The goal of cutting government spending is ultimately to reduce the amount of resources drained out of the economy through taxes/inflation.
Balancing the budget is useful insofar as it reduces the resources that will need to be drained out of the economy in the future to pay interest on our growing debt (currently 11% of all Federal spending).
Tax money isn't drained out of the economy. The money used for NASA goes right back into the economy, since they use it to buy things. Even money to pay down debt isn't removed from the economy since the majority of that debt is held by US citizens who use that money to buy things.
> Tax money isn't drained out of the economy. The money used for NASA goes right back into the economy, since they use it to buy things.
That's not remotely how this works. By this logic, wars are actually free since the money spent goes to defense contractors who use it to buy things and hire employees. We can have an unlimited military budget with no negative repercussions!
To help you avoid this in the future, remember that "the real economy is not money, it is goods & services". Any government spending necessarily takes goods and services out of the real economy and allocates them towards things the government wants done. Some of those things might have a positive ROI, but with government spending there's absolutely no guarantee of that since they're getting those resources through taxes, not through voluntary economic transactions.
The broken windows parable is about causing destruction and then repairing it, which thankfully isn't what NASA is doing. If you read your Wikipedia link you would see that this was never meant to apply to all government spending. To help you avoid this in the future, read the links before you try to correct people.
The fallacy is thinking all money spent "goes right back into the economy" and ignoring opportunity costs. If you pay people to break windows and then repair them, that money "goes right back into the economy" but it's still a net negative.
Government has no mechanism to ensure the money it spends is on things that have a positive ROI, since the money they spend is obtained by force, not by voluntary transactions.
And this thread is talking about the result of that, and quite a lot of people seem to think this "control via elections" thing isn't working that well.
Most democracies don’t have 100% vote share or approval going to one party, so we have disagreements. There are also lots of other elections that happen more often than every 4 years.
The broken windows fallacy isn’t about government spending. The parable never mentions governments or taxes, you have added that piece. Voluntary economic transactions don’t have a positive ROI by virtue of being voluntary. People and companies engage in negative ROI activities all the time.
People and private companies that are reliant on voluntary transactions for their funding will go bankrupt and be forced to stop if they spend too much on negative ROI activities. Governments can just raise taxes/borrow more money and keep spending until the whole country implodes, unless voters stop them.
You're fractionally engaging in the broken windows fallacy.
Every time we pay for something that wouldn't have got done otherwise it comes at our expense.
That's not to say that some of these things aren't worth doing. But there are a whole great many things the feds spend money on that aren't worth doing.
If two dollars go to invading some stupid sandbox and one dollar goes to Nasa and the NASA dollar pays back a buck fiddy we're half a dollar poorer at the end of the day.
I agree this sounds like bad policy, but what's the logic for doing this with actual capital goods then? Doesn't that have exactly the same problem of limiting corporate investment?
The reasoning is that the deductions for expenses should be applied for the same year as the income they bring in. For expenses that will cover multiple years, they are spread out over those years.
The only logic was to make the Trump 2017 tax cuts look "revenue neutral". They were cooking the books so the CBO would give the tax cuts a passing grade.
https://americansfortaxfairness.org/ways-means-trump-tax-law...
Quote: Corporations have traditionally been allowed to deduct all of their research expenses in the year incurred, even though a lot of research pays off slowly so its costs should similarly be written off over time. Adopting this position, and as a way to partially pay for its big corporate-rate cut, the Trump-GOP tax law decreed that starting in 2022 companies would have to write off research and experimentation expenses gradually: over five years for domestic research, 15 years for foreign. This requirement to “amortize” the expense over time reduces the value of the deduction, increasing corporations’ taxable income and requiring them to pay more in income taxes upfront. The Ways & Means legislation proposes to retroactively reverse this provision.
Accounting likes to recognize expenses with revenues. If an asset will be producing revenue for five years, its cost is recognized over that same time span.
That's going to heavily depend on the type of software and whether it's sold as a shrinkwrap product or a subscription.
For example: your average AAA game will likely produce the vast majority of its value inside the first year upon its release.
At the extreme opposite end you have things like enterprise software using subscriptions, whereby the software continues to produce value year over year, but you're generally also paying developers' salaries to maintain and enhance the softare year over year. That, too, makes little sense in spreading out salaries as a cost over 5 years.
