Part of the reason there's a shortage is because the US was the main supplier. There was no market incentive for anyone to invest into helium extraction.
It'd be like if the US used it's strategic oil reserve to supply the US with oil at a low price at all times.
A strategic reserve isn't supposed to be used as a supply. The existence of a strategic reserve shouldn't have an effect on the supply of helium except in an emergency. The fact that selling the helium reserve could create a shortage should tell you that it wasn't being used as a reserve but as a supply.
The US was, essentially, artificial subsidizing the price of helium. What's happening now is that people are actually paying the real price of helium.
The US government decided (maybe correctly, IDK) some years ago that their strategic helium reserves were too high (and thus expensive).
There were several announcements, a lot of discussion, and a long process before they started selling it. It was also a temporary action, with a well known end-date (that TBH, I never looked at). It had a known and constant small pressure over investments, it wasn't something that destabilized a market.
It wasn't. It was injected into the porous rock at the Bush Dome Reservoir [1], which acted as a natural container of helium. The strategic helium reserve was "expensive" because buying helium for storage was funded by treasury debt, but it was expensive purely only on paper.
I answered that. It wasn't expensive. Building up the stockpile was expensive (but only on paper; financed via treasury debt), but once stored, it required very little maintenance because it was all held underground in porous rock. The only real expense was maintaining the wells.
It was a penny wise and pound foolish political move to pretend to be financially responsible and reduce the deficit by some tiny rounding error on top of a rounding error amount.
Basically political bike shedding so elected officials could avoid making any hard or controversial decisions that would have a material impact but maybe upset some folks due to raising taxes or reducing spending.
I suppose I'm neutral on the topic of strategic helium reserves; but what aspect of this is supposed to be pound foolish? What exactly is the buffer meant to be for?
A strategic petroleum reserve makes a lot of sense, petroleum is part of the food supply chain and it'd be stupid to be in a position where a short disruption could cause people to starve. Not to mention the military implications if an army can't zoom around because the petrol stations run dry for whatever reason.
I don't see anything on the list of uses for helium that looks particularly time- and helium- sensitive in the way that a strategic stockpile would help with.
The article for example mentions MRI macines, aerospace engineering, fiber optics and semiconductors, so I guess it depends on if you want those things to still be available in a crisis
That does sound kinda minor? A worst-case scenario of a month or two without MRI machines or "aerospace engineering", whatever that means doesn't sound particularly scary. And that is making some pretty unrealistic assumptions like there is literally no helium, hospitals don't have private reserves that can last a few months and there are no replacement gasses or alternative options of any sort. And people can make do with limited fibre-optic or semiconductor manufacturing. We have crisises in various computer components every few years (I can think of HDD, RAM & GPU supply shocks over the last few years). Doesn't seem to be a major problem. A couple of months of disruption isn't a strategically interesting event.
If you're worried you can keep your own helium reserve? Then if there is an emergency and it turns out that you don't need an MRI you can sell the helium to whoever does and feel really good about your foresight.
I'm not seeing any need for a strategic reserve here. There aren't any strategic issues. It is a bit far-fetched that a helium shock will even lead to the end of MRIs.
Everyone also could keep their own supply of gas and their own batteries for electricity but it turns out that is not expensive and foolish compared to centralizing such backups.
A lot of people die every month. We're talking about a probability near-0 event where I imagine it'd be difficult to pick that deaths out from general background mortality - admittedly just based on the fact I don't recall anyone I know who needed a life-saving MRI but I know a few who died. That isn't much of a justification for a strategic helium reserve. Some level of risk just has to be tolerated, we can't afford to have a contingency for every possible hypothetical.
AFAIK, it was created to fill airships in case of a war. So the original intent is completely outdated.
Also, last I knew about it, the reserves were only reduced, and the US still has some. I have absolutely no idea on the cost/benefit of it, but I don't think any other country keeps a large reserve of Helium.
> The existence of a strategic reserve shouldn't have an effect on the supply of helium except in an emergency.
Is there a widely-accepted definition of "an emergency" in the context of strategic reserves?
[Thinking of the SPR] "Oil/gas prices are currently higher due to geopolitical events, my [potential] voters are getting increasingly unhappy, and there is an election soon" would probably constitute an "an emergency" in the mind of a typical politician and his/her advisors.
Whether eg the SPR was created to (indirectly) help politicians keep their jobs is debatable.
An unexpected and/or temporary change in supply or price.
