Where I live travelling at that speed will get you passed by every cop and state trooper driving on the same road. A lot comes down to local norms and enforcement.
DOGE "failed" because cutting the budget wasn't their real goal.
Here are a few outcomes they were able to achieve:
(1) Cutting funding for agencies and organizations that were investigating companies run by Elon Musk.
(2) Cutting funding for organizations, like NOAA, that have high economic returns for every dollar the government spent on them.
(3) Copying information from multiple government databases.
(1) had immediate benefits to Musk. (2) leaves openings for someone with enough capital to fill in the gaps left behind and make a profit charging for what used to be a government service. (3) provides numerous long term benefits to Musk and anyone else with access to that data.
> Cutting funding for agencies and organizations that were investigating companies run by Elon Musk.
Which doesn't make any sense because you don't need to cut their funding when it's your buddies in office. They just don't investigate you anymore regardless of their funding level.
> Cutting funding for organizations, like NOAA, that have high economic returns for every dollar the government spent on them.
It's obvious why fossil fuel companies (and therefore Trump) would want to do this, but Musk is the guy who does electric cars and grid storage batteries. His financial incentive would be to play up the dangers of climate change.
And this is the same as the first one. If your guy is in office then you don't need to cut the funding of some agency under your own control, you just have them stop doing whatever it is you don't want them to do anymore.
> Copying information from multiple government databases.
The only reason DOGE could copy them to begin with is that they were already in control of the government and therefore already had access to the databases. If you want to complain about something, how about why does the government keep all of this sensitive information instead of encouraging systems that use decentralized identity or don't imply or require mass surveillance in order to operate? Every administration has access to that when they get elected, including the ones you don't like, so let's not have it to begin with.
> (2) leaves openings for someone with enough capital to fill in the gaps left behind and make a profit charging for what used to be a government service.
If this was actually a profitable market then there would be no reason for it to be a government service to begin with. But it isn't, because collecting the data is expensive and there aren't a lot of buyers. If anything getting rid of NOAA would cost SpaceX money because NOAA pays SpaceX to launch satellites, and nobody else is going to do it.
Republicans want to cut NOAA because they publish climate data and the fossil fuel industry is a Republican constituency. But you don't need DOGE for that when the Republicans control Congress.
They were completely feckless at finding the right things to cut but this stuff is conspiracy theories.
There are countries that have single-payer systems and widespread supplemental insurance. But if you universalized Medicare, you'd immediately do at least two big things to the market:
(1) You'd eliminate the system of advantages and supports that cause employers to offer private insurance, which is where most people get their insurance from.
(2) You'd create a huge adverse selection problem --- the more effective/useful Medicare is, the fewer families will want to spent $24k/yr on private insurance, meaning the families left on private insurance have a reason to want it, meaning the composition of the risk pool would shift dramatically.
Like, if we ever did M4A, we'd probably end up with a widespread system of supplemental insurance; we already have it with Medicare! But that's not the same thing as keeping your existing plan.
I don't understand the obsession some people have with keeping your existing plan. Lots of people can't keep there plan under the current system. Insurance companies update their plans regularly. Sometimes they remove plans or exit markets entirely. An existing plan will get small changes over time. If Theseus has an insurance plan for 10 years and the insurance company makes changes every year can we still call it the original plan of Theseus?
If M4A plus supplemental insurance gives me about the same coverage I have now for a reduced total cost that sounds like a win to me. Even if it ends up costing me the same amount the net improvement from everyone having access to basic health care would still be a win.
Every policy is easy to enact if you just define away anybody who'd object to it. But, more importantly: it's unlikely that M4A by itself (let alone with the supplemental plan you'd likely end up with) would reduce your total cost!
Pension funds should be diversified and have a mix of asset classes that includes more than the stock market. Ideally, most of these assets will move independently so if one is doing particularly badly the others can balance it out to reduce overall volatility. If your pension fund is too heavily weighted to the market, that's a management problem with your fund.
> I primarily blame Democrats for the current situation for they have been doing just an awful job of getting anything done or standing up to opposition, they are ineffective cowards and invited the current situation with their incompetence.
I agree with you that Democrats have been ineffective in opposing Republican policies but I think you've come to the wrong conclusion. When someone gets robbed I don't primarily blame them for being ineffective at securing their home, I blame the person who robbed them. Why wouldn't you primarily blame Republicans for pushing bad policies instead of Democrats for being bad at blocking them?
Because we are talking about a nation and a political party covering half the population and not an individual victim of a crime the "don't blame the victim" morality does not apply.
When government is doing a terrible job it loses the consent of the people and gets overthrown, usually by monsters. This is the problem with Democrats, they think they should continue to win, that they deserve to continue to win regardless of how they perform. Because they're right it is morally correct for them to continue winning.
THAT'S NOT HOW THE WORLD WORKS.
It is historically objectively true that governments failing to address the concerns of their people are replaced, usually by authoritarian autocrats. It's a pretty straightforward mechanism.
Democratic leaders in the party corrupted the process to put Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden on the presidential ticket. Democratic leaders in Congress failed to show any leadership, failed to address any problems, failed to stand up or take any sort of action that addressed meaningful problems in this country.
They created the environment for the right to fall off a cliff into extremism.
Instead of defending democracy they sat back and watched.
You've got hundreds of millions of people in this country, extremists are always going to exist. You can't pretend that they don't exist or hope and moralize and blame them for existing when their ideas get popular.
