Scott Adams (Dilbert) hosts a daily podcast of commentary on news and life in general, often with unique and useful insights. Here we look at some excerpt from his public youtube channel.
Tuesday, September 17, 2024
American politics 2024
Monday, September 9, 2024
Re-engineering government
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFl2MkkN1J0
Trump was reported
38:36
looking at uh putting Elon Musk in charge of what they're calling auditing federal agencies to look for things to
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cut and Elon Musk said about that report quote I can't wait uh there's a lot of
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waste and needless regulations in government that needs to go it it looks like this is real
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uh apparently both Trump and Elon Musk are completely on board if Trump gets elected that musk will get the look at
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where you can just cut stuff this is probably the best thing that's happening anywhere about
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anything because in in my view let me tell you something from the
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business world so in the 90s or so there was this idea that business should be
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re-engineered not tweaked now what that meant was instead of you know continuously improving things the way
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they are sometimes the world has changed so much or your company has drifted so
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much you know without your intention that you really have to almost treat it like you're starting over so the idea of
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re-engineering was not just tweaking what you have but saying okay what if we didn't have anything and we had a chance
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to build the thing what would it look like so that's reengineering that's rethinking it from the ground up if you
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needed to do that to our government and I would argue that's exactly what we do
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need what skill needs to be brought to it do you need a
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lawyer nope do you need a historian
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nope do you need a a finance person because it's going to be about money
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nope there is one skill that you need and it's engineering because it's literally
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re-engineering because the government can be thought of as a machine it's got
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moving Parts this part has too many moving Parts maybe we could do this with three moving Parts instead of 100 this
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one is an unnecessary feature it's causing us trouble why don't we just remove the feature it's an engineering
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task just just consider this thought for a moment if you're not feeling enough
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optimism lately just just hold this in your mind
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the biggest risk to America is that we don't re-engineer and that we just keep
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tweaking things and that we become bloated and Divi divided and overspend and just kill ourselves with with just
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drifting in One Direction it is our biggest risk it and I could argue it's what
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destroyed almost every civilization in the past unless it was a natural
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disaster that they needed to stop doing what they were doing and do a whole do thing or else they're going to they're
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all going to die we're in that situation we're in the existential risk our
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current system will kill us all really like actually really if we just keep
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doing what we're doing we will die we will all be dead and the only way to fix it is to somewhat radically change how
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we operate as a country in other words replace the machine but you need to keep
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the Constitution you just want to keep the Machinery right so you want to keep the rules of the road so you don't want
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to change the fact that you know Vehicles need to go under the speed limit and stay on the road and stuff
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that's like the Constitution but the car itself needs to be completely redesigned
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now if I said to you pick the one person on the entire planet that you would want to
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re-engineer anything whether it's a government or a car or a spaceship it's it's musk it's musk all
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day long all day long you try to give me the second best
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person for that good luck who's the second best person for that job you can't even come
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up with one you're my you you know you can think of lots of smart people but you can't
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think of anybody smart enough who would be willing to take the level of
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pain that would be required to get it done right the thing that Elon brings to
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every situation is you think that a level of pain will stop me well watch this pain doesn't stop him
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threats don't stop him he he's got the threat of jail right now doesn't stop
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him it's the only person who could do this and we're lucky enough that that
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person not only is willing to do it but enthusiastic about it do you know how lucky that that
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is I mean just think about how lucky that is yeah and he would have a JD Vance and a vake um he would have you
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know brilliant people you know the on his side to help this is really really really lucky
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Elon Musk could have easily been Australian right he could have easily
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been you know if we're all reincarnated Chinese
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but we got him the number one person to do the number one most important
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thing I feel pretty good about it but only if Trump gets elected
_____
I saw somebody else saying
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that musk was ruining his brand Tesla and I have to I have to admit I am
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concerned that Elon musk's political stuff will sour some number of people
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from buying tesl I don't know if we've seen it yet but I don't know how it doesn't happen
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because people are pretty prickly about their politics and their cars and so I should tell you that I I do own
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stock in Tesla so I'm not I'm not being unbiased I'm totally biased in favor of
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Tesla uh but my investment in Tesla has less to do with cars and more to do with the
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robots one possibility is that the reason we don't understand why Elon Musk could take such
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a risk with the stock price of Tesla is that he told us exactly what's going on
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that robots are going to be you know maybe 20 times bigger than cars and Tesla is going to be a robot company and
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they're going to be rolling them out in a year or so it might not matter to him what happens with
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cars it might be the smallest part of his business in less than a year so
