brightball

EDIT: I see several comments suggesting that there is nothing left to cut. I'm not sure how anyone squares that perspective with this federal budget growth chart.

The federal budget over time...

2026 - $7.5 trillion

2020 - $4.8 trillion

2015 - $3.9 trillion

2010 - $3.7 trillion

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FGEXPND

We do not have a tax problem, we have a spending problem. There's no reason that the US federal government shouldn't be able to operate on a budget equivalent of about $4 trillion which was just about the average from 2010-2020. There seems to be quite a lot available to cut.

> hundreds of thousands of dead people

No reports have substantiated this talking point to my knowledge.

39 trillion in debt with no Congressional stomach for...

- spending cuts

- stopping fraud

- figuring out how the net worth of people in Congress increases from hundreds of thousands of dollars to 10s or 100s of millions of dollars

- addressing wasteful and ineffective programs

Given those issues, the only solution will be inflation. The circling the drain moment will hit with the associated welfare programs get a direct staple to inflation itself, so we will spend more to combat inflation, causing more inflation faster.

It's not going to be fun.

The people who believe that believe that every US President is appointed by God. This is a very common Christian view and there’s nothing special about Trump in this regard. By the same token, Biden and Obama were also.

It’s an interesting subject.

Are we to assume that nobody at the company who had launched more satellites than the rest of the planet combined is aware of this problem?

Hitler explicitly adopted socialist & anti-capitalist rhetoric early on had heavy state control of industry and price controls in place.

Political extremist always pander to control the people who will listen to them, selling lies at worst or at best hope that depends on a lack of understanding of human behavior and economics to follow things to their natural conclusions. Nazis, Socialists, Marxists, and Communists are all authoritarian extremist who share the same values.

It's apparently a response due to a noticeable increase in apprehensions over the last 6 years.

https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-26-107501

I know I always did. CakePHP and Rails made it really easy to determine if a request came from AJAX or direct and you could slightly tweak the response to match the medium.

Agree that most people didn't, but I was always an advocate.

This was the jQuery way. It was called Graceful Degradation.

The entire approach went out of style with the advent of single page apps, React, Angular, VueJS, etc.

Seems like it's going okay...

https://x.com/FreddyLA7/status/2064514871685710295?s=20

That’s echoed on X. UK folks grumbling while tourist from other countries are having a blast.

Not for this guy from Germany traveling across the US for the World Cup

https://x.com/freddyla7?s=21

I mean...I have a Tesla Model 3 with FSD enabled. I turn it on by default now when I'm in the car and I can't remember the last time I felt like I needed to takeover. It's been at least a month.

FSD unsupervised seems pretty close to me.

Yet

Violations of the US Bill of Rights.

Yes they occur. Yes the US does it. Every violation of it should have lost in court already but courts have a way of interpreting things based on their beliefs rather than original intent.

Beautiful facility. They renovated the old Pepsi bottling plant.

https://www.flywheelgreenvillesc.com/

I use a Substack site for the conference that I run. The popup and subscribe buttons everywhere used to annoy me...but they work. Went from 0 to almost 1,000 subscribers on an otherwise low traffic site and it's by far the best way to reach people.

https://carolina.codes

Using services that will let you generate single use credit card numbers for subscriptions are great for this type of thing. You just disable the card number.

It’s not so much language magic as it is “clustering preparedness” IMO.

Since any node in a cluster can be updated at any time and Elixir/Erlang code on the BEAM is designed make it easy to pass function calls to other nodes you don’t have any way of guaranteeing the Type contract between nodes. Types create a sort of false confidence in those situations where pattern matching handles everything very cleanly.

Example: You may not need to match on a full type, just a specific element name in a hash.

When people say Elixir doesn’t need types it’s not claiming that types are without value. It’s a claim that the mechanisms that already exist are enough without the added complexity.

I appreciate the gradual approach so that we can lean on both.

Felt more like an upsell. Maybe predatory was the wrong word.

It's interesting to read about.

I visited one of those Bosley places in the US. The pitch came across as very...predatory? It did not inspire confidence. They would only consider scheduling you for the surgery if you could demonstrate that you'd use other measures for a year, meaning finasteride, one of those laser hat things, etc. They did talk about how few surgeons there were that do this stuff well though. Also talked about scalp injections I think?

It's been several years. I just decided to let it go naturally and deal with it.

I keep intending to find time to try them. What are you seeing the best results with?

Google really needs to work on the user experience. The Google Cloud based approach to Gemini for coding is so clunky.

> Being a U.S. ally no longer guarantees that you will be protected by the U.S. as Ukraine is seeing.

How much more is the US supposed to do in Ukraine beyond the $60-70 billion in weapons and supplies? Do we need to actually go to war with Russia?

Best advice I ever got on home ownership:

Don’t get a loan til you can save 20% for a down payment and then, never get more than at 15 year mortgage.

Good advice on both counts.

Once you have 20% down you get out of paying PMI (private mortgage insurance) and you can open a an equity line (HELOC) for about 80% of the equity in the house. It’s typically like a super low interest credit card that you can tap for emergencies. I didn’t have an income for 6 months once and had to live on it.

The 15 year is critical. Do the math on a 30 year mortgage and you pay almost nothing toward the principle for a slightly lower payment for the first 10 years.

Describes the US since founding. It’s the Constitution.

Might be a different experience in a smaller town.

We did that too, but the mall was also a good time.

Since we couldn't drive, parents had to drop us off and then eventually come pick us up again.

I spent so much time hanging out at the mall in middle school. My friends and I would play in the arcade, wander around exploring book stores, game stores, walk around and bump into other people. Then we would make a collect call to one of our parents and give the name “come pick us up” before hanging up real quick to avoid charges.

It was a good time. The arcade especially because if you were good at a game you could keep playing without putting in more money, so we got really good. You can’t do that with arcade games now.

Getting a book is my goto to learn anything new. I taught myself PHP and ended up finding a book 4 years later when I was looking for an answer to something. On the next page was something that would have saved me tons of time so I read the whole book.

Since then I’ve read books on Ruby, Go, Elixir, Docker, K8s and a lot more. By far the best way to get a semi complete understanding of anything without scraping together data from the internet yourself, because you won’t easily know the gaps.