JPL has been strangled by both parties. They had huge staff cuts in 2024, and then more in 2025. They've gone from ~6,500 to ~4,500. Trump closed their research library[1].
Of course this is a drop in the bucket, the entire science research apparatus of the United States is being burned to the ground[2]. This administration is doing to the future of scientific research what the Mongols did to Baghdad.
That's per 100k (which just says it's mostly flat per 100k), net spending of the federal government is more than ever, and actual workforce is bigger than ever. Federal spending as a percentage of GDP is stubbornly high despite us being in "peace time," and not recession spending.
If you all don't think bureaucracy is the main driver of government delays...well you clearly have never worked with or in and around government. I try to live in reality.
No, it's a plain headcount. Your first link is a chart of non-inflation adjusted spending. Your second link is all government, not just federal employees so it's not really germane to the discussion, and your third link includes things like Social Security, and frankly...good. Without the government stabilizing spending the economy would be even more of a dumpster fire of random investor panics.
I'm close to a number of people in the public sector. They're brilliant, they do great work and they aren't paid what they're worth. I've also worked for a long time in a mega-corp. It was frequently just as bureaucratic and wasteful, if not more so, than the government.
> They're brilliant, they do great work and they aren't paid what they're worth
The headcount of such wonderful people you are describing has been reduced but then replaced by 3x+ times the rates Gov is paying for the contractors that were hired (I am one of them). so this headcount being low is a nothing more than political smokescreen that will probably be used in campaigns leading up to November election (not probably, certainly cause there is nothing else to run if you are member of the ruling party)
I am willing to concede that it would be more financially responsible for the United States to greatly increase the size of the permanent federal workforce, and to stop making its size a political football.
Iran on the other hand protected the Thani family during the failed 1996 countercoup, as well as collaborated with Qatar on extracting LNG from the Gulf.
In the real world, countries compartamentalize relations and are not binary in nature.
This is how India can both arm Israel [0] as well as transit Hormuz with Iranian backing [1] and continue to operate Chabahar Port [2] despite neighboring Konarak Port being hit [3].
When countries break this norm of compartmentalization, that is when they become actively belligerent.
Also, by this logic (which is flawed), we would be justified in striking Iran, as Iran has aided and abetted Russia in their war against Ukraine, thus Iran can arguably be treated as another front of the larger US-Russia and by extension US-China conflict.
I realize Qatar is in an "it's complicated" relationship, it's just amusing to me that people feign shock that Iran would consider them fair game while omitting the detail of them kinda being a client state hosting a huge US military base.
The thing is, if we accept the norms that Qatar can be targeted for kinetic action by Iran for hosting US assets or by the US for hosting Iranian assets, then that opens a MASSIVE can of worms.
This means Ukraine has the precedent in place to target the Chongqing–Xinjiang–Europe railway in Russia in retaliation for Chinese support of Russia [0].
This also means all of Europe is fair game to be striked by Russia in retaliation for supporting Ukraine [2].
This also means South Korea considering rearming Ukraine [4] due to North Korean involvement in the Ukraine War could make it a direct belligerent against Russia.
This is why sentiments hardened globally and especially amongst Gulf States once they were targeted by Iran.
Accepting that nations like Qatar, Turkiye, and Azerbaijan that have an avowed policy of compartmentalized relations are fair game to strike means we have to accept we are in a de facto World War.
The attempted strike on Diego Garcia was similarly destabilizing in it's implications [5]
Hosting US assets actively being used in war vs Iran = being active co-belligerents. Host countries no longer neutral when they don't adhere to duty of abstention (Hague Convention V). This not even Iran using deniable proxies, this is Qatar allowing sovereign territory to facilitate attack on Iran, which unambiguously makes them legitimate target. Ditto with Diego Garcia.
In the same way railway in RU already legitimate target for UKR because in RU soil. If EU sending out sorties from NATO bases to hit RU then they too would be active belligerents. There's no compartmentalizing using territory to shoot someone else.
The norms of compartmentalization I have mentioned are orthogonal to The Hague conventions and frankly they do not matter in a world which has de facto moved away from being rules based.
Additonally, by that logic it is acceptable for Ukraine to conduct kinetic action against Chinese assets in Russia, which they have held back against despite Chinese support for the Russian MIC.