The reserves are there to soften any quick price spikes or avoid them entirely, they aren't there to set the price in the long term. To my knowledge, the oil reserve has generally been used that way, even when the price change is self inflicted.
> What's happening now is that people are actually paying the real price of helium.
If they're not paying for the negative externalities that come from the methane extraction that comes along with it they really aren't paying the real price at all.
Despite all the online rhetoric, and the popularity of mis-naming political movements, sometimes I think the people who hate America the most and want it to fail are Americans themselves.
Nah; last but one job I had an Iranian coworker, and I asked if the way the regime calls Israel and the US the "Great Satan and Little Satan" was serious or a quirk of translation.
Apparently the regime is quite serious about the US being the actual devil.
Specifically, the US federal government. Just like most Americans don’t hate the people of Russia or Iran any more than the folks the next town over, I’ve never met someone from Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, Pakistan, or pretty much anywhere else who hates all Americans. I’m sure they exist, but probably as a small minority. There’s plenty of reason to hate our government though, especially if it has threatened to destroy your entire civilization.
I don't know about the percentage of the population, but everyone who leaves Iran and learns English (or German) is much less likely to be a fan of the Iranian regime than those who never left Iran in the first place, so you'll definitely have a sampling bias.
Growing up in the Southern US, I met plenty "Let's bomb all the savages in the Middle Easy and take their oil" types. Some of them grew up to be self-proclaimed Nazis.
These people are racist against non-whites living in their own communities, whom they have spent their entire lives with. Meeting a dark-skinned stranger in a turban is a chance for them to confirm and bolster their biases, not to reduce them.
And even if they go through some kind of traumatic experience with a stranger from the Middle East and call them friend, it wouldn't stop the racism. I know plenty of racists with "black friends" who will tell you all about how "there are black people, and then there are n**rs". Some of their black friends will even parrot this kind of propaganda.
I'm not sure I agree. Given that the area in question here is the southern United States, and considering that racism is alive and well there, indeed with people groups they have met (and who speak English), I'm not convinced that exposure to non-whites speaking Farsi will somehow fix their attitude.
Yeah, buy Americans are not target of Russian aggression and violence. Russia is kinda abstract ennemy far away. Feelings get stronger when the country is actual target of bombing.
God is documented as being rather keen on genocidal smiting. That is part of the exact problem. I googled two relevant examples:
1: God commands King Saul: attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants
2: When the Israelites entered the Promised Land, they were often commanded to carry out total destruction against the Canaanite nations. "they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass"
I'm not into religion, but it has had a massive influence on my culture (NZ) so I pay some attention to it.
Holy books seem to be buffets that people just pick their favorite dishes from, for the most part. At least, in the western world. I can't speak to elsewhere.
1. While approaching the land, the Amalekites had attacked them, preying on the weak. God had said that they would be destroyed. Now, probably partly as a test for their first king (he failed, didn’t eradicate them), God said, get on and do it.
2. God had promised the land to Abraham and his descendants, but said they’d only get it in four hundred years’ time, because “the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete”—they still had time to choose God’s ways. Only once they were irredeemable were they to be destroyed.
Lots of people who claim to be Christian still quote Leviticus as justification.
Not all of it, banning mixed fabrics (19:19) and having land ownership revert every 50 years including houses outside walled cities (25:31) and animal sacrifice (all of chapters 1 and 3) would reveal how disconnected such people are, possibly even to the speakers themselves, so it has to be selective.
Literally the devil. Not metaphorically a bunch of bastards, the actual devil. And not as performed by Tom Ellis.
There's a reason why I asked the guy.
And I asked him a few years ago now, so "what the US did" that the regime found objectionable has more to do with the US support for Israel and all the consequences of that than it has to do with any direct attacks by the USA against Iran; for direct action I think you might need to look at the 1979 revolution to undo the 1953 CIA- and MI6-backed coup?
Just because someone hates you and calls you the devil (or loves you and calls you an angel) doesn't mean they think you're literally the physical embodiment. Especially when you're not even a living being but a country or a government. I'm pretty darn sure you can assume it's a metaphor and that your coworker doesn't have evidence to the contrary.
What is more important than proclaimed words is to evaluate actions of the said government.
The Iranians have been pragmatic and relatively restrained, while USA and Israel have repeatedly escalated.
Iran has been helping USA dealing with Al Qaida in Afghanistan and Isis in Iraq. As a payback, they have been included into the 'Axis of Evil' and subjected to heavy sanctions. Just one of the cases...
