Trump, sitting on top of a Republican government, is responsible for 10Trn of the debt, about a quarter.
Conservatives gave up on principles long ago and have settled for simply lying about everything, including what's happening and who's responsible for it.
The words are so overloaded. Republican is just generic right wing. I think the "conservative" the parent is talking about is the neoliberalism like what Milton Friedman would propose. He would have wanted half of the government gone, next to no market intervention (he even argued against seatbelts in one lecture). That would actually be the "conservative" someone you stereotypically imagine like Ron Swanson would adopt, who describes the perfect government as just a person in a tiny white room. The Republicans are a joke, just like the Democrats. They're both there for themselves, and have no actual agenda, manifesto, ideals, or values. They've got all the junk identity politics, religion, abortion, immigration crap mixed in such that you're either picking crap or crap. There's nothing "liberal" about the Democrats and nothing "conservative" about the Republicans. The Republicans were even the ones who freed the slaves! Make of that what you will.
The politics of this is grindingly difficult; people think of "them and us", not "we're all together in three free world". Achieving free trade means either dismantling all the little market carve-outs that local politics relies on, or enshrining them in the collective (EU farming policy).
Imagine trying to integrate the politics of Japanese rice farming into the CAP.
The war(s), especially with the impact on pipelines and the Houthis taking over more of Yemen, are finally affecting fuel prices and hence turning the global economic outlook less positive.
You can print money, but you can only ""print"" oil for a short time from reserves, which the US and China have been draining.
Not just reserves, but also all the oil already on ships slowly making its way to its destination. I think I even saw someone predict that around September, the oil issue would get worse due to how slowly those ships move.
> You can print money, but you can only ""print"" oil for a short time from reserves, which the US and China have been draining.
What's different between the two is that apparently China hasn't made an equivalent dent in its oil reserves, despite no significant reduction in travel, and despite reducing its import demand by 1 OPEC.
It's not entirely clear how - but theories include shifts from flights to train travel and shifts from gasoline cars to EVs.
Apparently the main reason they have started buying crude again is not for internal consumption as much as taking advantage of the massive crack spread in refined petroleum products (like diesel) which they export.
> It's not entirely clear how - but theories include shifts from flights to train travel and shifts from gasoline cars to EVs.
From a distance, those look like pretty sound theories.
It's wild that the pols and talking heads in the US have been screeching about how "dangerous" China is since the 90s (I remember family members making crude jokes about why I should be learning Mandarin instead of Spanish in middle school) and, yet, here we are doing everything we can to hand them the reins of world power.
> China hasn't made an equivalent dent in its oil reserves
I think the easiest explanation is that this probably isn't true. The US SPR is underground, it would be quite easy for China to manage its equivalent in secret, for whatever reasons.
The Chinese EV shift is real and significant, though.
JavaFX is a hidden gem. I really like the programming model with its binding and scene graph and CSS.
It's not as portable as Swing, as it has some platform specific binary components to it. But it works fine on mainstream platforms. For me Swing portability is not worth giving up the FX model.
Just be aware that if you happen to bundle in the Web view component, you're basically adding WebKit to your distribution. I did this with a small project because I wanted to have a "help" screen with Markdown -> HTML. Easy, but "expensive". It simply adds a big chunk (10-20Mb) to your distribution.
(Now I have a very crude Markdown renderer for this task, which is a 100 lines code, and I'm working on a better one -- but I have yet to pull the trigger on the latest FX with its new Rich Text component, which could change everything.)
One hot tip with cross platform FX, however. Embed your fonts. The font suite is not common across the distributions, and the CSS does not honor the font fall back (i.e. if not XXX font, then YYY font), so if the runtime doesn't have your specific font, it collapses to the System font. So, embedding the fonts you use helps a lot with cross platform stability. Plenty of free fonts, I have not had a real problem with this. But it can be one of those O.o moments when you test on other platforms and encounter it the first time.
Rubbish. They don't want to. The tractors have license plates, allowing them to be pursued after the fact, and the NL police have firearms if they want to get spicy.
There have been a number of attacks in Europe of the form "deranged person drives vehicle into crowd". I'm sure the police wouldn't sit back and shrug if that was done with a tractor. The vehicle doesn't have magic properties, the driver has police protection.
Ah, the magic of being a rightwing populist, which gives you a free pass to do illegal things (drive a tractor on the motorway) even if that results in fatalities.
Really Western Europe has been ignoring Russia's war for far too long; the MH17 shootdown was in 2014 and the situation has only deteriorated since then.
While the consensus is that it's likely a Russia controlled/allied battery shot it down - I'm not sure anybody thinks it was anything other than an accident, not an intentional act of sabotage.
If it was a Russian weapon (which is the most likely explanation) then it was the result of them meddling where they shouldn't be - either by supplying separatists with military equipment or by being there themselves, i.e. a part of their ongoing expansionist campaign in Ukraine.
Not that airgapping is expensive so much as it's really, really inconvenient once you take it seriously. You need to build special rooms for it, you can't just API out to a datacenter. You need to have processes for requesting data be sent into the box. And so on.
I feel like there is a reasonable compromise between "yeah they have full internet access" and "separate airgapped rooms that require multiple levels of authorization to access" that would make this a lot better without that much more work.
I feel like they're doing it intentionally to show how dangerous these models are and that the government must step in and protect them
This is absolutely true, but even the most charitable interpretation of “maximize the use of AI” doesn’t include “do nothing but prompt and you’ll keep your job”.
One can argue semantics and fairness all day long, but if an employee is adding no value to their $90 Claude signature, then they’re gonna get fired as soon as someone realizes. :/
Conservatives gave up on principles long ago and have settled for simply lying about everything, including what's happening and who's responsible for it.
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