing people, making them homeless, or destroying their education.
It's the rich bastards who steal our money and freedom that we need to stop. The military contracts. The Starlink. The tax fraud by Google and Amazon and Coca Cola and every other large corporation. That shit is what I think almost everyone in the country wishes we could eliminate.
I'm not saying perfection. That's my last sentence. The fraud of by a small number of people is worth it if it means more people are helped.
It doesn't make sense to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to prevent fraud of hundreds of dollars.
I agree with your conclusion. It was the statement in the middle, where you said you would be hard-pressed to find people who wanted the government to be efficient and without waste, that's the statement where I'm telling you that here I am saying I don't need a government that's efficient and I don't mind a government that has some waste. I really don't.
What I do mind is a government that's inefficient and wasteful in ways that are throwing money at the rich. That's something I mind a lot. Certainly we both agree that we shouldn't be trying to crack down so hard that we're depriving people of support that they clearly ought to be receiving based on the law and morality.
Let me go an obvious step farther. Suppose there's some office somewhere that has 100 employees and they might be able to get by with 95 if they streamlined their process. And maybe those employees are making $40K or $60K whatever. I'm just not hugely worried about that 5% inefficiency. I'm happy enough knowing that they're probably supporting themselves and pushing that money right back into the local community. I'm also happy knowing that if you tried to replace them with a private company, it would cost twice as much and you would get a fraction of the service. People love to talk about the magic number, efficiency, but most of us are not living to be efficient. We have other goals in life. The actually important things. That's what our governments should be pushing for. When efficiency is a reasonable step towards making life better for the people who live in that country, then we can focus on efficiency, but we should never ever think that efficiency is the goal when so often it's the opposite of the goal.
Oh I totally agree.
When I say efficiency, I'm talking about quickly providing service. I expect the USPS to be efficient in that they deliver the mail without sending something around the country pointlessly and that they deliver it quickly. Efficient in that appointments are easy to get. Efficient in that applications are processed in a timely fashion.
I don't want meaningless busy work or pointless paperwork. I honestly don't think there is a lot of that anyway. These aren't things that federal workers want or administrators would set up to purposely be obtuse. (Other than those purposely trying to sabotage agencies for privatization. But I'm good with my tax money going to more federal workers. Those people aren't getting rich on their government salaries.