> Trust me, we, Ukrainians do mean that in relation to _anything_ that is to north-east of our country. A good rule of thumb is to always say for yourself.
Leaving aside that I am skeptical millions of Ukrainians sincerely believe the devil has been launching missiles at them from the northeast (regardless of what you write here)... it's rather hypocritical to speak for millions of Ukrainians and then tell me to only speak for myself, don't you think?
> sometimes I think the people who hate America the most and want it to fail are Americans themselves.
That's because the US (and the UK) are about the only countries in this world that haven't had the entirety of their legal, economical and political system completely revamped at least once in the last 100 years - most countries average more than that.
At the same time, such a revamp is desperately needed - the issues with the status quo are reeking - and everyone knows that it is highly, highly unlikely to get that done by ordinary democratic means due to the sheer inertia of hundreds of years of fossilized bureaucracy and individual/party interests.
And that is why so many people tend to vote for whoever shouts "destroy the country" the loudest - and not just in the US (MAGA) or UK ("Reform"), but also in Germany (AfD), Spain (Vox) or Italy (Salvini/Meloni), where economic inequality and perspectivelessness has hit absurd levels. Let it all burn to ashes, burn everything, even if one goes down with the fire, eat the rich, and try to build something more sane this time.
Would like to add Vox is nowhere near the other's popularity, and has received substantial donations from... Hungary. A total of 6.5 million euros during the 2023 elections.
> That's because the US (and the UK) are about the only countries in this world that haven't had the entirety of their legal, economical and political system completely revamped at least once in the last 100 years - most countries average more than that.
I usually get downvoted when I make an observation along these lines, but I will go for it again -- IMO some of the reason Europe has pulled ahead in infrastructure and policy is because a couple world wars last century reduced much of it to rubble, including the systems of governance. The UK mostly escaped that, and the US escaped nearly all of it. Which is one reason we can still have a lot of old electrical infrastructure, for example, that is pushing 100 years old, and a Constitutional system 250 years old.
I think a major problem with the system in the US is the difficulty changing it. There is a balance, and a lot of room for differing opinions on how flexible it really ought to be, but I suspect there is broad agreement that it is too inflexible. We rely too much on changing interpretations rather than changing the fundamentals.
Perhaps we really do need to risk a second Constitutional Convention. Or we will end up with a worse alternative.
If Europe has "pulled ahead in infrastructure and policy" then why do they have nothing to show for it? They can't even protect their own sea lines of communication.
On the other hand: The US can't even build a single proper high-speed rail line, hasn't figured out how to electrify its railways, doesn't understand that bike lanes are good for car people, hasn't managed to solve four-way intersections yet, doesn't have anything even remotely resembling a free market for critical supplies like power and internet, and is in general going bankrupt due to excessive urban sprawl.
I could probably go on for another ten pages. Europe definitely has its flaws, but let's not pretend like the US is a paradise where everything is perfect and nothing ever went wrong.
Thats funny, most of the places that I've visited in Europe don't have any of that stuff either. It's a big place with a lot of diversity in infrastructure and economic development.
There are a lot of metrics, take your pick. But if you can't obtain reliable supplies of energy and other critical resources then none of the other metrics matter.
> eat the rich, and try to build something more sane
The tragedy is that right wing parties are sponsored by the rich snd serve primarily them. Economic grievances of ordinary people are exploited to make them vote agains their interests.
I love my country quite literally to death. Death plays a strong role in the concept of freedom in American philosophy: Give me liberty, or give me death (yes, I know the real context of this quote), etc.
And so when my government wants to destroy my country, its land and its people, divide us, commodify us and our life experiences, and also export this kind of systematic industrial exploitation across the world, through colonies and coups and political assassinations; yeah, I hate that government a lot. I hate it to death. The American government has been an enemy to America, and an enemy to Americans. Since the beginning, with our treatment of the natives.
You'd do well to separate the land, people and government of a nation; confusing them only further serves State propaganda. We force children to say a pledge to our country in school, but it's really to our government. It's political brainwashing. I have refused to say the pledge since becoming politically aware enough around age 7. I cannot tersely express the amount of institutional abuse I suffered for this position. Teachers would ostracize me, bully me, punish me, attempt to physically force me to say it, write me up for detention, get my guardians to abuse me at home over it, etc. Like I said, the American government is a psyop.
