I completely agree. The author is incredibly naive on the "I asked myself how much of this actually affects my daily life". If there's one thing that absolutely affects your life, it's politics. Maybe not today, and maybe not immediately in a meaningful way, but it will affect you.
Just take a look at their comment history, most comments are completely empty in content like this one, and I'm willing to bet that if this indeed a person, they've never lived in an European country. Nobody that actually lived in the EU says they've "left the EU", since each country is pretty different and it makes no sense to say it like that. This whole thread has bot-vibes.
With all due respect, and I understand that you probably mean well, but did 2 different people write this?
You're drawing the line at things that are already happening. Legal citizens are being put into literal camps (the fact it's a modern warehouse or a Salvadorian prison doesn't make it less of a camp) solely based on their appearance.
He's blatantly making moves to enrich himself (see meme coins, tariff back and forward, etc), and unless you live under a rock, the collateral damage should be clear to you now. He's constantly lying when he speaks and I'm sure an educated person as yourself can see that.
You say the other side was more dangerous long in the long term, and although I don't like either side either, it was clear which side was still progress.
You somehow got into a mental state where you're able to trust someone to do things in good will and at the same time say that he's "not a nice man".
You support what is being done, and at the same time you say you don't understand it and you admit it's possible he doesn't either.
Please, take a second to think why billionaires of all people, would be interested in doing anything that doesn't benefit them. They're billionaires because they spent their life doing just that, they don't care about you and I.
You're clinging to the hope that maybe what they're doing somehow benefits you, but you're not even sure how that would happen.
> If your job is so unimportant that you aren't willing to reach out and make a case to the relevant people for why it is important, maybe the mission won't be deemed strong enough to justify spending tax payer dollars on.
"If you don't complain, maybe your job is not important".
"If you complain, your job is important".
Do these takes sound reasonable to you?
> For work that does produce actual value, assistance could be provided in converting that mission to a private company if the entities that depended on it existing will realistically pay for its services.
If the solution is to privatize anything that produces value (and I think we can agree that cancer research does produce value), why do we need the government again? That scenario doesn't even sound realistic as it assumes the transition would be done seamlessly, but that can't happen when the existing entity is shut down abruptly.
I think it's blatantly obvious that removing funding from NIH is a negative thing for regular people (not only for Americans), but naive people still try to spin actions like this as something that is being done in their best interest. Please think instead in terms of "how can benefit the people that made the decision", and you'll soon find the real reason why it's being done.
If you firmly believe that your job is important and helping people, then it seems reasonable that you would complain and try to get an exception or other people who know of the program would complain. It's not perfect, some people would just be defeatist and assume things are happening at a higher level that they have no control over, even if they think their role is important.
The solution would not be to privatize anything that produces value, the solution would be to assess whether privatization would be a good fit for some of the things that do have value, but don't strictly need to be run by the government.
I'm not assuming anything seamless, but the process would occur before something gets shut down, not after. I didn't get the impression from the article that anything was totally shut down, just some kinds of activities were paused? I'm not really responding specifically to this, so much as just the general critical need to reduce costs.
That said, cutting government costs and people's dependencies on the government down to within a reasonable threshold is in people's best interest.
In China and Russia, so many people work for the government. Keeping people not just employed, but ideologically on the side of the status quo of the government can get out of control. It's convenient in some ways, because you can just create jobs out of thin air if the job market is struggling.
The best interest of the people is definitely not infinite government growth.
Government spends a lot of money too. Spending some money can be in the interests of the people. Spending too much money can flip over to not being in their interest. Spending too much can reduce both the value and the trust (necessarily linked) in the US Dollar, slowly weakening our economic leverage for doing things on behalf of US citizens and our allies.
So just spending infinitely like there's no cost to creating money is also not in people's best interest.
Some projects could fail, some things that were valuable might fall apart, I don't know. Ideally it's done with some finesse and important things are either kept or found a new home. But the logic of compassion significantly favors cutting government spending and government dependency when it gets past some threshold.