Also, I told you years ago to not chat with me on this platform. We do not align and I have found it tiresome discussing with you. I have ignored and steered away from commenting with you and I ask you to do the same for me.
It's acceptable, as I said, targets in RU soil legitimate. Of course the UKR has their own calculation on what PRC interests in RU they're able to hit that's not counterproductive - PRC support for RU MIC can be much more than what it is.
Even if we accept moving from "rule based" doesn't discount realist/rational based which rule based is derived from. It is not hard to understand allowing your house to be used to shoot at someone else = your house is now legitimate target. Expecting immunity under those conditions is strategic fantasy, especially when IR hitting GCC countries is arguably not counter-productive.
> The thing is, if we accept the norms that Qatar can be targeted for kinetic action by Iran for hosting US assets or by the US for hosting Iranian assets, then that opens a MASSIVE can of worms.
None of your examples are actually analogous, they are all more distant support than hosting a base from which direct attacks are carried out except for the first one in which the "can of worms" is justifying attacks on a state that it is already a direct belligerent (and in fact the aggressor) because of third-party support, which, on the other hand, is not analogous for the opposite reason—it is very much not necessary to invoke any third-party action to justify that. The direct belligerence already justifies that.
There’s no “precedent” needed, Russia and Ukraine are simply choosing not to do certain things to avoid widening the war in the ways you mention, because they don’t think that would be to their advantage. The precedent is there already, it’s not like either country is looking at Iran and going “oh wow, I didn’t know that was an option!”
> We show that laws mandating use of child car safety seats significantly reduce birth rates, as many cars cannot fit three child seats in the back seat.
Wouldn't the real cause of the depressed birthrates be the requirement to own a car in order to have children? If you aren't a slave to your vehicle there's no problem with the available space for car seats.
Double-buggies on public transport and more than two kids on a typical cargo cycle aren't fun either. Granted the age-span that's necessary is a little shorter than car seats.
That said, have 3 kids aged within 5 years of one another and we never had to get a double buggy. The older ones would be OK to walk (3 year olds will walk a pretty long way if you're patient) by the time the youngest got too big to be sling-carried.
It comes down to, dealing with three under-5's single-handed while out and about is pretty hectic full stop. Most places with high birth rates "solve" this by not allowing mums the expectation to be away from the house much, and/or they're multigenerational households where grandma or an aunt can be home with some of the kids.
So to your point, I think it's less the requirement to own a car, more the expectation of a kind of lifestyle which often, though not always, in turn requires one. Childcare for 2 year olds here is often upwards of $2500/month, now that's a contraceptive.
If you aren't a slave to your car, you likely live in a walkable area where the cost of a 4-bedroom apartment or house is going to be pretty high. I'm not saying you can't raise kids in a 2 or 3 bedroom apartment, and when I lived in apartments many families had kids in a 1-bedroom apartment, but it's very tight and many people would consider it a significant hardship for both the kids and the parents.
I would also add as a car slave that the kinds of cars large enough to fit the kinds of car seats marketed in the US are tens of thousands more than a compact or mid-size sedan, and that in a mid-size sedan having a car seat in the rear-facing configuration significantly constrains how far back you can put the passenger or driver seat. This is true even for the narrower seats that are designed for three-across seating. And worse, you might not have the latch system or an appropriate kind of seat belt on that third seat.
> If you aren't a slave to your car, you likely live in a walkable area where the cost of a 4-bedroom apartment or house is going to be pretty high.
Or you're one of the millions of people who live in developing countries which have low cost of living and low housing costs. Coincidentally this group has very high birth rates.
Also, socially conservative, multi-generational households (sharing labour and childcare between women relatives), less expectation for mothers of young kids to be away from the home, and a much lower expectation of what "housing" means in terms of both building quality and the amount of living space per person.
Work and wider social participation, and a sprawling suburban geography that has people living far from friends and family.
The alternative - small, crowded population centres where everyone knows everyone and three, even four generations live in the same household can of course be limiting, even suffocating.
But there's a reason why, for all that the 1950s autonomous nuclear family is held up as some kind of ideal by tradwife fetishists, it's also the milieu in which Valium and sleeping pills became popularised.
Worse. Some people even deleet all of there online banking, except, for an account that can recieve funds from online sources, and then deal with everything in person at the bank.