I can't really think of any cases where a piece of software is sold as shrinkwrap software, requires no ongoing maintenance/updates, and is expected to continue earning revenue for many years afterward. That just isn't the industry we live in.
> At the extreme opposite end you have things like enterprise software using subscriptions, whereby the software continues to produce value year over year, but you're generally also paying developers' salaries to maintain and enhance the softare year over year. That, too, makes little sense in spreading out salaries as a cost over 5 years.
There's also a ship-of-theseus problem here. How much change has to happen to a codebase before it's not the same software anymore?
The answer to that question can only be reliably answered in 5 years.
Actual honest valuation of software is something that requires actual evidence.
Software returns have extremely high variance. From a lot, to none, to high negative (For projects that don't complete, or worse, deploy to negative effect.)
Yep, some software systems become money pits. You end up having to pay more people to keep them running.
Only now if those people you have to pay to keep them running are software developers, you have to act like the money you’re spending on them is helping make new value, not merely paying interest on technical debt. Fun!
As the article says, for some people it serves as a substitute for having kids/a family. Life is about more than your personal well being. Maybe you disagree; there are certainly a lot of moral frameworks under which that's not a true statement, and unless there's a higher power to appeal to nobody can tell you that your chosen philosophy is wrong. But all of us will someday grow old and die, and dogs aren't going be our legacy, nor will they be taking care of us in our old age. Just something to consider...
Regardless of dog ownership, it sounds a bit ego-centric to think that life is solely about leaving a legacy and assuming your kids are there solely to care for their parents in old age.
I agree. I'm certainly not suggesting those are the only reasons to have kids, just two that I felt might resonate well with the the previous poster given the materialistic thrust of his comment.
This is why "do whatever the heck I want with it" ought to apply to software, not just hardware. This is one thing I think Richard Stallman got right, all the way back in 1988:
> the freedom to change a program, so that you can control it instead of it controlling you; for this, the source code must be made available to you.
We're a long way from that ideal today. Software controls us all the time. Usually that just leads to anti-consumer annoyances like lock screen ads or DLC seat heaters. But when the one controlling the software that controls you is a communist government...
Not sure what the short term practical solution to this is though.
It could very well be legit, but if you "have not tested its answer yet" the fact that it can generate something that looks plausible doesn't really tell you much. Generating plausible-sounding but incorrect answers is like the #1 most common failure mode for LLMs.
This thread isn't about data in general, only passwords. So first of all, a strong password is much harder to crack in the instance that it's stored in a hashed form in the database. In the instance it's stored (unforgivably) in cleartext, it cannot be used, because an additional factor is required to authenticate. That is how exactly.
In this case it looks like they didn't just want an image though, they wanted the cursor to invert the color of whatever part of the web page it's over, and to seamlessly morph into a selection highlight whenever you mouse over certain controls. Seems like that's a lot harder to make performant.
You can do that by changing the cursor icon for the elements in question. The CSS rule does support per-element swapping (because of course it does, that’s how a text input has a bar but a button has a pointer).
And you can use hammers to brutally murder people as well as to drive in nails. You can use a screwdriver to grievously wound someone besides using it to repair your glasses. The fact that a tool can be used for bad things does not negate the good things it can be used for. Nor does it mean that the maker is responsible if someone chooses to use it for bad things.
In practice it does not. If you have had something with FindMy tracking stolen you may know what apartment block it's in, but not what unit.
Police won't or can't do anything if it could be in multiple units or would require any kind of warrant for the building as well as the specific unit you think it's in.
If you're "lucky" some might chaperone you knocking yourself, which itself is not something most want to entertain.
On account of police policy, AirTags are effectively useless for actually getting anything stolen back. You'll get more use out of them in filing your insurance claim if the theft of the item is covered under for example your homeowner's insurance policy.
That's only a problem if the stolen property is in an apartment and not a house or driveway. And even in the apartment case it could probably be used in combination with other evidence (if available) to obtain a warrant, though you're correct that in practice police don't often have the bandwidth to investigate property crimes to that degree.
Balancing the budget is useful insofar as it reduces the resources that will need to be drained out of the economy in the future to pay interest on our growing debt (currently 11% of all Federal spending).
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