Except that the executive branch has no discretion on paying a whole lot of that money. Many benefits are defined by law, and failing to pay them means breaking the law. A lot of expenses are going to be for contracting goods and services, and not paying is going to be illegal.

When paying them is physically impossible without breaking the law, they must delay the payments.

However, the public debt is constitutionally protected and cannot be questioned by the executive.

However, remember we only observe a small fraction of the skies, and much of the things that have a 99.99998% chance of missing us, were never detected.

Also.... when asteroids get close enough to our orbit to have a 0.9999998 chance of impacting us; eventually, the number of times this is happening adds up to a million, and the number of expected collissions is 1 or greater.

What could go wrong with e3-1240 v3 Xeons costing only $276? Normal people might HAVE them! *shudder*

But I a sure it serves somebody's agenda...

This belongs to the "Malcolm Gladwell and Thomas Friedman school" of Deep Thinkers (TM).

If I paid 100 cancer researchers to break rocks in the hot sun, this would be a massive waste. Sure, they can spend the money on someone else doing something worthwhile, but you're removing their potential productivity from the economy. That's bad for the economy, and bad for the world. Far better to pay them to research cancer cures, they pass the same cash back into the economy, but they are adding value.

If we get rid of contractors to the Government, that profit from this "war" - and the Pols who maintain the security of their power by perpetrating a "war' against their own people...

"DRUG WAR - HIDDEN HISTORY"

Thanks. This whole "clash-of-civilizations" bullshit always pisses me off! It's ahistorical and anachronistic. Maritime Islamic regions arguably had a better understanding and application of Classical Athens and Ionian culture and achievement than "Western" leaders do, today...

I'll accept the argument (whether I agree or not) that certain things should be socialised. Roads, police, fire, health, military, food production (which happens in the usa via farm subsidies), space exploration, national power grid, water, etc.

Airline travel doesn't fit into any category I can think of.

I think you misconstrue my observations and my tentative conclusions.

The "Arab" traders were really a remarkable multi-ethnic amalgamation of Levantine and peninsular Arabs, Africans from the horn, Persians from the gulf, and Indians from the Arabian sea - Malabar Coast and Gujurat. There were also Genoans, Turks and Georgians from the Caucasus - with plenty of overlap by Chinese through the time of Kublai, under the Mongols.

This was the world of Sinbad, and the true inheritor of the great maritime civilizations in the Mediterranean - Tyre, Mycenae and Athens.

Just because the mean was so bad, doesn't mean that there weren't significant outliers, with difference on orders of magnitude.

Agree, about the revelation. Then? There are folks in rural Wisconsin who've never been to Milwaukee, Des Moines or Chicago.

I'd like to see it ported to WINGs. It's simple, fast, pretty and not married to C++.

Why sales for tech needs to be technical. Why sales for tech need to be subject matter expert for customer domain.

Why good technology experiences by customer organizations are rarer than princess farts.

Mod Up, x1000

People don't kill people. Linux kills people.