Which then frees up devices to skip the whole closed source misery go round.
I would never use a bank that required a smartphone in order to access your money or do normal banking activities like transfers and payments. Fortunately here in the USA there are thousands of little mom n pop banks and credit unions, so I think we are safe from that madness at least until I’m dead and buried.
I know people doing this in Prince William County, Cheyenne, and Minnesota college towns. It just takes ordinary frugality, no deprivation that I can see.
Only on very modern times would you feel the need to have that many bedrooms for 3 kids. Of course that’s because you can’t banish the kids from the house until sunset anymore
This is IF you can find a 3 or 4 bedroom apartment in an American city. The job centers mostly build studios, 1 and 2 bedrooms if they build anything at all.
If you make kids share a bedroom it drastically decreases the margin for tension between children because they don't have anywhere else. That can work, of course, but it might not and too fucking late for the kids if it doesn't. That can mean physical abuse, but it can mean things like one kid loves loud music and the other wants to read quietly alone, or their sleep schedules naturally don't align well - if you were an adult house share you'd say well, we're just incompatible, it's nobody's fault, I'll move out, but kids can't do that, they are stuck with the situation their parents created and it's all they know.
My mother - I found out years after I'd left home - was worried that I resented the fact I had a small bedroom while my younger sister got a larger one - but in reality I didn't care at all, she's an artist, she makes stuff which actually exists, of course she needs space; I write software, which conveniently takes up no space, whereas if I'd had to share with her that would be extremely problematic and wouldn't have gone well. I could be in my tiny room and that was enough.
Having grown up in a family large enough that giving each of us our own room was not even an aspiration, this point of view just doesn't make any sense to me. You learn to get along, that's what happens. You learn to respect shared spaces and accommodate other's needs. The kind of individualism you describe is a luxury, and one can live well without it.
Some friends were able to provide separate bedrooms to their sons last year. The older one already has a man-shaped face and body (still an adolescent voice and personality, but that's sometimes how that goes). I really couldn't believe it when I found out.
I grew up privileged and had my own space, but a shared space between siblings was normalized. But going into high school with that constraint, it seems stifling. I really have to wonder what effects that lack of privacy / autonomy has on a developing mind. There are probably studies but it's not something I'm about to research.
sharing a room forces kids to learn to get along. giving them their own room early deprives them from that experience. loud music is not going to work in many places even if you have your own room. if siblings are so incompatible that they can't bear living together than they have bigger problems than sharing a room. physical abuse among siblings points to deeper issues that are not caused by sharing a room, nor does having separate rooms fix those issues.
giving each of our kids their own room reduced our families stress level significantly. it's not 100% necessary, but i really don't think that making kids share a room helps them get along better....
Raising one child is fine, raise two or three means sharing rooms not having a guest room (e.g. relatives can't stay easily) or an at-home office space.
It's not that you can't, it's just that it's not the standard of living most western people expect.
It depends on how many kids you have, no? I did know other kids when I was growing up who shared a room with one or more siblings, but some parents want to be able to give each child their own bedroom.
So a three-bedroom apartment might not be enough if you have three kids.
Or you are poor enough you get paid to pop out more kids and it's cheaper to uber twice a month to the grocery store because you have no job for which you'd need a car nor the cash to buy it.
I think the car is a proxy/correlation for a level of wealth. If you make little enough the marginal cost of the next kid "seems" cheap because you basically make it back in state benefits in a lot of cases.
"Wouldn't the real cause of the depressed birthrates be the requirement to own a car in order to have children?"
Yes. The one-time setup costs for "properly" raising kids are probably around $30k. All the kids stuff is extra expensive (in the west) and for the kids seats you need a large car (in the west) and there's social stigma against kids sharing a room (in the west), so you also need a larger apartment.
Can confirm, the "stuff" costs basically nothing in the scheme of things and nearly all of it can be had used. A bunch of it's also not really all that necessary. Clothes and toys can all be had for very little, without even that much time investment, folks are drowning in this stuff and lots of it just gets thrown away.
The real money goes to:
1) Healthcare (in the US).
2) Childcare or foregone wages.
