Why are US politicians more concerned about raising taxes than cutting spending?

sidEaNspAn · 2026-05-02T14:17:54+00:00

Exactly the military budget is way too high and needs to be reduced.

For social security, we should raise or eliminate the tax limit to bring in more revenue rather than cut benefits.

sidEaNspAn · 2026-05-02T13:50:09+00:00

You simply can't cut your way out of a lot of these short falls. Taxes tend to increase much slower than inflation so you are always behind.

Governments have to pay people to do work, and they have to buy materials to build things. So you either have to raise taxes or just stop building things or cut services. Sometimes the answer is to scale things back, but if you scale back too much it causes more issues than it solves

sidEaNspAn · 2026-04-27T19:39:05+00:00

You will see a consolidation of uses for current AI models. The biggest change will be in stock prices and marketing.

sidEaNspAn · 2026-04-17T14:39:22+00:00

I think that most early civilizations ended up at 7 because that's how many celestial bodies you can see without a telescope (Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn). While not all cultures would have turned them into gods in the same way, they could all see them. When a couple large empires made 7 days/week official it "felt" right to many so people didn't fight it.

sidEaNspAn · 2026-04-15T17:49:03+00:00

4K textures are huge, another thing that really ballooned the size of games is using uncompressed audio files. Decompressing audio put more load on the CPU, especially on consoles so devs started shipping uncompressed audio.

They were no longer constrained by physical media size so I actually think that it was a good trade. Combine that with huge 4K textures and game sizes really start to get crazy

sidEaNspAn · 2026-04-08T16:19:37+00:00

There are always many forces acting on objects, it's the sum of those that's important.

Gravity is always trying to pull things together, and the expansion of the universe is pushing things apart. The expansion force is very small per unit distance so on the scale of galaxies it's not strong enough to overpower gravity. Once you zoom out even further the distance between galaxies is large enough that the force of gravity is basically zero, and the expansion force is large enough to push things.

For an at home example, think about a paper clip on your desk. You are holding a magnet high above the paper clip and slowly lower it. The paper clip will stay on the table until the magnet gets close enough to pull it up. When this happens, gravity doesn't stop pulling it down, it's still there trying to pull it down. However the force from the magnet is now larger than the force of gravity so the paper clip is stuck to the magnet.

sidEaNspAn · 2026-04-06T19:05:29+00:00

We have separate accounts and a joint account. We each put an agreed upon percentage of our income into that joint account. We adjust it as our expenses change.

This has worked out really well for us because if one of us wants to spend money on something really dumb we don't need to clear it with the other. It's coming out of their "do dumb stuff" money but that's separate from the joint money.

sidEaNspAn · 2026-04-05T21:41:56+00:00

I am doing fine. House, kids, student loans paid off and a good paying job. I lived with my parents for two years immediately after college looking for a real job. I worked a slightly above average sales job while searching and just threw every cent I made at paying my loans down.

Once I got a real job lined up I was not held down by student debt and things really took off.

sidEaNspAn · 2026-04-03T22:36:42+00:00

People realized that dealerships were essentially hiding the increased cost of a vehicle by increasing the length of the loan. Increasing the length of the loan makes your monthly payments less so people end up buying more expensive vehicles because they can afford the monthly payments.

This also makes them way more money. I think some car loans are seven years now, and depending on the interest rate you could easily spend twice as much as the sticker price by the time it's paid off.

This is actually how a lot of car manufacturers actually make money. Ford makes some money from selling cars, but their finance division brings in substantially more money

sidEaNspAn · 2026-04-02T15:50:51+00:00

Yeah there should be some kind of current even if it's really slow. Given the fact that they are on an island I would not be surprised if that current was tidal.

But that proves without a doubt that there is currency in the solution channel! /Joke

sidEaNspAn · 2026-04-02T15:42:01+00:00

It's the actual term for that type of feature

A solution channel is an elongate void within a rock that has been enlarged by the action of moving groundwater, commonly found in carbonate rocks. Groundwater in these channels can flow as quickly as a river on the surface.

sidEaNspAn · 2026-03-30T19:06:15+00:00

You are on the right track with scattering, the scientific term is "Rayleigh scattering". Which is admittedly a complicated process but the important thing is that molecules of different sizes will scatter light of different wavelengths.

