This is not optimal. We get one if these every 10 years or so. We should be always prepared, not "prepare now!" boom/bust cycling this stuff. This is new, but it is really not new. Waves of panic followed by apathy is not the way to do public health, but it is how we fund it.
For those who want quick and easy, I wonder if quarto dashboards will eventually replace that use case. I feel like many R users would be a bit more skeptical of Posit if they were more familiar with software companies and the games they play.
Zalensky is right. Russia started it, if we have to destroy the planet with nukes and kill every single European of fighting age, we can never, must never, surender to Putin. And think of the great innovations in murderous drones we will get out of an ongoing multi-decade prixy war, all that ingenuity and Ukranian expertise in killing can be ours for very, very low cost! Beginning to wonder about Trump's priorities.
Certainly not 90%! Many American men are religious, and those that aren't are often feminists. The fraction of American men who are in neither set couldn't be more than 20-30%.
I think most government workers including elected officials in both parties will be biased towards spending and granting themselves more power over time. I think if each party actively damages the other party's cherished institutions and programs (eg by creating policies undermining the defense industrial base, or undermining SNAP) it will require excess spending just to stand still. Each party is stuck rebuilding stuff every 4 years and nothing gets done for either party's agenda, at astronomical expense. Tragic, and obviously unsustainable. In a perfect world, liberals push spending on useful well run programs and conservatives resist foolish spending on fads and over zealous interventions and policy with little impact. We need that balance. We do not have it. As such, those that want to burn it all down will win, unless the left change their ways. (Moderates on the right are and forever will be outgunned by the more intelligent, typically wealthier Milton Friedman types.)
The only way to avoid that requires a lot of very angry people realizing that it's in their own interest to embrace their enemy. That literally never happens. So RIP to the way we were. If only more people valued institutions and heritage, rather than seeing America's value in dynamism singularly. Identity requires long term memory.
But that's it. I don't think slash and burn is related to debt, least not directly. That was my whole point. It's revanchist escalatory politics on both sides. When more than a few democrats acknowledge the debt and talk about cutting, and when more than a few republicans talk about increasing taxes, we can make progress. Until then we'll get more partisanship and sctivism, which means more games with the budget and thus more volatility and inefficiency in Washington, to the detriment of all federal workers, but to citizens also. The parties and powers that be are the winners. Everyone else loses. Moderate politics and less change is better for most people on average, certainly better for institutional stability, which is the core issue with DOGE's chainsaw approach to belt tightening.
Exactly right. Revanchist politics lead to boom/bust debt cycles in government. One party spends way too much and hurts the citizens, the other party uses their mandate to fix the overspending as a pretext to subvert government controls and agencies, and slash and burn in a way that hurts citizens. And 95% of the population blindly, religiously even, suport this and yet don't feel at all responsible for the current state of affairs. "They did it!" seems like the new American ethos.
The debt is not a minor problem, which is why conservatives should be unhappy. The cuts so far are at best rounding error. We're cutting the cheap useful programs (USaid, Ed) and leaving the big issues with entitlements for future bipartisan efforts which everyone knows will never come. The opposite of the 80/20 rule seems to be guiding the process. And a lot of people on the right are free market liberals, including many key never trumpers, so the Milton Friedman fan club and CATO types are not going to point out the obvious math.
If I have to spend more than 30% of my monthly budget on power, I will not be taking cold showers or living in the cold. Consuming energy replaces other hobbies. High energy prices have been normalized, at least in my state. Same with gas. People had to stop caring, or leave.
Maslow's pyramid is a thing. Once you are financially secure, those other levels of good stuff open up. For most common folk, college is about financial security because that is what they don't have. If you are born into a financially secure family, you cannot understand that and may give really had advice to poorer folks.
Was watching something recently, think it was Vox, that seemed to suggest bird flu is widespread now but very mild and so not worth continued alarm. It doesn't help science if we over hype stuff that always ends up being not quite the end of the world after all. But, incentive structures in science funding and the media's if it bleeds it leads mission focus means over hyping is the average.