It's really telling how davidu, a GP at a16z, investor in Flock, author of https://a16z.com/announcement/investing-in-flock-safety/ is losing his mind about his investment being called out on corruption, which adds even more credulity to the accusation.
I had ulevitch.delmar.ca.us delegated to me until one day some IT dweeb just deleted it and when I complained he just said I didn't have any right to have it.
So I'd caution against this path for something you actually care about.
Obama also cut the deficit by more than half. It didn't get all the way to a balanced budget because of how bad of a mess Bush left to clean up, but it was moving in the right direction.
And as a sibling post noted, Bush senior also both raised taxes and lowered spending on a relative basis. So the original assertion is decisively disproven -- half of our modern era presidents (along with the Congress they presided over) did not behave the way they said "only happens".
Incentives are key. If Congress does not present a balanced budget then there has to be consequences. Many other countries work this way. No balanced budget forthcoming? Then there is an immediate collapse of the current government or ruling party and run-off elections to replace them.
The issue with requiring balanced budgets at the federal level is there are a number of situations where, by any economic theory, you want to run deficits.
So what you really need is an impartial Fed-budgetary-counterpart arbiter that declares when balanced budget rules are and aren't in effect.
And probably toss in what target percent of debt needs to be paid down too.
Contract with America convinced enough rubes in America that Republicans actually had a plan (which netted them Congress!) It was a giant failure in terms of actually accomplishing a fraction of the goals it set out, though.
Does Clinton deserve a. Ok the credit, for signing off on it? No, of course not. He deserves some of the credit. The rest goes to the Republican congress, which did the budgeting.
This ignores history. We did raise taxes in the 90s and were paying off our debt. Bush senior made the big boy decision and it left us in amazing shape. Clinton handed over a government to W that was paying off debts and had surplus from 1998-2001.
Absolutely. One note though - it wasn’t just the raised tax, it was that he very explicitly promised to not raise taxes. Maybe doesn’t get elected without that promise but I really don’t know enough about politics before Clinton/Newt Gingrich.
The US had a balanced budget in 2001, after decades of most people claiming that was impossible. The problem with a balanced budget is we all have to live in the real world. The actual real world that you can measure, not each individual's theoretical world of choice.
But stories are much more fun than data, and we put everything on the credit card, and here we are.
All sibling comments are untrue, because it is the legislative branch that has the "power of the purse", including the ability to raise/lower taxes and pass budgets for spending.
So whether an executive makes campaign promises, takes credit for signing the bills into law, or championing the bills and advocating that Congress pass them, it is ultimately Congress--the House with the Senate--that has done these things with taxes and the budget.
This helps define some of the challenges with making very very small turbine engines. We have electrical (lithium) powered drones but they are heavy and have low energy density compared to what a liquid fuel + turbine could provide. But could we make a 2 inch diameter turbine engine reliably? Maybe!
>could we make a 2 inch diameter turbine engine reliably
I mean, technically yes, but in practical terms, no - turbines run on the Brayton cycle, where the are under curve efficiency is determined by the peak pressures it can withstand. if you scale down the turbine proportionally, it gets structurally weaker, meaning its efficiency drops. thrust/weight decreases
If you then thickened its walls you would then be able to handle higher pressures, but weight would increase - thrust/weight decreases again.
So the correct answer is if you really wanted to make a small turbine, you could certainly make one, but your design would be less optimal than a bigger one, so unless your goal is to go small, you would make one as big as you can get away with it.
Here’s a breakdown of the networks present, what they mean, and how they relate to the map’s context ...
The first red flags.
Conclusion
The map is a diagram of networks—pipelines, oilfields, terminals, company concessions, and shipping routes—depicting the Middle East’s oil as a vast, interdependent system. These networks are both physical (infrastructure) and abstract (ownership, contracts), making the map a powerful tool for understanding the strategic importance and international entanglement of oil in the mid-20th century. AI analysis.
And now the last paragraph literally says "AI analysis".
> It's not AI slop, it's probably not even AI. You simply are unable to parse the description, or the map, or both.
