781–790 of 839 posts
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I am perfectly capable of making sense of the article. It's you that I struggle with. At the time this exchange began, that was the only reference to CNN in the article. As I recall most of the rest was attributed to NBC.
The actual source was CNN. Which is the focus of this discussion.
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Data centers will pretty much absorb any person with military nuclear power experience, even cases of people who completely washed out of the program. As for nuclear missile programs in this case, I'm pretty positive that field will still have similar desirable high points. Reliability, understanding procedures, actually understanding procedures to know when/how/why scripts are broken in some cases, and having such s…
> Data centers will pretty much absorb any person with military nuclear power experience Could you elaborate why is that? They seem to be unrelated areas.
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They won't go hungry. I don't think famine will stop them. They don't want to lose their dictator that is willing to advance their agenda.
But they need to have a strong economy AND strong, consistent revenue to fund their defense budget. Don't forget that...
When Putin realised that, his body language changed: https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-ukraine-war-putin-neumann-int...
(Oh how hyperbolic headlines are…)
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Before the election, Vivek or Elon or one of the galaxy-brains floated the idea of firing every other employee in the federal government based on the last digit of their social security number. The cruelty is the point.
There is a difference between cruelty and arbitrariness. It isn't cruelty. They're going up against a world-class bureaucracy; a human powered machine that is excellent at dragging out changes beyond the term of any politician. Something like "Yes, Minister" is a comedy show except a lot of it is fairly true - they aren't going to get anything done without doing something drastic like cutting a lot of functions and s…
That series was based on conversations between the writers and senior civil servants in UK Government. It was Margaret Thatcher's favourite show (she even wrote a scene to perform with the actors at some event or other), because in 1970s and 1980s Britain, it was incredibly on the money.
However, the more apt political comedy to reflect what modern politics looks like isn't "Yes, Minister" or "Yes, Prime Minister" (the sequel), but "The Thick of It", which shows well-meaning but put-upon civil servants dealing with the tyranny and abuse of special advisors and external consultants bullying and demeaning them at every turn. It, too, is based on conversations with real insiders in UK government.
I'll leave it to you to decide which is most apt for modern Washington, but there was a film of the latter mostly set in Washington, which tries to capture the tensions on that side of the Atlantic quite well, with the main joke being the UK's necessary subservience to a larger World power. It's worth a watch.
For my money, Musk looks a lot more like Malcolm Tucker than he does Jim Hacker.
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I am perfectly capable of making sense of the article. It's you that I struggle with. At the time this exchange began, that was the only reference to CNN in the article. As I recall most of the rest was attributed to NBC.
The actual source was CNN. Which is the focus of this discussion.
That’s already enough to conclude that your attempt to “do your own research” fell at the first hurdle.
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There are some hints toward this, like with recent reporting : https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/house-gop-panel-ap... > Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, R-N.Y., said she has expressed “concerns” to leaders about the prospect of steep spending cuts and told reporters that, before she agrees to vote for the budget resolution, she wants “better clarity” about the next stage — especially when it comes to cuts. “$4.5 tri…
It is the US Government. Nobody has minded funding their schemes since 1970. They're going to keep borrowing until something so terrible happens that they literally cannot borrow any more. It is a bipartisan consensus position that spans multiple powerful governing ideologies. Rep. Nicole Malliotakis is much more likely to be using rhetoric than predicting how the situation will develop. If the Republicans as a party…
Trump has therefore caused gilt rates to rise, borrowing costs to rise, and a potential currency devaluation.
If you want to see how that works out when people finally lose their confidence, see what happened to the Truss government in the UK: it's not pretty. The UK is still paying for that on multiple fronts, but we were able to end the experiment in 49 days - that's not possible in the US.
I don't think what has worked for the last 50 years - waving budget appropriations through, shrugging at the national debt - is going to hold up for too much longer, for multiple reasons. And when it falls, it's going to fall fast, and very hard.
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It is the same reason I moved to Europe. I don't think I was overoptimistic. It was literally the best decision I ever made, in every aspect I can think of.
> I don't think I was overoptimistic. It was literally the best decision I ever made, in every aspect I can think of. A lot of folks mention the lower salaries in Europe (generally, and especially for tech): has mattered much in your (personal) experience for quality of life and happiness?
I just wanted enough to buy a house and raise a family, and I could earn enough for this. A comfortable middle class life in a nice neighborhood.
I also appreciate the safety nets and worker protections here in Europe. I recently went through a serious medical condition that in the US would have me bankrupt. Here I had no issues.
Had I moved to the US I would by now be either dead or broke.
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> That's clearly one of your ideological priors But the “living constitution” is nothing more than imposing one’s ideological priors onto the document. I happen to think the crisis of a permanent bureaucracy that is ideologically divergent from the population is far more “dangerous” than anything else the country faces. If we are going to “pragmatically reinterpret” the constitution, that’s the challenge that such in…
> But the “living constitution” is nothing more than imposing one’s ideological priors onto the document. That overlooks a key distinction: An "ideological prior" that's proved to be supported by real-world evidence (i.e., experience) is no longer an ideological prior. Analogously: Special- and general relativity were just theories in 1905 and 1915 (their respective publication dates). Over decades, real-world eviden…
Regardless, we find ourselves in a new time. If the Old Republic could be overthrown by “emanations from penumbras” we can just as easily wave away the current imperial interregnum in which we find ourselves.
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This is Russia driven. Its right out of Aleksandr Dugin's playbook for Russian political dominance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics
Dugin had ideas of spheres of influence. Roughly speaking, he thought that America should be dominated by the US, Europe/Africa by the EU and Asia by Russia. This however coincides with the much older ideas of the technocracy movement, which was championed by Musk's grandfather Haldeman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy_movement#The_Techn... So it is not necessarily Russia driven, but surely RT has recently…
I think it is safe to say that the west is experiencing Duginism.
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> But the “living constitution” is nothing more than imposing one’s ideological priors onto the document. That overlooks a key distinction: An "ideological prior" that's proved to be supported by real-world evidence (i.e., experience) is no longer an ideological prior. Analogously: Special- and general relativity were just theories in 1905 and 1915 (their respective publication dates). Over decades, real-world eviden…
The administrative system never worked. For much of the 20th century we had prosperity deriving from the post-WWII boon and the tatters of the Old Republic protecting private industry. But since 1980, we have had 12 presidential administrations. Of those, 9 won elections by expressly promising to cut government, several by promising to drown it in a bathtub. The only reason the system still exists is because American…
"Far from perfect, but reasonably serviceable" ≠ "total shit"