Appropriations is Congressional and specifics how much an agency will get over the fiscal year.

Apportionment is under the Executive and addresses when and how those funds are made available.

They are two distinct things.

Before anyone asks, no I don’t round up for the Boys and Girls Club at Taco Bell. I sometimes feel bad about it though.

1) Our debt is above GDP and interest is rising faster than GDP growth. Debt is fine when being used as leverage but we are upside down at the moment.

2) We don’t have the ability to issue more debt at the moment. The government has no money. They are using employee pension funds to meet obligations with a promissory note. We have negative cash flow and have run out of the ability to extend our line of credit until Congress raises the debt ceiling.

LLMs are great at certain tasks. Databases are better at certain tasks. Calculators too. While we could continually throw more and more compute at the problem, growing layers and injecting more data, wouldn’t it make more sense to just have an LLM call its own back-end calculator agent? When I ask it for obscure information maybe it should just pull from it’s own internal encyclopedia database.

Let LLMs do what they do well, but let’s not forget the decades that brought us here. Even the smartest human still uses a calculator, so why doesn’t an AI? The fact that it writes its own JavaScript is flashy as hell but also completely unnecessary and error prone.

https://registry.opendata.aws/commoncrawl/

If you don’t like Elon Musk that’s fine. But his companies get stuff done. Blue Origin has been around longer, has gotten more from the government (Yeah, really) and been getting a billion a year from Bezos with nothing to show for it. It’s insane how much SpaceX has done while everyone else has been doing nothing.

Everything else is just details.

Regarding the modern Progressive movement though, I find them a bit too authoritarian for my tastes. There are countless examples but classic Western liberalism is at odds with their ideology. They’ve fallen into the classic revolutionary entrapment of their own power being tied with continued upheaval. If you are not with them completely then you are the enemy. From the Google Manifesto to JK Rowling’s cancelling, they remind me of the mob during the French Revolution. They just eat their own and refuse to accept any kind of meaningful critique.

Liberalism requires debate, disagreement and questioning the status quo. I don’t see that amongst the modern Progressives. They would rather burn it down than build something better.

Ironically, I fear them gaining power as much as I do the religious right. Neither contains the capacity for building the coalitions needed for stable governance. I like moderates. Stability. Peace. Compromise. Mutual Respect. Empathy. I just don’t see those values in those circles.

Now that I’ve politely disagreed, I suppose it’s just a matter of time before someone comes along to insult me and prove my point.

Corporate greed and military spending aren’t up for debate though. We can bicker about guns and immigration policy all we want but some topics aren’t even on the table for discussion.

Every engineering company releases stuff like this. It’s not meant to change the world. It’s marketing to recruit other engineers who would find that problem interesting.

But the Government has to buy them from businesses that meet certain characteristics. Woman owned, etc. That’s a great thing, right?

In this case however, that female owned business is the guy who invented the things wife. Who he sells them to at a mark-up. Who then sells them to the government.

Economy of scale? Ya! They are the number one buyer and pay the most. Honestly, who cares though, it’s only a couple million a year. Drop in the bucket.

How did Boeing fail? Death by a thousand cuts. That same story probably plays out across the entire supppy chain. Every part, every product, every supplier. Compounded over and over again.

I have accounts for all three and will generally try to branch out to test them with each new update. Admittedly, I haven’t gotten to Grok yet, but Claude is far and away the best model at the moment. It’s not even close really.