Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

This week, both our top winners on the insightful side come in response to our post about DOGE and the disaster in Texas. In first place, it’s That Anonymous Coward with a reaction to the government’s response:

Devoting a large portion of a press conference to patting themselves on the back & praising the god emperor while parents are waiting for any fragment of information.

Governor telling parents perhaps they didn’t pray hard enough to save their kids.

Speaker of the House of Rep. all we can do is pray.

ICE Barbie blaming old systems.

Member of Congress blaming bureaucrats, trying to shore up it was the fault of anyone but the people alleged in charge & who are supposed to care about citizens.

Prayer is an amazing dodge for them being stupid worthless pieces of shit.

They made a decision to not have the most basic things required, sirens. Its a proven technology (when maintained) but to save a few bucks on a line item they stopped. People honestly don’t understand that the costs of a disaster with no real warning, are way higher than the few bucks it cost to have that sort of system.

Mind you they have a magical statewide Blue Alert to fire off everytime something bad happens to a cop, it can be 200 miles away from where you are but they push it to everyone. Databrokers know your location to within meters, but we don’t have an alert system that can target. Pushing for vouchers for ‘christian’ schools matters much more than public safety.

An agency that has been DOGEd, had their satellite data turned off, most of their operations the jeebus freaks don’t understand stopped b/c they must be wasteful are under attack by the jeebus freaks who tied their hands.

They go on and on about how much these things cost…

(from a meme I’ve posted before online, prolly drop it on my bluesky today too.)

Image with text on a black background.
“Take my $1.37,” “I want my PBS,”
“Take my $.46,” “I am all for federal funding of art programs,”
“Take my $.46,” “I love my museums, colleges, and libraries,”
“Take my $.11,” “I support developing minority businesses,”
“Take my $.66,” “I am for entrepreneurship and innovation,”
“Take my $1.60,” “I want us to export more goods overseas,”
“Take my $0.43,” “I would like to see more American manufacturing,”
“Take my $0.88,” “I think community policing needs vast improvement,”
“Take my $1.48,” “I support programs for women,”
“Take my $1.55,” “I believe in due process for all,”
“Take my $0.48,” “We need a civil rights division in the justice department,”
“Take my $0.38,” “I think we need to defend our Mother Earth,”
“Take my $0.03,” “I know more work needs to be done for climate change,”
“Take my $8.95,” “because we need more sustainable energy,”
“Take my $2.71.” “because we should reduce our carbon footprint.”

“IF SAVING THESE PROGRAMS MEANS I’M OUT $22.36 A YEAR, I’M GOOD. NOW GIVE ME BACK THE $575 I PAY TO KEEP THE WAR MACHINE RUNNING AND THE $368 I PAY IN CORPORATE WELFARE TO BIG OIL AND WALMART.”

In second place, it’s CSMcDonald with a comment about the reliance on ExTwitter to issue official notices:

Notifications on Social Media are worthless

Posting emergency communications on a platform ran by algorithms that almost guarantee they won’t be seen until far after they’d be useful has got to be the biggest dereliction of duty a government can do.

Our county has e-mail and text weather alerts you can opt into. Nobody should rely on FB or ExTwitter or Mastodon, etc. for emergency alerts. And if your local government does you need to hold them accountable for tragedies like this.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with an anonymous comment on that post offering more perspective on what happened:

This was almost entirely preventable

Speaking as someone who has trained professional rescuers in tactics and strategies, including incident command:

The NWS, despite the insanely stupid cuts made by DOGE, did its job, did it well, and did it in a timely manner. Texas officials failed to pay attention and to act immediately and decisively. The warning the NWS issued at 1:26 AM in an area with a history of severe flash flooding should have resulted in a full callout of every available person and vehicle, with the latter dispatched to a pre-determined list of locations that are (a) close to the Guadalupe River and (b) likely to be full of people in the middle of the night. Including: a summer camp that’s been there since forever and is well-known to everyone.

The river was rising at that time (1:26 AM), but the catastrophic increase in flow didn’t happen until around 5:15 AM — most of 4 hours later. [1] They had all that time to send firetrucks, buses, vans, anything that could carry people to higher ground. They didn’t even manage to get warnings out, e.g., every available local and state police car should have been on the roads nearest the river with full sirens and lights waking everyone up. They should have fired up the tornado sirens. They should have sent Jim Billy Bob and his friends and their high-clearance pickup trucks out to get anybody they could find and get them to higher ground. They should have called and texted every phone, repeatedly. And so on.

If local officials had done even a half-ass job they probably could have saved almost everyone.

[1] I know this because I pulled the data from the USGS gauge. At 1:30 AM river flow was 12 cubic feet/second — pretty much a trickle in a river that size. At 3:30 AM it was 279 CFS — still not very much for a river that size, about enough to float a canoe. At 5:15 AM it was 315 CFS, still not very much. And then all the water from upstream began arriving: an hour later, at 6:15 AM, flow was 118,000 CFS. So they had from 1:26 AM until 5:15 AM, a precious 3 hours and 49 minutes, and they squandered it.

Next, it’s That One Guy with a comment about Trump’s new video streaming service, and its promo material that mentions “…discredited legacy news channels that have squandered the trust of the American people”:

‘We can’t do journalism, we might offend a billionaire!’

The funny thing is that second half actually has a large amount of truth to it, however the reason they’ve been discredited and lost the trust of the public is not because they’ve been ‘pandering to the woke’ but because they went in the opposite directly entirely, refusing to call out abhorrent behavior from conservatives lest they be accused of ‘anti-conservative bias’ and instead turning themselves into nothing more than spineless PR agencies that will uncritically report whatever someone rich and/or powerful tells them.

Over on the funny side, things have finally picked up a little bit after the last few weeks, so although there weren’t a ton of funny comments, there’s enough for a full section! In first place, it’s some anonymous sarcasm about Trump’s general attitude about everything:

Trump is right and:

• economists are wrong
• law firms are wrong
• climate scientists are wrong
• epidemiologists are wrong
• the media is wrong
• historians are wrong

Trump is a gift from God, the new messiah, and anyone who opposes him in any way is wrong.

In second place, we return to the post about DOGE and Texas, where Pixelation also had thoughts on the government’s response:

I read what Trump said, I was SHOCKED to learn that it was Biden’s fault!

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we’ve got two more comments from that post, both on the subject of the “thoughts and prayers” that seem to be in such ample supply after disasters like this. First, it’s That One Guy with an idea:

‘Nothing could be done’, says person who did nothing.

If prayers are so powerful for republicans how about a deal?

The obscenely rich get ‘thoughts and prayers’ going forward, and everyone else gets all that useless ‘money’ for things like public safety and assistance programs.

I know it’ll be hard for the public to lose out on the highly valuable ‘thoughts and prayers’ while being left with only millions/billions of funding, but as the republicans just showed the way to make america great is to do everything possible to help the people who need help the least, with the expectations that they’ll then lift everyone else with them.

Next, it’s an anonymous alternative proposal:

So, what is missing is a Department Of Prayer Efficiency.
Musk, any spare time to lead this?

That’s all for this week, folks!