I think it's because Elon Musk just really wanted to be the head of a department called "D.O.G.E.". The whole attacking science thing is just a bonus.

Especially if you'd add up all the inefficiencies already introduced in the name of efficiency. All those grant proposals, superfluous fluff articles to bump impact factors, etc. are all required overhead to game a system designed to seem efficient.

It's an even more fundamental conservative tactic. What they do is find a single example of something they think they can easily deride and hold it up as representative of that entire thing. Think welfare, immigration, criminal justice, reproductive rights, gender identity, and much more. Right wing media is full of single cases they beat into their viewerships' minds while ignoring all other cases

Take literally any scientific idea and you can easily imagine a conservative mocking it.

"They want to male a huge bomb, sit on it, and go to space!"

"They're looking at mold from their days old sandwiches and call it science!"

I tried googling whether penicillin was mocked "pencillin was mocked as stupid" just out of interest. The third result (or first after "people also ask") on Google, The Stupid Reason That Elon Musk Is Complaining About Scientists Spraying Bobcat Urine on Alcoholic Rats

Around and around and around

They don't want groundbreaking though, unless it's profitable. They want people to suffer unless they can profit from their relief. They don't want the government funding this sort of research. They want the government funding their companies that then perform this sort of research at a 5000% mark-up.

Spoiled rich boy who wants to be president and figured out how? Rumor is he hasn’t left trumps side since the win.

He’s an investor and salesman. Given the way he treats his workers, I’d bet money on him being a douche to waitstaff.

I personally don't think that politicians should be given elaborate security details. Their performance or lack of performance should determine how safe they are from the populace they're tasked with serving.

Nah, there was another contender, but they were a fuckin' nerd with big, scary words and headachy sentences and got bullied out of the race.

(The nerd is a general analogy to reasonable people, not any specific person or group)

Thank God we are cutting out this wasteful science. It will pay for half of an F-35. We're buying an extra F-35, of course, so it's a net loss, but our budget is unlimited for the military.

I'm thinking the outcome of this may be even more sinister.

I know there is already plenty of corporate hands in science, doing what they can to fund research they want and making it more difficult for potentially damning results to come out.

Fun wild experiments won't go away, they'll still get funded, but only at the mercy of the corporation that bankrolls their study.

Or the server move

Another comment explains the moon landing one. It's a hexbear comment and probably not federated to a lot of instances, so copying it here:

The Moon landing line is a pretty important thing to study, actually, since we know what the rehearsed line was: “One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” Without that “a” it’s a very silly line.

Armstrong for years claimed he said the line right and that it must’ve been garbled in the radio transmission, and in recent years has been vindicated as better signal:noise algorithms processed the recording and found the missing word. Researchers aren’t blowing money to find out if Armstrong was a liar, they’re using it to develop more sensitive receivers, better transmission protocols, and more advanced algorithms to parse signal out of noise, all of which have massive impacts in other domains. An algorithm that’s better at parsing data out of noise in particular is going to be useful in loads of places like MRI machines where improving resolution will take billions in research but improving parsing is just updating the software.

Can't really blame people for defederating though. It's a slog to find the treasure in the shit. In this same thread there's both "Death to America" and "kill all honkeys" non-sequiturs. I can see why they drove off their admins in a stupid struggle session recently. I'm just waiting for another struggle session when they discover the etymology of "bad" and have to rename !badposting@hexbear.net:

It is possibly from Old English derogatory term bæddel and its diminutive bædling "effeminate man, hermaphrodite, pederast," which probably are related to bædan "to defile."

How much is it gonna cost us to create this new “D.O.G.E.” Department and pay Musk? The cost of these studies is completely irrelevant to the situation, like others have said the GOP props up ridiculous situations and makes it seem like they represent the entire situation, and they do it to disguise what they’re doing which is fleecing taxpayers money to private corps.

Knowing your wife is pregnant definitely benefits men too.

including trans women, which they also hate