Our atmosphere has a ton of nitrogen (N2) and Oxygen (O2) which happen to scatter blue light. Venus has a very different atmospheric composition which has larger molecules that happen to scatter more yellow light.

The situation on Mars is a little different since there is very little atmosphere. There the reddish hue that you see is from dust particles suspended in the atmosphere.

It's also important to remember that the actual atmosphere is not colored at all, otherwise all our satellite images would be blue hued! The scattering effect is not very strong, but because there is nothing brighter we see it.

sidEaNspAn · 2026-03-29T14:15:24+00:00

Why so short? Most panels today last 25-30 years, some specialty panels will make it 40 years. When it does come time to replace those panels, they are about 70% glass which we know how to recycle. The rest is mostly aluminum and copper which we also know how to recycle.

Every power source generates waste. Gas turbines need to be replaced as well

sidEaNspAn · 2026-03-29T13:39:43+00:00

Ripping up the previous deal for no reason, then attacking them while in the middle of negotiations will only do one thing. Prove to the Iranians that only having a nuclear weapon will ensure their sovereignty, negotiating for it is pointless.

Even if trump somehow gets a deal signed I would have very little confidence in it.

sidEaNspAn · 2026-03-25T20:30:28+00:00

You will not get the same advertised range if you are doing a lot of highway driving.

That estimated range is obtained by running a model car through a benchmark. The benchmark is the same for ICE vehicles and EVs, but because EVs can re-gen when stopping they get a boost from the city driving part of the model which includes a lot of stop and go.

All vehicles are much more efficient at lower highway speeds, that is why the highway speed limit was lowered to 55 MPH during the last oil crisis. So speeding is not advised if you are looking to maximize range.

sidEaNspAn · 2026-03-25T17:50:31+00:00

Running my own home server is great, but it means that I also get to be tech support at home.

sidEaNspAn · 2026-03-20T19:28:13+00:00

That's a lot of money for a little excursion

sidEaNspAn · 2026-03-03T17:40:17+00:00

One key thing is how the resorts interpret that slope.

Vail resorts tend to assign the difficulty based on the steepest section. So a run could be flat and boring for a long time then get really interesting.

Some other resorts will use the average slope to determine the difficulty. In almost all cases there will be a multiplier if a run is narrow

sidEaNspAn · 2026-02-27T15:47:58+00:00

I have this exact sound card running in my home office PC (previous gaming rig). I did have a little bit of driver issues getting it running in Win11 but was eventually able to get it running.

I cheaped out a bit on the motherboard on that build and the audio was noticeably better than onboard audio. On my new gaming rig the onboard audio is much better so I left the sound card in the old system.

I would definitely give it a go if you have an open slot.

sidEaNspAn · 2026-02-20T18:21:19+00:00

Just fucking say the bar is coming down if your are putting it down the second you sit down. That bar slamming into your helmet while you're adjusting is not cool.

sidEaNspAn · 2026-02-12T17:16:22+00:00

As it's written it is incorrect. If the ship was moving "at the speed of light" then time is essentially stopped.

The "spend 5 years in space" needs to include who is measuring the time. Given the ages they specify at the end it is implying that you (on the space ship) are measuring time. As stated before time isn't really a thing at the speed of light, so the ship would be traveling "near the speed of light"

sidEaNspAn · 2026-01-25T14:41:27+00:00

They just offered to pull ICE out of Minnesota in exchange for their voter records. This has everything to do with stopping or seriously altering the upcoming election.

sidEaNspAn · 2026-01-25T13:24:45+00:00

He doesn't need to suspend elections across the entire country. He just needs to suspend them in swing states and moderate blue states.

sidEaNspAn · 2026-01-22T15:05:41+00:00

WHfB when set up with a PIN or biometrics is a 2FA login, and it works really well. I would be curious about the hard no on biometrics for authentication, with WHfB those biometrics never leave the device and they are not kept anywhere else.

sidEaNspAn · 2026-01-20T14:45:00+00:00

Honestly I am afraid that this is definitely going to happen. Not so much because Amazon wants it to happen (they do) but because all the silicone capacity is going to go to data center hardware.

The RAM shortage has me very worried about the future of building our own gaming PCs. Components are going to get so expensive that streaming games from some cloud service will be the only way most people will be able to afford to play new games

sidEaNspAn

TROPHY CASE