The scales of money at play always seem so strange. Oh a few hundred million for ocean sensors, or about what a few OpenAI / Cursor employees or a few hundred FAANG employees could personally fund if they desired to do so.
Instead, we're paying money to pull the sensors out of the water. We're actively spending money to blind ourselves to things we know are growing areas of concern.
they are intentionally making it difficult for the next administration to flip the switch back on to monitoring again; it would now require $100s of millions to reconstruct the system, money that may not be easy to get congress/taxpayers to agree to
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/lawmakers-fight-to-stop...
But that just seems like par for the course for the current administration, whether it's tariffs or ballrooms or ocean sensors - do the illegal thing ASAP, let the courts argue for months or years, and maaaaaybe get a slap on the wrist sometime way in the future.
don't forget that the courts have already decided that anything this president does is legally okay because he's immune from punishment for breaking any law as long as they decide the illegal activity was an "official act".
And we're about to pay over a third of that to Iran?
Alternatively, they could just increase the military budget by 300 billion (or more).
Which why the $300 million claim is fake news.
No it didn't, that is fake news. Please provide an unbiased source where JD Vance claims the US will be paying Iran $300 billion.
"Well, Ed, that's the sort of thing they could have access to, funded by the Gulf coast coalition, so long as they honor their end of the obligation. I think that one of the things you're going to see, Ed—and people have to be skeptical of this—is that the hardliners in the Iranian system will overemphasize the benefits that Iran gets, while underemphasizing all the things that they have to concede and all the things they have to provide in order to get these benefits," Vance replied.
NBC news. He said the "Gulf Coast coalition", but it's unclear exactly who is going to be paying into that.
Very cool and worthwhile way to spend your one fleeting existence dude: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48446644
That is also fake news. The US did not lose the war: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Iran_war
You keep using those words, but it's clear you don't know what they mean (or what anything means). Enjoy your trolling.
Don't project your inability to discern fake news on others.
>(or what anything means)
Cringe.
>Enjoy your trolling.
Enjoy your fake news delusions.
The new budget proposal is $1.5T
However since ~2005 their percentage of the total has gone from ~25% to <1% as computers became less of a hobby and a way to make money.
The entire debt ceiling bullshit is political theatre and always has been. We didn't even have a debt ceiling for the majority of our existence as a nation, and since it's creation by right wingers, it has been used as a bludgeon by right wingers to kneecap anything that stood to benefit the civil good of our country. Austerity politics have been deployed here and elsewhere to great effect to destroy social programs, demonize those who need them, and reallocate trillions of dollars to the private sector to provide the same services the public sector did, but worse, and while enriching greedy assholes the entire way. And the whole way it has been done by an enthusiastic and approving portion of the public who can be persuaded to feel outrage that seventy cents of their yearly taxes are going to some program in some far off part of the country they'll never see.
Meanwhile the actual national debt soars, and under who? Yep, fucking right wingers again. And every time we want to do something science and evidence backed like give the homeless somewhere to live, we're met with a chorus of WHO'S GONNA PAY FOR IT, but every goddamn time there's another country full of brown kids to blow the fuck off the face of the Earth, we always, always have money for that.
It's disgusting and I hate it here.
Exactly. If the people on the right cared at all about government spending they'd never vote republican again, which just shows us that they don't actually care about government spending. They don't seem to want to talk about the things they really do care about too loudly though.