The pledge is not to some painted cloth or the current government but the community of people you are part of and the decision of who leads them, made thru free and fair elections.
I really thought about its meaning as someone that chose to come here and join this community out of my own free will. IDN, Perhaps people that are taught to memorize it as children simply regard as mantra and never think about its meaning.
PS: There is no country on Earth that doesn't have some sort of pledge, most often to fatherland/motherland or even a King or Tyrant.
I would love for you to explain how the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance is not a form of youth brainwashing.
I've already discussed how I was personally targeted in my scholastic years as they only person in my schools refusing to participate, so you already knows what happens if you exercise your first amendment rights.
> made thru free and fair elections
Where? What does "free" or "fair" mean here? It is not a secret that the US is a failed democratic republic that looks more like an inverted totalitarian state today. It's hard for things to be "fair" when there exists a vast capital asymmetry between those writing the law and those "voting" for it. Lobbyists, state actors and NGOs deploy billions of dollars into brainwashing the public about the US's image and actions, both domestic and foreign.
We are a neoliberal colonial state, that even in this exact moment are actively attempting to expand our colonial reach.
> PS: There is no country on Earth that doesn't have some sort of pledge
And my grandfather used to say, as he beat me viciously, "This is nothing, you should have seen what my father used to do to me." Historical presence does not justify anything, and never has.
Well as I explained children reciting the pledge, few really think about its meaning like you did. They simply reciting a memorized line, as dry and boring as the arithmetic table.
Yes lobbying and money in politics is a problem, but people are not as gullible as you seem to believe. The California wealth tax passed, despite billions spent against it. On the other end, Harris outspent Trump by millions and was still effectively crushed.
Often grass-roots movements are far more effective then big-money campaigns.
What America has are Client-States, Countries that are subordinate. but this is nothing unusual, and can be beneficial for a country with little power of its own. In-fact many former colonies have ended up becoming Client states to their Former European masters. In contrast Colonies are directly controlled with imposed Governors, backed by a military force of the Colonial Master.
> few really think about its meaning like you did. They simply reciting a memorized line, as dry and boring as the arithmetic table
I was raised in the Catholic church and it's the same style of blind, rote memorization -> brainwashing. And to that point, sneaking "under God" into the pledge was a disgusting move that weakens a core tenet of American philosophy and law, the separation of Church and State. Each and every further recitation weakens it further, and all who participate are complicit in weakening our democracy.
> people are not as gullible as you seem to believe
Not sure where any notion of gullibility was discussed prior to this.
> Often grass-roots movements are far more effective then big-money campaigns.
How often? Want to share some numbers that paint a different picture than 250 years of American history? Our treatment of the natives? The centralization of wealth and power accelerated by the Industrial revolution?
The authoritarian ratchet of American politics is well-studied and frequently discussed. Temporary wins have not prevented the overall trend towards the US government increasing federal power and becoming an inverted totalitarian colonial state.
> What America has are Client-States, Countries that are subordinate. but this is nothing unusual
It is not what the spirit of the United States was about. The federal government was never meant to be this powerful. It has been twisted and abused into something considered "normal" but it is in no way the intended state.
> In-fact many former colonies have ended up becoming Client states to their Former European masters. In contrast Colonies are directly controlled with imposed Governors, backed by a military force of the Colonial Master.
Yes, that is neoliberal colonialism. Just ask Greenland how they have been doing. They ended their status as a colony in 1953 after establishing a Constitution. A few years later, Denmark began systematically castrating women in secret, a common tactic for preventing a nation from attaining real political sovereignty and power by controlling their population levels.
I'm not even going to go into what else Denmark has done to Greenland, or what has come out of other such relationships between "former colonies" and their political masters. The occasional outlier is an exception to the rule, not proof to the contrary.
We can look at how the US treats colonies right now by looking at colonies such as Puerto Rico or Guam, which are historically oppressed through social and financial means. And we can examine our current foreign meddling in dozens of countries, or our history in participating in non-democratic regime changes in other countries. The bottom line is that the US government is a psyop and anyone who is a patriot to this country, its land and its people should understand the US government is an enemy to those things.
And the pledge is meant to convey allegiance to a symbolic flag and government, not to its land or people. Again, this can be evidenced simply by observing the routine punishment I received for not participating and comparing the pledge to other cult rites. This is Hitler Youth level shit. I was lucky enough to eventually go to a high school with a principal who refused to do morning pledges for my final scholastic years.