3) School/housing location (same thing; either tuition, or spending 20+% more for the same amount & quality of house in a nicer school district [and the ongoing cost of servicing the extra mortgage on that]; you can skip this, but if you can at all afford it, you'll not feel like it's optional)
4) Space. Larger housing and larger cars. You can skip this kind of (larger car is less-optional if you have more than three kids) but at significant cost to QOL.
Anyone without multiple kids hasn’t experienced how nice it is to have a car as a “destination” - once a kid is strapped into the car they’re safe and controlled and you can focus on the next one.
Wrangling 3 or more toddler and up kids in public can be hectic.
Here's your reminder that this is of course a bunch of alarmist nonsense, because as an issuer of currency the United States is incapable of becoming "insolvent."
The authors are from an libertarian extremist think tank that pushes for a balanced budget amendment. If these people got their way, we would immediately solve the problem of people arguing about this on the internet since none of us would be able to afford to own a computer.
Moreover, the great con was to convince people that the US debt is a liability, as though there's someone who is going to come and repo man your country with a truck.
At the macro level, debt is one of the most powerful tools that a government is entrusted to deploy. It's literally how you grow an economy.
Oh c'mon! We know that. Good Lord, if a country's debts were held elsewhere, it'd be the Trump administration trying to repo someone first for Nato money or other some fool reason.
Meanwhile,there are in fact actual, bonafide, tangible problems to financial stupidity you're quip forgot to address.
This assumes that there isn't profound demand destruction caused by the stratospheric energy prices.
Fossil fuels were already an inferior energy source when oil was $60/barrel. Electrification has been moving fast and accelerating, even at the pre-energy crisis prices.
Now? Current events are likely to take fossil fuels out back and give 'em the Old Yeller treatment with surprising speed.
I absolutely agree, _in market driven economies_, fossil fuels are slowly pricing themselves out of relevancy. The issue is that for some reason the US specifically subsidizes their usage keeping them artificially lowly priced.
So, how many billions of newly printed debt is Trump willing to throw at the problem to keep those subsidies up so that he can be sheltered from the scary windmills?
Seems like a big own-goal for the administration to inject an agency which (according to polls[1]) is quite broadly hated into the daily lives of millions.
Politically they're just going from failure (immigration policy broadly considered a failure) to failure (starting a new forever war in the middle east is universally hated) to failure (this).
It's no wonder they're trying to burn the election system to the ground to prevent a fair election from occurring this year. It's the only way they're staying out of jail, especially Tom "cash bribes only" Homan.
Why, Imperial Command Enforcement of course. They're a a bit like Hitler's SA (in fact one of them even dressed the part), the Great Leader sends them wherever he wants something stamped on.
And that you can't print a trillion dollars and have half the country not go to work for a year without pain further down the road. Which was, by the way, a Trump policy... (Not that it was an incorrect one.)
Misinformation, low voter turnout, and an electoral system that massively over-represents people living in areas of low population density and underrepresents those living in areas of high population density.
That’s ignoring any possibility of interference with insecure voting or tallying computers.
Don’t forget racism. This administration got elected in large part because they are openly racist, delivering outcomes at a velocity that ‘Southern’ dog-whistle deniability doesn’t allow for those that do, for whatever reason, want to continue having positive or neutral reputation with those opposed to racism (which includes half of U.S. women, or more if you limit to those younger than 30) while also benefiting personally from racism’s privileges to them and their families.
racism was a minor factor in the 2024 election. Had Harris been white, she still would have lost. She ran a campaign that said nothing about what she as going to do, she only said how evil Trump would be. She lost the election when she was asked on "The View," a Democrat friendly show, if there was anything she would do differently than Biden. There's only one wrong answer to that question ad she gasve, saying not a thing. Had she just said she'd tackle the border and illegal immigration, she'd have had a chance.
Had Biden kept to his word and been one and one, the Democrats would have had a primary and selected a candidate who could have won. (Harris would not have won the nomination in any sort of primary.)
It isn't just "the dem candidate is black and I am racist so I will vote for the republican candidate." Trump and his people going on TV and whipping up racist paranoia about how refugees are eating people's pets and how he is going to get rid of all of the immigrants motivates racists to the polls.
Why voting day isn't a federal holiday is baffling to me. Along with all the weird-ass rules about "registering to vote" and people having to queue for hours in the heat and nobody is allowed to even give them water.