The ideas of the extreme right got popular because the ideas of the center and the left failed to convince enough people.
When my castle falls I'm not blaming the invading army, there's always going to be a new one testing my defenses. I'm blaming the castle guards.
This isn't the case of a poor defenseless victim of a senseless crime. This is the experts who should know better falling asleep at the wheel and intentionally ignoring reality because of their selfishness and stupidity.
I think it depends on the piece. I have a piece that I love and spent about $5k on. It's relatively large and has a lot of detail. I wouldn't be surprised if that is the equivalent of a month's work full time for the artist so the price seems reasonable to me.
There is no reason that cloud providers shouldn't be able to set up the same kind of billing options that advertisers have had access to for years. In Google and Meta ads I can set up multiple campaigns and give each campaign a budget. When that budget gets hit, those ads stop showing. Why would it be unreasonable to expect the same from AWS?
Cloud providers charge for holding data, for ingress/egress, and for compute (among other things). If I hit my budget by using too much compute, then keeping my data will cause the budget to be exceeded.
The difference is that cloud providers charge you for the “at rest” configuration, doing nothing isn’t free.
Great so they can give you an option to kill all charges except basic storage. Or let you reserve part of your budget for storage. Or let you choose to have everything hard deleted.
Surely these billion and trillion dollar companies can figure out something so basic.
I'm not an expert on LLMs but my guess would be that this is a result of the curse of dimensionality. As a general rule more dimensions != more better.
I'm not the poster you replied to but I appreciate your clarification. However, I still don't understand your argument. I don't think anyone has argued that supply and demand don't apply to the labour market. However, it seems that you do agree that there are externalities if workers are paid extremely low wages. Is your argument that the government shouldn't put in laws to mitigate or prevent those externalities? Are you saying that minimum wage laws don't actually address the externalities and should be removed? Are you trying to promote other solutions to solving those externalities? If so, what are they? Is there some other point you're trying to make that I'm completely missing?
Many people argue that supply and demand don't apply to the labour market!
Often because they're not even aware of the concept. The more sophisticated claim that it doesn't apply to the labor market.
The minimum wage discussions are dominated by this view.
The supply/demand analysis is simple: If a worker has skills worth $12/hour on the labor market, and the minimum wage is $15, that worker will be unemployed, making 0$/hour. They'll also not learn new skills, since they can't get a job.
Try bringing that up in a minimum wage discussion, and you'll be called many nasty names. Often equalling market wage to human worth, which means you think the poor are lesser humans. A few sophisticates will bring up vague externalities arguments, as if they negate the whole supply/demand concept.
From my perspective minimum wage laws is one of the main factors keeping people in poverty, but that concept is impossible to even explain to most people.
My main thought about externalities is that they their effect is usually minor, and can be ignored. Many of them are also positive. For the bigger ones, it's a case by case analysis.
Is the externality you're thinking of something around the government paying money to the working poor?
That's a strawman. I don't doubt that you've read these things that bother you so much that you bring it up in unrelated discussion, but to the extent serious people critique supply and demand, they don't say it doesn't apply at all (literally all things have supply/demand curves) but that the market distortions in our concentrated economy lead to suboptimal outcomes for society and that the simpler market model (in econ 101 you learn this model is optimal under many assumptions including "perfect competition" that is rarely true of the real world) is an incomplete model of reality which leads to the wrong answer. If you're going to argue against anything please argue against a serious point like one found in an introduction to the topic such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage and characterize it fairly. If you don't understand this graph then you aren't ready to debate the topic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage#/media/File:Monop...
To demonstrate that this is a strawman, I will parrot back what that basic wikipedia article provides as a critique of your point: often in the real world that $12/hr number you provide is depressed by a one-sided monopsony (few large employers vs many small employees, a fact known as market concentration that has grown stronger over decades) and minimum wage can provide effectively a mega union against it to put it simply. When a market is dominated by a single entity what is something "worth"? You may say whatever the market will bear but in noncompetitive markets that is absolutely not the most efficient allocation of resources for the broader system. If insulin were a complete monopoly would it be worth $1M/vial because a billionaire would happily pay that much to save their life? I use the extreme to demonstrate the concept of market failure to you. By pointing out monopolistic forces am I saying "supply and demand don't apply"? Maybe in a way, but putting it that way is reductive and unproductive for our collaborative search for the truth in this discussion.
Or, for a totally separate but less abstract argument, say someone has no skills except for an ability to dig a ditch at $5/hr - it is low value because you could pay someone $50/hr to rent and operate a trencher and be 100x more productive at less total cost and a better overall outcome to society (I think these numbers are probably roughly reflective of reality), but this low skill person is unable to run that trencher. Is it better for society to "learn new skills" as you say by digging ditches for years? They probably would get a bit stronger but obviously never get close to the trencher's productivity or bang per buck. This is an exaggerated toy model but it demonstrates the point that many sub-minimum wage gigs teach negligible skills compared to formal education. I point this out just to object to your example - many people turn to education if possible when they fail to find employment, so to say sub-minimum wage employment will teach them skills whereas unemployment will be worthless just doesn't map on to most people's experience in the real world and to be frank sounds out of touch.
I don't disagree with you and think that UBI and universal health care are better alternatives. However, there is a much easier path forward to getting higher minimum wages and we shouldn't stop making incremental changes just because there is a potentially better solution that we will probably never implement.
