Yeah, its a circular economy. So for example, all your federal workers spend, save, invest and pay taxes in the country.

I think this a good small example: https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/new-report-shows-nasas-75-6-billion-boost-to-us-economy/

NASA budget is about $25B

That money (which is respent in the national economy) adds $75B to GDP. 3:1 multiplier effect.

So by finding NASA by $25B you get most of it back again in taxes AND you get all the jobs, services, technology etc. Its a huge list of benefits that is basically paying for itself. That’s 300,000+ jobs and $10B in more downstream taxes…that counts against the $25B budget…it is really a net $15B tax spend to bring in $75B in GDP increase.

If you cut this program, you shrink the overall economy, drop.GDP AND lower future tax revenues. So when the money these programs spends is multiplied out through the economy in a circular way, the high price tag is a useless / pointless way to analyze the value of the return. You need to have the full systemic analysis or you’re just doing damage…

This is every government program. My own small business I can track higher sales when SSI checks go out. The grocery store lines are longer and all the seniors are lining up to get groceries when the checks arrive…

And even if you “save money”, what would you turnaround and do with it if not fund NASA and social security? Do they have a better idea? What else do we need that money for?

The common wisdom in the reseller community about PayPal is to never leave any funds inside the paypal wallet, do not use them for large transactions and do not use them to transmit money that you depend on.

You can read many horror stories online about people who “trust” PayPal and then get blindsided and lose their money with no way to appeal or recover.

There seems to be a pattern where PayPal just steals large account balances and burns those clients. PayPal will take money for no reason or without providing any reason at all. They just fall back to “we are a service you agreed to use, we are not a bank or financial institution”. There is a whole reddit community with people commiserating. Lots of people lose their rent money, their business funds, their huge consultant contract payments, their school tuition etc. Often using paypal without imagining that its not a real company with a phone center and a system you can go to for an appeal, but some rinkydink black box of thievery with no real human contact and no legal presence anywhere you can tackle them and make them accountable.

eBay is the man in the middle between buyers and sellers, and overall the total marketplace is in decline in terms of buyers, dollars and sales volume. There is a situation where eBay has this shrinking pool of people spending money, and so they have enshittified their system by breaking search results and charging sellers to advertise/promote their listings. Essentially, surplus sellers compete to purchase the scarce buyer now. Its a doom loop. EBay is cutting a larger and larger piece of the sales and this makes everything on there more expensive, which makes the sales dwindle…rinse and repeat.

In both cases it is hard to understand why all their competitors aren’t beating them. For example, things like Craigslist or Facebook marketplace have a very lucrative opportunity and a big head start, but nobody has really challenged eBay…its confusing. They botg killed their golden goose but somehow they keep going as.zombie businesses.

What are the odds that they saved the US money and kept it a total secret rather than to brag about it.

So low that I think this is a smoking gun that they failed to do so. We now know it didn’t work out because they are quiet.

Not to mention that, in this case, the phone network was known to hacked and infiltrated by adversaries.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_Typhoon

This hack included JD Vance’s phone who was part of this chat group.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/25/us/politics/trump-vance-hack.html

These peoples phones shouldn’t be considered any more secure than a public bathroom.

Presidents were above the law for the final year of Biden’s term.

He chose to do nothing.

This fuck-up was strictly due to the fact that they’re incompetent morons just randomly inviting people to group chats and shit with no guardrails.

No.

These fuckwits were handling classified and top secret information in the open on their cell phones.

It doesn’t matter what specific app they used. This is not about the technology. You missed the point.

My friend said that if Steam and Netflix both went down at the same time there would be huge riots. I am not sure they are wrong.

What odds are they giving for “shitty rocket accidentally blows up on launch”?

There is no biological difference between innate and acquired immunity, right? Right?

Slavery was perfectly legal according to the votes at that time.

I think that would be a great plan

They don’t have the cards?!?

And that speaker is more or less stationary, and it’s inside a room?

I think your absolute best audio (for speech) would be from a lavalier mic clipped on the person. Second best might be a shotgun / directional mic focused on the speaker. Zoom recorder placed in the room will be more likely pick up any other audio like HVAC hum, passing traffic, footsteps BUT it will also pick up the room acoustics and stereo image.

One suggestion is to actually capture audio on multiple devices and mix them (if needed) in Post-production. For post production you can play with EQ and compression, plus volume normalization to get a good clarity.

It’s always nice to attach the mics to their own independent supports so that you don’t get any unwanted microphonics from touch / vibrations. For example, if you place the lav clip on the person but they brush their clothes, or if you stand the mic on the table but they tap the table as they speak…

When you say “interview”, are there two people/speakers? One asking questions and one person being interviewed?

…and make Mexico pay for it.

There is a whole branch of management theory about “narcissistic leadership”.

Narcissistic leaders are not always dysfunctional narcissist personalities…it’s also a style of leadership where the people in charge push their own ideas / agenda and dont really care about other people. Its essentially a leader who is in the job for their own selfish personal gains.

The benefit of narcissistic leaders is that they can be very magnetic people who become very popular. In management schools they basically accept that these people are useful for rallying support.

The danger is that if there is a power vacuum, they often step into top positions where there is no longer oversight / supervision. This is the cardinal rule: you NEVER let these people run anything. NEVER.

Once in a top position, they tend to discard rules, disregard others, do a lot of bad things in secret, sabotage all rivals etc etc, eventually leading to major corruption problems for any organization they head.

You can change the region area view to ‘nino 3.4’, which is a 5-month running trend of the nino area.

Explanation of the nino 3.4 tool is at this page:

https://climatedataguide.ucar.edu/climate-data/nino-sst-indices-nino-12-3-34-4-oni-and-tni

This is one driver of the big disasters like storms, droughts, floods, heat waves and other bad weather that is all being amplified by climate.

The newest month for which there is a full 5-month run would be October/24 which showed a cooling trend, but in the past 60 days it kicked back to a dramatic warming /el nino conditions. Supposedly they forecast a 60% chance of a switch back to neutral conditions in March-April-May.

Under the line graph, there is a small button labelled “show T2 anomaly map”.

If you click that (terrifying) it visualizes how hot the polar regions are getting. Today is about 10-15° above trend.

16" of rain in 8 hours. Wow.

It is expensive (the most expensive in North America *) because it is low in fossil fuel generation AND uses a lot of renewables with variable production.

The only way to keep the system stable is to rely on fossil fuel generation outside the jurisdiction to offset the peaks and troughs that happen on short time scales.

Ontario actually pays the bordering states to take away excess energy, and they can do it because their gas fired generation can act in seconds to balance supply and demand.

The power EXPORT from the windmills costs the ratepayers in the province over $1B a year…

Similarly, many of the hydro projects rely on seasonal foreign demand. For example BC produces a lot of extra hydro in summer season, and there is air conditioning demand in California during those months. Its not as if the province can hold that water and use it for heating homes during winter.

(* because of unreliable supplies, large consumers like industry can’t actually operate in the province because they cannot get reliable contracts… This is about 1/2 million jobs. This is a big part of how Ontario became a have-not province, actually. I had multiple clients from Ontario’s generating sector who told me that they “did not want” to enter power contracts with penalties around outages, so if a car plant loses power they can lose millions per hour, and the power companies didn’t want to commit to anything. All things equal, big factories can move to Buffalo NY and pay half the price for Ontario energy… )

Basically, it’s expensive because of the costs of remote jurisdiction dependencies and the lack of true self sufficiency.