I usually vote a few weeks in advance while grocery shopping, there's a booth set up at the supermarket. I can just walk in with my ID, vote and the vote is sealed in a box until the official day.
Or I can walk like 1km to the nearest school, again show my ID, vote and go home.
If I had to "register to vote", I'd most likely forget it or not bother to do it.
In the US, this is a partisan issue. The left benefits from higher turnout and the right gets less traction. States with Republican leadership and vaguely competitive elections are doing their best to make it harder to vote.
> an electoral system that massively over-represents people living in areas of low population density and underrepresents those living in areas of high population density
We need paper ballots because people can understand them. Election conspiracy theories are becoming a problem. Having a counting process that people can understand and trust is a feature.
Paper ballots that we almost never bother manually checking against the insecure digital tallies unless there’s a very close race or explicit challenge to the count.
Nearly every state routinely does statistical audits of voting machines compared with paper records.
People hate to hear this but: statistics work. You can randomly sample a portion (say, 2% to 5%) of ballots and have effective certainty about how much fraud or error there is in your voting system.
Conspiratorial thinking can't be fixed with additional facts. There is no set of facts that conclusively establish any claim to someone who is already committed not to believing the claim.
A common property of conspiracies is that any evidence is evidence of the conspiracy. Not enough data produces "what are they hiding" stuff. More data produces deliberate misunderstandings of the data to justify the conspiracy. We saw this very clearly with covid. When public health agencies were less transparant it was evidence of an evil coverup. When public agencies were more transparant about limitations or things they didn't fully understand it was evidence that public health efforts didn't work.
You could blame the backing of the richest oligarchs in the world, you could blame a morally bankrupt culture amongst a large chunk of the electorate, but at the end of the day it was a very tight race and there was a global wave of incumbent losses[1], regardless of the incumbent party's position.
Between 2021 and 2024 the world went on a rollercoaster ride. Pandemic economic stimulus made everyone feel rich in 2021, and then harsh monetary tightening led to everyone feeling like their world was collapsing in 2024. They punished whoever was in charge at the time.
Because the Democrats tried to run Biden again, despite the obvious-to-everybody signs of decline and unfitness. Then, when that became impossible to ignore, they anointed Harris. (Thereby overturning the results of the primaries, which created bad memories from the previous two campaigns.) Then Harris said that she wouldn't do anything different from Biden, despite people being tired of Biden.
And because the electorate had kind of forgotten what Trump was like, because they'd just spent four years seeing what Biden was like. There was a bunch of stuff that Biden (or at least his people) did that didn't really resonate with voters, and a bunch of them voted for "not that".
The other thing they did wrong was, they were a year late in prosecuting Trump. Trump managed to delay things out to the point that the campaign (and then the office) protected him. I don't know if Democrats delayed deliberately, so that the prosecutions would be damaging Trump as the campaign season started, but if so, they were well-paid for that bit of attempted chicanery.
Democrats funded, armed and protected a live-streamed genocide so horrific that roughly a third of their own hard-core base (Biden 2020 voters) couldn't bring themselves to vote for Harris, even in a close race against Trump [0].
There are other reasons Dems lost, also important. Still, genocide remains the blazing neon-red 12-ton elephant in the room. And there seems to be absolutely no sign of owning that fact, which means that no lessons will be learned or policies changed.
However, it still points to the fact that Harris lost millions of votes due to her support for arming Israel.
And, even for the people who voted Harris there was a distinct lack of enthusiasm - directly because of Gaza.
> Even among Biden 2020 voters who did vote for Harris in battleground states, voters by a seven-to-one margin say they would have been more enthusiastic in their support if Harris “pledged to break from President Biden's policy toward Gaza by promising to withhold additional weapons to Israel” rather than less enthusiastic.
> More enthusiastic - 35%
> Less enthusiastic - 5%
All the richest sociopaths in SV have latched onto the meme that democracy and (their) freedom (to do whatever they want to the lower classes) aren't compatible, and these people bought control of the algorithms that are currently brainwashing anyone within eyeshot of a screen.
Of course this is a drop in the bucket, the entire science research apparatus of the United States is being burned to the ground[2]. This administration is doing to the future of scientific research what the Mongols did to Baghdad.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/31/climate/nasa-goddard-libr...
[2] https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-026-00088-9/index.ht...
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