As for a less chaotic way to go about it, both Democrats and Republicans have been screaming about a balanced budget for as long as I can remember (Im not young) and now we finally have someone willing to attack the problem seriously.

I mean we all know how to do it, simply cut THE OTHER GUYS programs and then we can afford OUR programs. Simple right? What we have here is a Republican administration deciding where to make cuts and a Democratic party unhappy about it. Donald Trump could literally save planet earth and the democratic party wouldn't have a nice word to say about him. This is the exactly how the Republican party treated President Obama for 8 years.

The US is very backwards in a lot of important ways. Since you're in Australia it might be hard for you to see but about half the country is perfectly happy with whats going on and they knowingly voted for exactly this. Its not a surprise this is happening and if anything is surprising about it a politician is actually doing the thing he promised to do.

The complaints and panic energy you see around this topic seems to stem from the fact that the Republican party has the executive branch and both chambers of congress in addition to a sympathetic supreme court (read FULL CONTROL). The party in power today can more or less do whatever it wants and the opposing party can only make complaints among themselves while mounting literally any legal challenge they can come up with in hopes of slowing the process down.

So consider the guy who makes $100k/year and spends $200k/year. Over the course of enough years what must inevitably happen here?

I think making financial decisions to avoid what amounts to bankruptcy is OK.

Now, the US wont ever go "bankrupt" or "default" of course, but it will absolutely print money to service the debt on its bonds. Bond holders tend not to like that and sooner or later will demand higher payments in exchange for the use of their money thus increasing our "minimum monthly payment" on our giant credit card.

Sooner or later we get to a death spiral situation - nobody knows when that will be or what set of circumstances will trigger it - and when/if it does finally happen it will somehow take everyone by surprise. Nothing is so surprising as the inevitable when it finally occurs.

In August 2024, Alphabet announced a quarterly dividend of $0.20 per share, totaling $0.80 annually, resulting in a dividend yield of approximately 0.39%

At current that would mean Alphabet's annual dividend payout is approximately $9.8112 billion.

Now the game is to pay that dividend, incentivize people to hold the stock and reduce volatility. A dividend stock company behaves very differently than a growth stock company.

Whats really frightening here is that a company like Google looks into the future and sees bad prospects for growth.

You are precisely correct. However I use AI regularly to write what Ive come to call Nuisance Code, which is for example: I need a function to find the highest peak and lowest valley in this example stream of data points.

Can I do that? Sure I can do that. Will I have to think about it for a minute and fire up the debugger here and there, drop a few log print statements to get it running? You bet I will. Will I have to dig around in my memory for the last time I did a thing like this, oh yeah.

Can I tell AI what my stream of data looks like, tell it I want a list of peaks and valleys in the data, get some code and run it the first time, today? Yes I can.

Someone is always going to have to break the ask down into discrete logical units for implementation then precisely describe that work. This person is always going to be a developer.

Then you can out him or take up legal action, or send some goons over to his house for that matter.

If you really want to have some fun tell him you're happy to pay him but he must become and Approved Vendor first ... and boy thats a process but you want paid right? This is the only way accounting will pay anybody. Sorry :)

So "Billionaires kept pace with inflation in 2024" is probably a more accurate headline.

One of the worst books ever published was that damn Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson. The week after that was published literally everyone with a laptop was a demanding asshole with ridiculous ideas they now felt compelled to beat everyone else into because IT WORKED FOR STEVE AMIRITE!!!???

The founders hate it when you use numbers, facts and analysis to come up with very good reasons not to implement their latest Great Idea on demand. I presume you were the one that actually implemented a Product Roadmap to keep founders out of the weeds in the first place.

Your take is dead on but there is a case where we actually do get it done and its not as hard as its being made out to be.

My point in a nutshell is simple; calling Trump names didn't work the first time and may have even helped him get reelected. If he is to be hampered, its too late to totally stop him, is this really the way to do it? Quadruple down on a losing strategy yet again?

Attacking Trump as a person failed. Attacking Trump on policy didn't seem to fare much better. Whats left at this point? 77 million people looked at the charges levied against him, and then voted for him anyhow. The rational response to this from his opponents is to continue down the same failed path? Its just performative theatrics at this point I think. The die has been cast.