It's not about how much I trust them, but that they were the only ones with the cajones to do the job. And you can see how hard it was by the outcry. It's easy to give people taxpayer money, nye impossible to stop it.
Borrowing billions of dollars when you are $37 trillion in debt and giving that borrowed money to people who hate you is insane. And most of that money goes to warlords and dictators. USAID needed a complete overhaul. And do you accuse the countries who don't give aid of causing famine and death? Why just America? You are welcome to give out of your own pocket if it assuages your guilt.
I said it would be a good thing and still do. Dismantling USAID alone was worth it. It's easy to spend taxpayer money, it's harder to make cuts, no matter how you do it you'll be the bad guy. But government needs to live within its means.
The comments here are crazy. Excuse me if I don't find Wired and a bunch of disgruntled ex-fed employees to be a credible unbiased source. The US Govt is so clearly bloated and inefficient it had to be trimmed and optimized. At least some here recognize that cuts in the 90's also worked. And I'm old enough to remember people crying bloody murder then too. People hate to be pulled off government's gravy train.
There is too much good content on YouTube to simply stop using it. It is a gold mine of tutorials on niche subjects. I just watched best ways to patch an air mattress, and a video on making theater quality popcorn! (and it was delicious)
The novelty of Waymo, as well as not having to interact with a stranger (especially for women, my wife used Waymo and liked it) makes Waymo a compelling option.
This is the problem with retirement systems built on Ponzi schemes. The low birth rate has accelerated the inevitable crash.
If my understanding is correct, Norway has a system based on investment in the country's economy, in particular oil production in the North Sea. And they are not needing the same austerity measures to retirement benefits.
To clarify and elaborate on this point, I tried reading it aloud to my kids at bedtime.
As someone else mentioned, Kurremkarmerruk is a prime example. Other than the occasional "Sparrowhawk" many of them just didn't stick well or roll off the tongue.
I'm apparently the only person who thought these books were terrible. I barely made it through Wizard of Earthsea. The story meandered and never seemed to go anywhere, the names were unpronounceable and unmemorable, and the ending dragged on and on.
I find these image generators and LLM's in general fairly toy like. Not useful for serious work, but you can create mood boards and idea generators. Kind of like random word generators when you've got writer's block. As soon as you analyze any output from these you can see they are producing nonsense. And as we now know from the Claude paper recently released, these things are far from reasoning.
We've been trying for the history of mankind to figure out how to "not keep people trapped in poverty". No one has solved that problem yet, despite the best of intentions with monumental effort. I'll agree with Milton Friedman on this, Capitalism, as bad as it is, has been the most successful system to alleviate poverty.
Aren't Cyber trucks by Tesla? And FSD is basically here which means robotaxis are basically here. Now there are just regulatory hurdles and the long tail.
What other kind of tax breaks are there? Any tax cut for the middle class will be exploited by the super rich who have tax lawyers and accountants. So just keep raising taxes so the middle class pays even more?
English adjective order is further complicated by the vowel order. For example "tick tock" sounds correct, while "tock tick" sounds wrong. English is a beautiful mess.
Tons of evidence released already, even if you've only been casually following DOGE. And for some, no amount of evidence will ever be enough. Why is it so hard to believe an agency as big and inefficient as the US Govt. would have plenty of waste?
Gaiman's Norse Mythology is quite readable, though it is VERY inaccurate. It's better read as an "inspired by Norse Mythology" book. Basically, it's fan fiction.
Got the Mac Studio when it came out and while its speed was impressive at first, ultimately I've been disappointed, too many technical glitches and issues with peripherals and the like, and my several iMacs before it are all junk now. I'm done with Apple desktops. So I'll be passing on this iMac.
They're laptops are still premium (better be for the price).
They did not know primary colors. They weren't discovered until the 19th century, even then it took another 100 years before they figured out that red blue and yellow are not the primaries.