"War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses." - Major General Smedley Butler
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron." - President Eisenhower
* Permanent extension of all Bush-era tax cuts: 0.35 Source: Moody's Analytics model, Cbpp
Dollar-for-dollar, social program spending consistently produces higher economic returns than military spending or tax cuts, especially tax cuts for the wealthy.
$1 billion spent on education or transit creates more than twice as many jobs (17,687-19,795) as the same amount spent on defense (8,555). -Cigionline
In fact, military spending can actually slow economic growth over time; a 1% military spending increase can reduce economic growth by 9% over 20 years.
Zandi's analysis of 2010 tax legislation found that 90% of economic growth and job creation came from unemployment insurance extensions and targeted tax credits, while high-end tax cuts had "only very small economic impacts." - Cbpp
I know a lot of people who love to quote Smedley and Eisenhower's farewell address, and to a person they support military intervention in Ukraine. Also, people who unironically were saying "The USA shouldn't be the world police!" 10 years ago.
It's almost like supporting an ally whose sovereign territory is being violated is some kind of different situation than the US unilaterally performing military actions in a variety of locations. Amazing!
Probably not, since most of what we sent over was existing stock. The money had already been turned into weapons of war years ago. You can't really turn a gun or rocket into a loaf of bread.
Then why are you arguing with me? I was pointing out the contradiction of people who do that. I feel like you think I'm saying the US shouldn't support Ukraine. I'm all on board with the US supporting Ukraine. I'm saying the US needs a powerful military if you want it to support Ukraine, which is at odds with people who are fully behind the quotes that come from Butler and Eisenhower's farewell address.
> I am saying that support for Ukraine is pretty different from the kinds of behaviors that make people say "the USA shouldn't be the world police!"
And yet, to even consider helping Ukraine in any meaningful way, the US needs an extremely strong, modern military.
Fun fact: the current Republican administration was pushing a budget that substantially increased the federal deficit. The one that was finally approved is still a massive budget deficit increase.
Obama reduced the deficit by nearly half during his presidency, the current FY2025 budget has authorized a $1.9 trillion deficit (6.2% of GDP), with reconciliation instructions potentially allowing for a staggering $3.3-5.8 trillion in additional deficit increases over the next decade.
* Obama's final deficit (2017): $666 billion
* Current 2025 projected deficit: $1.9 trillion
This represents an increase of approximately $1.23 trillion, or about 185% higher than Obama's final deficit. The current deficit is nearly triple what it was at the end of the Obama administration.
Republicans have mastered the art of fiscal hypocrisy: campaigning against deficits to win elections, then ballooning them with tax cuts for the wealthy, only to leave Democrats with the thankless job of fiscal cleanup—for which voters reliably punish them at the polls.
That's like asking what an ocean is but preferably in more detail than just water.
But to answer the question, we really can't give more detail. Congress passes a budget and delegates out to subcommittees to figure out how to spend the money (not revenue) that they were allotted.
So a subcommittee has been authorized to find 4.5T of tax cuts over the next ten years and we won't know what they are until a later date.
There isn't a single Republican budget yet - the house and senate have their own versions of the budget they need to reconcile. That said, the house budget (which just passed yesterday) I believe hews more closely to the Whitehouses' proposal.
But as a summary, you can probably look at Table 1. The values given are over 10 years, so divide every by 10 to get a sense of per year. As written it looks like:
* Overall decrease 170 billion per year in spending (overall Federal spending is about 7 trillion per year). There are cuts across the board except in DoD, DHS, and DoJ.
* Tax cuts decreasing revenue by ~450 billion per year. There is a section in the report identifying all of the different tax cuts. This decrease in tax revenue includes the effect of locking in Trump's first term tax cuts which are currently set to expire.
Pretty frustrating to be nearly 50 and this is literally the exact playbook over the last half century. Reagan / Bush / Trump - 20 years of absolute shit policy (and results) when it comes to the deficit that everyone cares about.
In general crime is down across the board big time. Violent crime especially. If you go back 20 years it's pretty crazy how much crime is down. It's even more startling if you go back further.
Americans believe in a lot of weird stuff that isn't backed by real world evidence. Newt Gingrich said it years ago, facts don't matter if people can be made to believe something. It's all relative and Americans have grown up with ridiculous privilege, which makes most people think immigrants are eating dogs or they go buy TP in bulk cuz of reasons.
People are horrible at understanding statistics. An American is more likely to die falling down a set of stairs than they are from a foodborn illness, for example. Or the average gun owner is more likely to take their own life with their gun than they ever are to use it against a criminal. Heck, that gun is more likely to be stolen and used in a murder somewhere else than a person is to use it in self defense. But most Americans believe they absolutely need a gun because of how dangerous the country is. Meanwhile, they're more likely to choke on a pen or get killed by a dog than to ever use that gun.
Yes, but people are also horrible at defining how a person "should feel" about statistics. A ton of statistics are apples and oranges in practice (e.g. falling down stairs vs food poisoning), because humans intrinsically care about more variables than statistics express (which is why we willingly drive cars, for the most obvious example).
Does NYC have a hell-hole stereotype? Other cities do, and 80's NYC does, and some people throw that shade at all metros, but I wasn't aware of NYC being specifically mis-characterized as being worse than average.
Regardless, this usage of statistics is an excellent example of one of the disconnects between Americans (and I assume other groups of people).
NYC is wonderful, and very safe as far as major cities go. Driving is much less safe, but is safe-ish. We live in a safe world, statistically speaking.
