All that is to say central planning has historically proven to be less than efficent and continues to do so.

It is still a huge leap to suggest they are on the brink of economic collapse. For example man us cities have pretty acute housing shortage / affordability crisis, would you claim the US economy is on the brink of collapse based on that? or even those cities and regions?

As to EVs so they over produced them.. Does it matter, if the government subsides pay for it, and they don't create system problems by slowing or halting future production, which they don't have to because the government can just subsidize retolling those factories to do something else to consume the inputs, it does not have to domino or snowball the way capital destruction often does in market economies. - Sure it will be drag on the economy over all, because the inefficiency and waste will have to be made up for with taxes etc, but then our government manages to light a lot of money on fire doing stupid projects that nobody needs or cares about too, as well as fighting foreign wars.

China built a bunch of cars nobody will drive and apartment blocks few will occupy. Its not good economics but the idea it is ruinous seems farcical; at least on the surface without real numbers to back it up and the CCP will never make real numbers availible. I say all this as someone who thinks the best thing that could happen to the world would be the collapse of the CCP but hope and wishful thinking does not make it so.

Modern Russia is absolutely socialist. Heck they national healthcare baked into their constitution.

It may also be 'autocratic' in practice if not form but it absolutely is socialist.

It needed to be "fixed" but not necessarily on anyone's time table besides the ffmepg volunteers, or alternatively given it is an issue with specific coded and not the core of the encoder or something, it is up to people that build and ship ffmpeg with they projects to disable that codec and rebuild and push an update.

If Google is paying or providing support infrastructure, hosting, etc they don't get a say in feature / fix priority. Just because 'security' gets added to the strings that constitute a bug report in a FOSS application should not suddenly mean that it becomes the most critical task, nor should it place some obligation on the authors to provide a fix at all.

The FOSS projects really need to learn to respond with "Look this is a hobby, and as a craftsman I take pride in my work, and i am trying to write clean, secure, correct code. However my priorities features and fixes that I care most about and other contributors sending high quality pulls care about, and those might not be yours, even if you think it they impact security. If you want determine how we spend our time directly, many of us are willing accept contract work."

FOSS projects need to reject this notion that just because a cabal of mostly commercial ISVs slap a CVE on something, they owe the world a patch even if it means losing sleep or skipping their camping trip to work on hobby they did not plan to make time for that month or three!

No; it's absolutely a terrible idea. It may be great for the businesses; but, it's absolutely fucking terrible for the consumer.

This is absolutely fucking insanity. Imagine having to carry 6 different cards and wondering which one a particular store is going to take.

So this is Geniza from between the First and Second Temple? Sorry, just had to ask. :)

Contemporary home-school does not look like it did decades ago.

We home-school and from what I can tell from the homeschooling community is that like us most of the kids participate in one or more co-ops that where groups of parents collaborate to deliver a course that are more hands on like science and music. Local YMCAs, gyms etc, offer classes during the day like Home School PE.

So homeschoolers get quite a lot of repeated and consistent interactions with other children. How 'diverse' those others are probably varies a lot by the size and makeup of where you live.

SAS has been dead for 15y; it started with R and then Python absolutely destroyed it. No one teaches SAS in universities any longer, why would they? It's terribly expensive and absolutely fucking dead.

We migrated away from SAS back in 2017 and never looked back. The only verticals still using it are heavily regulated and running long-standing legacy code that they're slowly migrating to Python.

I remember absolutely dying when they tried to renegotiate our contract UP back in 2015. I flat out told them they were dead and we were moving away from them and they told me, "good luck managing your data without us!"

Two companies and 10 years later, we're doing just fine and they are not.

Why would it?

The FAA could make the fee schedule in a way that encourages whatever behaviors congress sets out as desirable in its charters if it were made more independent. Nothing would stop them from say charging higher fees to file a flit plan for a cargo plan vs one with commercial passengers. No reason they can't do that even on a per source or destination airport basis. Want to fly cargo into LAX - $$$$$ but if you land it in some less busy airport a couple hours away in the desert its only $. Where a passenger flight plan with an LAX terminus might only be $$.