> One objection is that a constitutional republic built on freedom of dissent should not require its citizens to pledge allegiance to it, and that the First Amendment to the United States Constitution protects the right to refrain from speaking or standing, which itself is also a form of speech in the context of the ritual of pledging allegiance.
> Another objection is that the people who are most likely to recite the Pledge every day, small children in schools, cannot really give their consent or even completely understand the Pledge they are making.
> Another criticism is the belief that a government requiring or promoting the phrase "under God" violates protections against the establishment of religion guaranteed in the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
It is not a matter of hate or love. But the fact that people in charge doesn't give a fuck at any other thing beyond their personal interests.
But this problem is not exclusive to America.
I don't want "the other side" to fail, and I absolutely don't wan the U.S. to fail when they are in power. I want the U.S. to succeed, and for "the other side" to be competent and fair.
One side is clearly interested in helping others simply because they need help. The other is clearly interested in help others that they can relate to (look like themselves) and have earned the right to help (such as believing in the right god.) or only helping people that can help them back.
There's a fundamental disagreement among people on what "help" really is.
Giving money to someone who could otherwise work is very different from giving food to a single mother who is already working 10 hours a day. Giving needles to a drug addict "helps" them in a certain way, yes. But it also enables their addiction to continue.
Yea it's easy for everyone to say "I believe in helping people!!". But which side of the fence you sit on in the US is non-trivially determined by what you believe "help" looks like in practice.
Giving needles keeps someone alive potentially. Until they can get more help for the addiction. Long term. Keeping the needles away makes increases the chances the druggie will die. Short term.
The needles is really a distraction. It is a very narrow special case.
Let’s talk healthcare. One side believes everyone should have the right to at least a minimum level of help regardless of who that person is. The other side believes everyone should receive at most the minimum level of care commiserate with the ability to pay. (Earned the help.)
It's scary how blind people are to this. The right wing wants to help people in the long term and the left wing wants to help people in the short term. Both approaches seem obviously wrong to adherents of the other because they both disadvantage the group that the other wants to help.
Approximately nobody is just bad and wants to harm people. That's a characterization both sides use against each other because they refuse to understand each other.
> The right wing wants to help people in the long term
That sounds overly generous. It seems more like the right believes in social darwinism and feels like it benefits society overall by ridding us of lower quality people. The left believes there should be a fundamental minimum standard for existence that all members of society are entitled to.
> The right wing wants to help people in the long term
> Approximately nobody is just bad and wants to harm people
Garbage. Mitch McConnell was on-record as saying during the Obama years that Republicans would be blocking any legislation from his administration that they could "even if it benefited the American people in any way" (his words, not mine) just so they could say it was a "do-nothing Presidency".
If there are ANY people the right wing wants to help, it's rich people and grifters, and "long term" to them is like 3 months. Sorry, but the current admin IS "just bad" and DOES want to harm people - see ICE.
Try thinking of honest examples. If you can't, you're not competent to have thoughts about the topic because you will only be able to feel emotions and pretend they're thoughts.
Quite a few on one side seem to want to "help others" so they can demonstrate publicly how awesome and righteous they are. And we can even falsify this hypothesis a bit... such people would, I speculate, be more interested in the appearance of helping than in the substance of helping. They'll tend to arrange the help in such a way as to garner the most publicity. And, most of all, they'll allocate their efforts such that they're vocal about how they're the good guys doing all the helping more than they're actively helping. Just to make sure everyone notices.
> Quite a few on one side seem to want to "help others" so they can demonstrate publicly how awesome and righteous they are
Being awesome because you help those in need? How horrible!
> more interested in the appearance of helping than in the substance of helping
This is a common and tired talking point: "virtue signalling". It often comes from people who are less helpful than others, and resent how more helpful people receive accolades. Their own personal judgement about whether something actually helps isn't authoritative, and is usually motivated reasoning anyways.
> their voters prioritize making people they don't like suffer over their own comfort.
> That probably doesn't seem rational but remember loads of these people think the Bible is a true story.
Those are the (sizeable) subset who are obsessed with a literal interpretation of the Old Testament rather than the turn-the-other-cheek teachings of Christ, who is little more than a totem for these fundamentalists.
Arguably there is less harm in believing that Christ's ministry was historical than believing that Sodom and Gomorrah were historical.