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maybe he's just ahead of us and he knows he can say what he wants to say and
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promote free speech and uh if something happens to the car stock he'll just make
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it up with robots and people want robots because it'll be the best robot and there you go so who knows he's
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taking a risk um so com Harris has come out directly
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in opposition of freedom of speech which doesn't sound true does it
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when I say that you're going to say oh that's a you know you're you're exaggerating what she
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said right but can we agree that the definition of free speech is that you
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can say things other people don't want you to say that's the definition the definition
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is not that you can say things everybody likes to hear that has nothing to do with free speech free speech is
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specifically Limited to things that other people really really don't want you to say because they think it's
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dangerous or whatever and haris says that uh social media has no oversight or
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regulation and talks about musk and says uh there has to be a responsibility to
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understand their power they're directly speaking to Millions without oversight or regulation and then she said of musk
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quote he has lost his privilege it should be taken down what she thinks the xplatform
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should be taken what should be taken down you mean just taken down a notch or
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just taken offline I mean either way it's terrible but if you say that somebody's
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lost their privilege because they don't understand that they should be censoring the way you want them to censor because
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you don't like the things they're saying I would say that is directly opposed to free speech directly and it doesn't feel
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like an interpretation to me to me it feels like a direct statement I do not like freedom of speech it's too
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dangerous when you boost it by social media and by the way it's not a crazy
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argument it's one I disagree with here's why it's not crazy when the Constitution
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was written social media didn't exist so if your crazy neighbor had some crazy
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ideas he could talk about it all day long it wasn't going anywhere so he he had real free speech he could say
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whatever he wanted using the best technology of the day he could write a letter one letter so free speech was
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really easy then because it didn't move the needle you know except in the
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longest you know timeline it did but at the moment social media is so powerful
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it can change the needle overnight it can turn a uh the least the least
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popular candidate into the most popular candidate and we watched it who you know if you had the news the news to social
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media now does she say the same thing about the
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news because whatever you say about social media it's not regulated it can say whatever it wants it's dangerous
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wouldn't they say the same thing about Fox News and breitbard and just the news
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and Gateway pundit doesn't it come next they have
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great responsibility if they have misinformation it's dangerous you know none of this existed
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during the uh time of the Revolutionary War
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so this is the most dangerous possible thing you could possi think uh Michael
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shellenberger goes further and he says in a post today people think Brazil style censorship couldn't happen here
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but it could indeed K Harris Tim ws and Barack Obama have all called for
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heavy-handed government censorship like that of Brazil and Europe complete with Banning disfavored individuals across
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platforms and he's right I mean he he backs it up with examples Etc
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so we were actually at a point where freedom of speech in my opinion could be the only
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topic of the election it seems to me that Trump is an
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unlosable situation because if he starts hammering on this freedom of speech stuff
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and he does a better job which he's not done so far on handling that bodily autonomy thing he has a stronger
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argument on bodily autonomy by a mile he just has never put it together the
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minute he puts together that bodily autonomy argument which is hey I took
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abortion away from the federal government and away from me I moved it closer to you and there are more women
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in every state you women can vote in any bodily autonomy law you want I don't oppose that a bit and then say but I
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don't want criminals to take your bodily aut autonomy I don't want undocumented people to take your your jobs everything
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that happens is your bodily autonomy can you walk outside with safety can your children go to school
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safely it's all bodily autonomy everything the government does from the legal system the Department of Justice
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but the Democrats are T trying to take Trump's bodily autonomy away and put him in jail the there is one side that is
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massively trying to control your bodily autonomy they're going to make sure you don't have a gun Etc the only argument
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they have the only argument is on Reproductive Rights and Trump has not done a good
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job in simply explaining that they do have everything they want and he's not the one opposing any of
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it they have everything they want in terms of they have the political power to vote in any state law that they want
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if the women are largely in the same team they just have to be on the same side so convince the women what you want
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not Trump he's out at the game and and by the way that sentence is
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super powerful imagine Trump saying look it's move to the States you need to work
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on getting women to agree with you because if they do you can have anything you want that's what our system is I'm
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out of the game I'm out of the game is a kill shot
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I'm out of that game I took myself out anyway um yeah freedom of speech
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could be the only topic of the election and it would be a trump Victory I think because he can he can make the bodily
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autonomy and freedom of speech argument if he chooses to
Monday, September 2, 2024
Banning books from school libraries
American politics 2024
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