Naturally, that calls into question the incredibly low interest rates, and the reserve currency status.

If you need to blame Trump, the last straw was COVID.

> At incredibly low interest rates, most investments are positive ROI.

Step 1: Hold short term rates at zero, forever Step 2: ??? Step 3: Profit Step 4: Wow, that's a lot of debt

[1] https://www.cfr.org/blog/first-time-us-spending-more-debt-in...

An everyday experiment is sticking your flat hand out the window of a moving car. With slight wrist rotations, you'll find even slight deviations from neutral (parallel to the ground) cause your "wing" to rise or fall, with a force that seems proportional to the angle.

We can hypothesize that a symmetric wing, with zero angle of attack, should experience no lift:

https://aviation.stackexchange.com/a/35139

A directory hierarchy feels more pleasant when it maps to features, instead. Less clutter.

Most programmers do not care about OO design, but "connascence" has some persuasive arguments.

https://randycoulman.com/blog/2013/08/27/connascence/

https://practicingruby.com/articles/connascence

https://connascence.io/

> Knowing the various kinds of connascence gives us a metric for determining the characteristics and severity of the coupling in our systems. The idea is simple: The more remote the connection between two clusters of code, the weaker the connascence between them should be.

> Good design principles encourages us to move from tight coupling to looser coupling where possible. But connascence allows us to be much more specific about what kinds of problems we’re dealing with, which makes it easier to reason about the types of refactorings that can be used to weaken the connascence between components.

Popping off the heat sink to apply a fresh dab is no big deal, but I didn't find out until the top-center keys (y, 6) began failing.

Replacing the keyboard is $50 and about a hundred tiny screws.

But it's actually all just taxes.

I can stipulate there must be essential complexity. I think we have to dispute any suggestion that this hypothetically-essential complexity has grown at the same rate as the spending[1].

It's not obvious that fairness, charity, national defense, public health, postage stamps, corn ethanol... [or air traffic control (cough), clean water (cough), non-derailing trains (cough), levees (cough)]..., ad infinitum should require a static percentage of the economy. Essential or not, those costs fundamentally cannot continue to outpace real GDP growth.

Rather, it seems obvious to me that the political class has scope-creeped "governance" into spending as an end in itself.

Practically, and morally, the government is too big and complex, and it should be drastically smaller and simpler.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#H...

Not sure if it's relevant, but psychedelics (mushrooms) broke a college friend after minimal recreational use. Like, maybe twice, with zero past history of any other controlled substance.

His delusions were similar to what you described. In hindsight, I wasn't qualified to handle his deeply troubled mind.

You did the right thing contacting family and seeking professional help.

If he harms himself, it's not your fault.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Station_Freedom

> As the Apollo program began to wind down in the late 1960s, there were numerous proposals for what should follow it. Of the many proposals, large and small, three major themes emerged. Foremost among them was a crewed mission to Mars, using systems not unlike the ones used for Apollo. A permanent space station was also a major goal, both to help construct the large spacecraft needed for a Mars mission as well as to learn about long-term operations in space. Finally, a space logistics vehicle was intended to cheaply launch crews and cargo to that station.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-134

> The Shuttle was originally conceived of and presented to the public in 1972 as a 'Space Truck' which would, among other things, be used to build a United States space station in low Earth orbit during the 1980s and then be replaced by a new vehicle by the early 1990s.

Grandparent said "collapse," which is what Jenga towers do.

Here's the era, in two charts:

[1] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/government-bond-y... [2] https://www.cbpp.org/income-concentration-at-the-top-has-ris...

There's a Nest mini (2nd gen) two meters away, but the device that answers is the Google Home 2016 in a different room.

First attempt: "Okay, ten minutes. And that's starting... Now."

Second attempt: "Sorry, I don't understand."

Third attempt: bingo.

Further trials seem to work, until they're interrupted by the 10 minute timer.

My partner comes downstairs to ask why I'm yelling STOP.

I remember my exact words when I bought this thing:

I have seen the future, and it sucks.

In a normal workday, I don't hear it.

Here, "conversational" means your voice command should prompt the app to ask you a question, driving a state machine. (Set a reminder. When do you want to be reminded?)

I haven't tried to use it, but the docs indicate CRUD-over-voice ("built-in intents") is unaffected.

https://developers.google.com/assistant/ca-sunset#what_will_...

https://developer.android.com/reference/app-actions/built-in...

When half[1] the population refuses to participate (perhaps they're tired of being lied to, or the candidates are slime, or there are too many selectively-interpreted, arbitrarily-enforced "laws" to count[2], or the idea one person should represent 617,000 is absurd, or they just don't like bossing their neighbors around)...

Maybe the government doesn't have consent.

[1] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/02/19/knight-non... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Code#Number_and_...

Accordingly, "their" costs inevitably exceed revenue. It is obvious they're spending more than ever.

  $ hyperfine -N -w 100 -m 1000 -L bin jq,jaq "echo '[1,2,3]' | {bin} '.[1]'"
  Benchmark 1: echo '[1,2,3]' | jq '.[1]'
    Time (mean ± σ):       3.4 ms ±   1.7 ms    [User: 0.6 ms, System: 2.6 ms]
    Range (min … max):     0.7 ms …   5.8 ms    1000 runs
 
  Benchmark 2: echo '[1,2,3]' | jaq '.[1]'
    Time (mean ± σ):       3.4 ms ±   1.7 ms    [User: 0.5 ms, System: 2.7 ms]
    Range (min … max):     0.7 ms …   5.8 ms    1000 runs
 
  Summary
    echo '[1,2,3]' | jq '.[1]' ran
      1.00 ± 0.71 times faster than echo '[1,2,3]' | jaq '.[1]'