"Two thousand years ago there was this dude saying 'Be excellent to one another'" is certainly less dangerous, but to be fair the same dude described in the Bible does likewise say:
"I have not come to bring peace, but a sword."
Which like, you don't need to twist that very hard to get to a place where you're going around "bringing the sword" to people who you think need it...
The Old Testament is big on genocide though, "We should definitely murder these children" has a lot more justification at the start of the book, or if you're batshit and think that stuff about Revelation, right at the end is a concrete prediction of future events then maybe that too.
That might be the noble aspiration that lives only inside their head, while outwardly the sentiment seems to look more like "make the government harmful so we can justify making it smaller."
Which would be laudable if that was what is actually happening. In practice it looks more like DOGE: setting every part of the government you don't understand or emotionally dislike on fire. Meanwhile, large corporate sponsors are allowed to do immeasurable harm without any oversight whatsoever.
Last I checked, corporations can't even exist without government blessing them into existence. If you have a problem with corporations, maybe you should dig into the root of that matter.
This is a bit like saying a hangnail and a gangrenous amputation are "not equally bad but they are both very bad". One is literally chopping things off to permanently alter them. The other is, at times, uncomfortable and frustrating.
The false equivalence of doing the "both bad!" song and dance serves to so radically under-emphasize the absolute wanton, orders-of-magnitude-worse levels of corruption and evisceration of norms of one side by reducing it to "more bad than the other but they're both very bad." It allows the window to shift to normalize the sort of destruction of systems we're seeing by hand waving away how "the other guys aren't great, either!" It's borderline discourse malpractice at this point, and should be called out as such.
The enlightened centrist take is not entirely wrong, though. The left definitely has some blind spots, among them their purist dedication to perfect morals and a willingness to tell anyone who does not perfectly agree to piss off.
While the right is comfortable holding their nose when white supremacists hang around because it gets them a bigger coalition, the left will excommunicate someone for saying out loud that they think trans women are not exactly equivalent to biological women. This shrinking of the coalition is how we ended up enduring another Trump presidency.
Not to mention the complete fiasco that was the 2024 presidential race. We should have thrown out the entirety of DNC leadership several levels deep for letting that happen.
There’s a bit of a duality about perfect agreement within the voters for the party’s candidates and somewhat within the party membership itself. Yeah, there’s a lot of telling each other to piss off. There’s a lot of jockeying for the platform and the primaries. But come the general, it’s a minority of the voters who will sit it out or vote for a minor party. Sometimes it’s a large enough minority to hand things to the Republicans, though.
A massive problem in the US is that the completely broken two-party system has essentially killed the political spectrum. People more-or-less vote against the party they dislike more, not for the party they want. To see any form of change you need someone like Trump to completely take over a party in one go and kill the old one from inside.
From an outside perspective the US does not have a political left. The policies proposed by the Democrats are roughly in line with the mainstream right-wing parties in the rest of the world. A mainstream left-wing party would look an awful lot like someone like Bernie Sanders - and we all know the Democrats would rather platform a wet paper towel and lose than see him gain any kind of power!
> ** Cost of token I believe is relatively cheaper compared to a full-time engineer and it'll get cheaper over time.
I don't know how true this is going to be, at least in the short term. The big providers are likely running at a loss and, as models have gotten better, they've also crept up in price as well.
They/you are counting on them hitting a point where it is actually cheap for the value provided (after they take some off the top) but I don't see that as inevitable before these companies go under or pivot into much more specialized tools for big clients.
It's not clear to me that AI code is cheaper than human code (of equal functionality).
This reads like you just desperately wanted to criticize, but couldn't really be troubled to research the background for a minute or two.
The IRA was a law passed by Congress. It set aside funds for grid upgrades, but did give some latitude to the President to deal with crises, because it was understood that Congress couldn't move quickly enough to deal with sudden supply issues. One thing that happened was the investments into grid upgrades created a demand shock, and transformer pricing and timelines surged upwards. So at that point the President invoked the DPA and used a chunk of IRA funding to try to unsnarl the transformer pipeline so the rest of the project could proceed. Then Trump (for basically arbitrary reasons) decided to screw it up. (He's also screwed it up in ways that probably just plain violate the law, but he doesn't care about that either -- which is why "run policy purely from the Legislative branch" doesn't fix any of this.)