But it's critical to accept that people don't only care about statistics. Humans have emotions. If in town A your chance of being beaten in the street is higher than your chance of being injured in a car accident, and in town B the odds are equal and reversed, people are going to be more angry and critical of town A, especially if the car accidents are not perceived as being of unusually negligent origin (i.e. it's not because everybody there is drunk all the time).
Now if you slide the statistics to counteract the perceived negativity of the two things, at some point they equal out, theoretically, but in practice, it's apples and oranges. In other words, behavior and intention matter. Dignity and civilization matter - a lot. Autonomy and responsibility matter. Crime and deliberate carelessness are not the same as, e.g., a pure accident.
It's the same reason people are more outraged about being hurt by a robot than by a human-driven vehicle.
We have to accept that this side of human nature is intrinsic, and not by itself irrational, even though it is sometimes the source of irrational decision making, when people get too swept up in it.
Factually, it does seem like the parent is probably wrong. I'm not a statistics genius and don't know where to find the best data, but it looks like your chances of being killed by a vehicle as a pedestrian in suburbs is somewhere just south of 2.3 per 100k annually (in 2022).
Your chances of being subject to violence in NYC are harder to say. When most people are making a comparison like this, they usually mean as a visitor, on the streets and in the businesses, probably including day and night. But e.g. probably not including territorial crime or other flavors of locals picking fights with their neighbors. And also not including crimes that occur in residences. But maybe including terrorizing, e.g. being robbed under implied threat of violence? It also varies a lot by borough and neighborhood, so it depends on whether you want to represent a scenario where you might be anywhere in NYC, or just the places a normal person might reasonably be.
All that said, the violent crime numbers are high enough that it seems like they couldn't possibly get qualified all the way down to less than 2.3 per 100k annually. But that intuition could be wrong.
Sometimes I think it's the only way to make people really think about the apparently ridiculous things they say. It's not personal.
>Your chances of being subject to violence in NYC are harder to say.
Not that much harder, I would say. If you want to make a serious comparison, that is... Here's a list of per 100k rates for various crimes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b... All of those crimes are WAY higher than 2.3 per 100k annually. Anyone visiting NYC is probably at much more risk because they will be more likely to go places and do things that are unsafe, and the locals can spot them from a mile away.
>All that said, the violent crime numbers are high enough that it seems like they couldn't possibly get qualified all the way down to less than 2.3 per 100k annually. But that intuition could be wrong.
I agree. Now you know why I consider the original comment absurd. There are also some people who are so anti-car that they want to make arguments like that, seriously. I assumed (perhaps incorrectly) that you are one of those. If you just made a bad guess and aren't arguing that NYC is safe or that cars are wildly unsafe, then I think we're in agreement now.
For every complex problem, there is a solution that is easy, simple, and wrong.
And then there's the Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety (not sure it's a law), which states, simplified, that a simpler system cannot control a more complicated system.
And the corollary to that called the "Principle of Subsidiarity" which states (paraphrasing) that "Responsibilities must be minimally delegated upwards"
A few months back I was playing with BLE tokens and espresence receivers so HA can tell which room I'm in. It was way too noisy to be useful at the time, but it strikes me as something that's eminently doable.
So, this is interesting, but much more interesting is the langchain stuff N8N has added to their latest release. Makes it seamless to add in an army of interns to your workflow.
You're right. The Langchain integration is great, but you need an extra account for it. But it is actually in the backlog to write a tutorial about whats possible with Langchain too.
fyi, a separate account should not be necessary any more as the functionality got integrated into the regular version and is so available for all users by default.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smedley_Butler
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron." - President Eisenhower
Military Spending and Tax Cuts for the wealthy have some of the lowest economic multipliers of all government activities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplier_(economics)
* Education spending: 2.4 (Federal Reserve research) Source: Federal Reserve
* Medicaid/healthcare: 2.0 Source: Congressional Budget Office Cbpp
* Food stamps (SNAP): 1.73-1.74 Sources: Mark Zandi/Moody's Analytics, Americanprogress, Manhattan Institute
* Unemployment insurance: 1.61-2.1 Sources: Blinder & Zandi; Urban Institute, Americanprogress
* Infrastructure spending: 1.0-2.5 Sources: CBO, Blinder & Zandi, Feyrer & Sacerdote, Americanprogress
* Military spending: 1.5 (average) Source: Federal Reserve
* Middle-class tax cuts: 0.6-1.5 Sources: CBO, Blinder & Zandi, Feyrer & Sacerdote, Americanprogress
* Upper-income tax cuts: 0.2-0.6 Sources: CBO, Blinder & Zandi, Americanprogress
* Permanent extension of all Bush-era tax cuts: 0.35 Source: Moody's Analytics model, Cbpp
Dollar-for-dollar, social program spending consistently produces higher economic returns than military spending or tax cuts, especially tax cuts for the wealthy.
$1 billion spent on education or transit creates more than twice as many jobs (17,687-19,795) as the same amount spent on defense (8,555). -Cigionline
In fact, military spending can actually slow economic growth over time; a 1% military spending increase can reduce economic growth by 9% over 20 years.
Zandi's analysis of 2010 tax legislation found that 90% of economic growth and job creation came from unemployment insurance extensions and targeted tax credits, while high-end tax cuts had "only very small economic impacts." - Cbpp
Jack Ma was completely correct: US wasted trillions on warfare instead of investing in infrastructure. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/18/chinese-billionaire-jack-ma-...