Goladus

More importantly, embedded in your claim is the assumption that comparing two different states with multiple order-of-magnitude differences in size and complexity should be accepted without question. Imagine deploying a solution for a class of 32 students in two weeks. Now imagine you have to do that for an entire university community of 8,000 people including all faculty, staff, and administration. You must account for on-campus and off-campus students; part-time, full-time, and remote employees; labor-oriented staff who do never use computers at work, multiple languages, bureaucratic restrictions to account for, politicking within different departments, and so on. Here's the kicker: you still have the same two weeks you had for the classroom project.

It's an absurd comparison that should never be made without clear disclaimers, caveats and careful specificity about the point.

There were programs aimed at individuals, though, such as ERAP for rent payment relief.

Heart-breaking stories aside, it would have taken far more time and money to roll out a new government bureaucracy merely to duplicate a vetting service banks already provide.

Yes. The goal was to put money into the economy to help absorb the shock caused by short-term COVID restrictions that would otherwise have caused businesses to fail permanently. The point was to allow more businesses to "weather the storm" than otherwise. You can argue about the extent to which businesses should invest in "pandemic insurance" (however you want to define that), but the government does have an interest in stability and preventing a vicious cycle leading to economic collapse.

The obvious point was to leverage the resources already available at banks to vet loan applicants and to reduce the total number of applicants in the first place. It's not perfect, but it's a reasonably good idea given the urgency. Sometimes it's reasonable to accept that some people are going to get away with cheating the system. Do the best you can and move on.

Can you imagine how much MORE it would have cost and how much more money would have gone to waste, had the government just said up-front that it was free money for businesses? How much would it have cost the government to arrange for approving applicant businesses? Was it even feasible given the desired timeline?

From what I see, the hate and revulsion is brought out primarily by confirmation bias due to (a) subjective reporting on his behavior and language and (b) gaps in factual knowledge.

I assume there are people who are legitimately repulsed by his behavior, but I never see people actually explain themselves clearly. They always engage in question-begging and other fallacies and misdirection, as you are now. You state that Trump's behavior is reprehensible, but do not allow that position to be challenged and provide no argument at all in support of your statement.

If you don't know how to apply discipline and empirical methods to have a discussion in a detached and productive manner, then yes you are going to have a very hard time with conversations with people who don't share your biases. And if you can just downvote, censor, and otherwise dismiss/marginalize/deplatform the person challenging your bias, you will never learn the truth.

If Google search and Facebook were to disappear tomorrow, my life would barely change at all (it might even improve). Contrast Google and Facebook with: packet-switched networks, the internet, cellular and wireless networks, sattelites, DNS. These things disappear and your life changes dramatically.

So in terms of market, yes, you can get some good ROI for research, but you're not getting flying cars (or various other technologies with such intrinsic potential to be life-changing) without a LOT of effort.

The idea of using CO2 emissions control as a form of social control doesn't sound crazy at all to me. Without knowing anything else, I'd assume it was a valid concern at least worth discussing, and I'd assume that anyone unwilling to at discuss it reasonably is probably a malicious and dishonest person with selfish motives who should not be trusted.