Given the context -- a broad law duly passed by the slower legislative branch, a crisis dealt with (according to the law) by the more nimble Executive branch -- I am struggling to make your criticism sound reasonable, even with the absolute maximal dose of charity. This is basically the kind of governance that we want a functioning Legislative and Executive branch to engage in; it was screwed up on purpose; and your proposed solution/excuse does not produce better outcomes.
> I am struggling to make your criticism sound reasonable
It's pretty straightforward...
> but did give some latitude to the President to deal with crises
All the President needs to do is say it's not a crisis. If you want it to stick past the current administration, pass a law after the crisis.
Anything that's at the discretion of the executive is at the desretion of the executive. I'm not saying it's great or smart but there's zero reason to be surprised and I'll not be surprised when a bunch of Trump's orders get reversed too.
You’re generalising from some criminals to an entire civilian population. The parent generalized from military to military. There’s a slight difference in the two.
Also, remember that it was the US who declared “no quarter”, not the Iranians.
We gotta imagine a few steps further in time and toss in some game-theory.
Imagine a big swing-state split between Yellow and Purple parties. It's legislature is controlled by Yellow, and they pull a sneaky: They partition into 10x Small Yellow states (5% pop each) and one Big Purple state (50% pop) Let's also assume the whole effort somehow evaded requirements in the state's constitution, referendums, etc.
At first glance, you might think Yellow has "won" by adding more/safer seats on the federal level, right?
Except now the folks in Big Purple are kinda pissed, and they control themselves now. They could choose to split again, leaving things as 10x Small Yellow and 10x Small Blue. That puts the partisan balance is back at square one, except for a shit-ton of disruption and pain and a bunch of Yellow politicians are out of a job. So did they really win? Knowing the likely outcome, would they have tried anyway?
In short, it's very different from district gerrymandering. For starters, every division becomes independent, and it won't even happen if residents are asking tough questions like "Then how do I get my water from the river!?" It'll be a very slow and very deliberate process stretched across multiple election cycles.
I am theoretically eligible to get 60% of my income for 3 months after losing my job, while I look for my new job. But if I actually try to claim that, they demand so many documents and meetings that it's not actually practical to receive that benefit. The only people who can receive benefits are the people who are experts at navigating the benefit system.
For instance, if you do not file a certain form on a certain exact day, then your benefits will not start until 3 months after you became unemployed. That is exactly the same time period this unemployment insurance benefit normally covers. By that time you should already have a job anyway and they will ask you to explain why you couldn't get a job in 3 months, since the benefit normally only covers 3 months.
Nobody will tell you how to navigate this. Nobody will tell you the correct form to fill out on the correct day. If you don't already know the arcane rules, you don't get the money. This is how most European social benefits work. They aren't actually provided to normal people.
There is lot of investment going in to fanning those flames - just look at the way the edges of this are discussed in the Epstein files.
Here in the UK, it is amazing to follow just how much money has been pumped into the various 'right of the Conservatives' parties for the last 15 years, while it might seem like a grass roots movement, the majority of the cash has been coming from those with vast wealth inside and outside the UK.
Probably better that they get their medication rather than waiting for an appointment if it’s keeping them from being psychotic or otherwise causing harm or being harmed.
If it keeps bipolar people on their meds, it will make the world better and safer, but also, those meds should just be able to be setup as "always fill this" in a saner system.
I'm aware that it happened. You seem under the impression that this is some kind of mass exodus based on people you know.
Uninstalls up 300%! What's the baseline?
> downloads fell 13% on day one and a further 5% the next day
Dramatic falloff of new downloads after one day (still plenty of new downloads). Day 3 was likely negligible and, I bet, it was back to normal less than a week after when the story left the news cycle.
> 1.5 million users joined the QuitGPT boycott within days
That's both very few people and a completely meaningless number since all it requires is checking a box. Did anyone verify they were actually human?
> Claude rose to #1 most downloaded app in the App Store and US usage rose by 51% [2].
> New customers are now choosing Claude over OpenAI 70% of the time [1].
Which has nothing to do with cancellations.
> And much more. I think it was just your bubble that didn’t cancel it.
Most people in my bubble have no idea any of this happened and are just using free chatgpt tier if they use it at all. That seems much more representative given your provided statistics of the 1.5m person boycott.
I didn't say that, I just brought that up to contrast it to yours.
The strongest part of my argument goes with your cited 1.5m number. That's not a lot of people, especially when you consider the signing of a petition requires no other action than signing and has no way to verify the signing.
I'm just not seeing how any of this harmed OpenAI more than a government contract helps.
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