YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Theres noone in charge.

Algorithm for surviving "rats on a sinking ship":

1. Watch the program execute

2. Examine behavior patterns

3. Best guess where they point

4. Prepare for that, whatever that is.

5. Error correct and repeat step 1.

ps. If enough rats adopt the algorithm the ship won't sink.

$1 billion/day way the initial estimate, but it was never actually that high. CBO estimates $38B through August 1, or ~ $7B/month. https://www.cbo.gov/publication/62756

It bought a whole ballroom!

I hope everyone is enjoying American Yanukovich, and looking forward to Amerimaidan to get rid of him.

I assume you're being satirical.

Edit: I don't really need it explained to me, I literally just said I assumed it's satire. Also who would downvote this? Calm down.

It's the biggest most beautiful deficit ever. If the democrats were in charge they would have spent far more on sex changes for kids, it's the TRUTH!

So the solution is to annex Spain. ;)

So ... low?

It take a hero to dive on the grenade.

Such dives tend to be fatal.

Until AI can produce a blast-management plan to ensure the hero's survival, the necessary courage shall remain elusive.

Bullshit on the lazy “both parties are the same” framing. Bill Clinton actually balanced the federal budget and ran a $236 billion surplus in 2000. His 1993 deficit-reduction package passed without a single Republican vote. You just keep eating up the Republican bullshit...

The Two Santas strategy <https://www.milwaukeeindependent.com/thom-hartmann/two-santa...> is the American implementation of the famous Alexander Fraser Tytler quote: “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage.”

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https://amarkfoundation.org/reports/u-s-presidents-and-the-f..., though you could just google the topic and click exactly any link, clearly shows that Republican admins grow the deficit, Democratic admins shrink it.

These are just straight up numbers increasing or decreasing. It’s not complicated shit. Quit equivocating.

Doing the both sides thing here is so, so frustrating… Obama and Biden both spent big to avoid/alleviate recession conditions, that is true. But it’s just not comparable at all:

1. First off: the deficit article were commenting under right now. This is unusual and terrible and 100% due to GOP norm breaking.

2. The BBB raised the debt astronomically, so this will continue well past the end of the war.

3. We’re engaged in a war of choice with a huge country with no end in sight and no stated objective, and the pentagon is getting more money than ever.

4. The corruption and graft is so rank and blatant that it might actually make a dent here, which is absurd. God forbid they carry out their ethnic cleansing plan for Gaza and then we pay for Trump City, there. Not to mention all the subordinate graft.

5. Only one party has divorced itself from reason entirely. Democrats are deeply flawed and I disagree with many of them on many things, but none of them dare try the ‘nuh uh shut up’ approach that is central to the GOP in the days of Trump. Imagine if they said anything as absurd as “Haitians are eating our cats and dogs” or “I’ll give everyone $5k” or “I didn’t lose the election that every single watchdog said I did” — they would be lambasted and forgotten within days.

6. Only one party is planning for the other party to ever be in power ever again. That is, assuming you don’t take Miller’s word for it that there are seven bajillion illegal aliens that the democrats ship in to win elections, which just hasn’t happened to work yet because the GOP is just too popular, and hasn’t been uncovered in any actual investigations because they’re just too darn tricky.

Sorry. Presumably this whole thread will be wiped anyway. But this is not a “both parties” thing! We’ve had a balanced budget and a positive treasury balance in my lifetime, and I’m a baby person!

(People said it was impossible then as well, FWIW.)

that's yet another "both sides are the same!" fallacy

you are right in that neither can fix it entirely

only one party consistently raises the debt->deficit

and only one party consistently lowers it

hint: you cannot spend $21 TRILLION on militarizing the country and going to war without exploding the deficit, there's no profit in war, only massive expense

* https://ips-dc.org/report-state-of-insecurity-cost-militariz...

and that $21 Trillion was before the Iran War which is going to go on for years and cost another trillion to replace all the weapons and ships, remember all those bases and planes that were destroyed which this administration is covering up

The administration has said it out loud. Printing press.

It’s okay, it’s all part of the political cycle:

1. Republicans start a war and cause a recession

2. Democrats get swept into power, barely.

3. Democrats clean up the mess but key reforms are blocked by some lone asshole like Joe Lieberman.

4. Everyone complains that Democrats didn’t do enough, it’s all the immigrants’ fault, and put Republicans back in power.

5. Return to step 1.

obama nearly doubled the national debt in 8 years ($11T -> $22T). this is not a problem specific to a party or a president

There's no "entitlements" you can cut that wouldn't cause more harm to the economy than they would save up in federal spending. And there isn't enough income that taxing it to pay off the debt would be practical. You have to tax capital, that's where the entire world's wealth has been sucked up in the last decades. That's the only solution that doesn't involve the country defaulting on its debts.

Billionaires know that and are already starting to speak against such taxes[0], before there's even any real possibility of them being adopted. They would rather see everything turn to shit than give back a single cent.

[0] https://paulgraham.com/winc.html

Paperclips are famously not that expensive to maintain

It doesn’t just print money. It raises money or backs it by assets. It amazes me that people have no understanding of basic economics, or what qualitative easing is. Study the 2008 financial crisis to understand the power of modern monetary theory.

If you print you cause more inflation and all the debt you need to renew requires higher yield to shift. So in practice printing yourself out of trouble is in itself a cause of trouble