They can similarly drive more or less revenue for certification of aircraft. Maybe domestically manufactured craft get cheap certs, and AirBus gets bent over the counter and thoroughly reamed. Tons of opportunities and lots of potential stability improvements if you make it a little bit more removed from the executive branch, without an need for your basic plane fare to change a much. It would just be one hand giveth the other taketh.

If that is true, and I am not saying it isn't then everyone will pay for it anyway. It will show up in the cost of products etc.

The FAA and everyone who flies, registers an aircraft, etc already interact directly. It would not even be inefficient to just make the FAA operate more like the post office, a government sponsored by not directly funded agency. It will insulate it from things like Finding Spats and shutdowns.

Actually turning the skies into a toll road seems like a pretty smart move.

The financial bullshit started long before 2008; it just took that long for the system to break. Bill Clinton removed a lot of the rules governing investment banking being separate from the S&L world.

Of course Republic Congress enacted the repeal; but that was bipartisan 343-86...

Hey no need to let facts get in the way of good story right, much more fun to just blame the other guy because calendar happened to roll over at the right time, that low-information-voters (also know as Democrats) will be easily suckered.

No but the Senate makes its own rules, and one of those rules is a tradition of unlimited debate. Until there are no objectors or a super majority agree the discussion should be terminated, legislation cannot be voted on.

For decades now minority parities have leveraged this to block the bodies business when it is doing something they don't like.

It is possible for the majority to simple 'change the rules' but nobody really wants to do that because they know the shoe will be on the other foot in another election cycle or two and don't want be railroaded when its there turn.

So the 60 vote majority requirement persists, as removing it is basically a mutually assured destruction situation, that will hold until one party feels they are certain to have a sustained comfortable majority going forward - I expect. The moment that happens and if said party has anything hovering right around that 60 mark which could become 59 or whatever the rule will be eliminated so fast your head will spin - I also expect.

The typical increase when the enhanced subsidies go away is like $150 a month. You act like it is apocalyptic but it is anything but..Green New Deal driven inflation cost these people more. Hell Cash for Clunckers probably drove up their annual transportation costs more then these premium supports expiring do!

Except you're lying. 'illegal immigrants' are defined as far as the ACA is concerned as anyone without a legal status. Never mind if that status was legally conferred or if it was perhaps granted by executive fiat, to include any kind of parole or programs like DACA invented out of thin air cloth..

Reality is lots of money is in fact going to people who are eligible for deportation..and who never (if past administrations had followed the law) be conferred any kind of status to begin with.

They (the GOP Lead House) passed CR to fund the government. A CR mind you that would have kept Biden era funding levels. Trump (The Executive) for his part seems entirely willing to sing that CR if it makes it to hist desk. The Senate (GOP lead) has repeatedly shown the raw votes are there pass the CR.

A minority party (Democrats) have enough Senate votes to use the Senate's parliamentary procedures to prevent the CR from getting an up or down vote. Mind you Appropriations bills are constitutionally speaking supposed to be written in the House, the Senate real legitimate role there is mostly one of executing veto power.

So yes the GOP has all three branches, elections are supposed to have consequences, the GOP is ENTITLED to implement its policy choices. At least when the GOP triggered shutdowns they had a majority in at least one legislative body.. This is pure hostage taking. The suggestion Democrats are not the ones clearly in the wrong here is just asinine. Win back a legislative body in 26 or 28, and if there is another shutdown then and only then can you blame the GOP for not being willing to negotiate.

Someone might have said all the same things about the space race.. They'd have been mostly wrong. At least for some span of generations along the axis marked time.

Yes the USA might be matched or eclipsed in 'space' technology in the near future, and maybe already is. In the mean time we are still enjoying huge technical dividends and current economic receipts via Space-X etc.

Over the past two generations we enjoyed a clear advantage in the cold war, and enjoyed a lot of national and even global security. We did not have to make morally reprehensible culturally destructive choices like building giant domesday end the whole world bombs, or as many bombs because we knew our ICBMs would get off the ground and put their payloads on target!

  As to your final thought, there may not be a finish line. There is an evolution happening, the Space Age order giving way to a information age order, and positioning ourselves in it is exactly what we are trying to do. Finish line or no there will absolutely be a next plateau, the question is who gets best position on it.