This is not optimal. We get one if these every 10 years or so. We should be always prepared, not "prepare now!" boom/bust cycling this stuff. This is new, but it is really not new. Waves of panic followed by apathy is not the way to do public health, but it is how we fund it.
For those who want quick and easy, I wonder if quarto dashboards will eventually replace that use case. I feel like many R users would be a bit more skeptical of Posit if they were more familiar with software companies and the games they play.
Zalensky is right. Russia started it, if we have to destroy the planet with nukes and kill every single European of fighting age, we can never, must never, surender to Putin. And think of the great innovations in murderous drones we will get out of an ongoing multi-decade prixy war, all that ingenuity and Ukranian expertise in killing can be ours for very, very low cost! Beginning to wonder about Trump's priorities.
I literally identified several kinds of noble people in my comment: those who give away money they earn in productive occupations and those who give freely of their time expecting no financial reward for doing so. Many many people do this. But, yes, I don't think those who do paid work for non-profits or charities are more noble than anyone else.
They may not be more noble, but they're a necessary part for the people you describe as nobel. Charities, non-profits, and USAID workers, are there to distribute funds, do research, and audit the economic benefit of funds they are given. If a nobel person is volunteering instead of donating, it still takes individuals to coordinate and request help. If people working for non profits, charities, and aid groups quit to make money to donate, it would be harder to be nobel because there's no one who can distribute and act on the funding.
A charity and non-profit take money voluntarily donated to it. If USAID were a government administered charitable organization, I may have a different take, but it is not in any way a charitable organization. It uses a threat of violence to siphon whatever money Congress deems appropriate away from Americans, and redirects it to whatever the executive dictates. That is not a charity.
Like I said, I think a national charity is actually a great idea -- if the President and Congress delineated a national charitable project and then encouraged Americans to contribute part of their income towards that... that would be amazing. USAID IS NOT that.
And this was the point of my post. Many people call USAID a charity, when it is nothing close to the sort.
> If people working for non profits, charities, and aid groups quit to make money to donate, it would be harder to be nobel because there's no one who can distribute and act on the funding.
I honestly frankly disagree wholeheartedly. Most American charity used to be administered by non-paid individuals actually volunteering, whether mutual-benefit societies, fraternal organizations, churches, etc.
We disagree with how we want our taxes spent. As long as the government is paying into it, I'm not convinced you would feel any differently if it was a charity or not.
> It uses a threat of violence to siphon whatever money Congress deems appropriate away from Americans, and redirects it to whatever the executive dictates. That is not a charity.
There is no violence. Congress put aside money for USAID and organizations and other groups write grants for ways to distribute that money. Someone has to read and vet these proposals and unfortunately they are paid.
Hey, it would be great for charity to be administered for free, but personally I'm not convinced that there are enough people with free time to donate to make that work. We don't expect social workers, doctors in clinics, counselors, or numerous other aid recipients to work for free so why expect the same from the administrators?
I think you missed some of what USAID did. Besides distributing direct government aid they also provided convenient and deniable non-official covers for many CIA agents. I can't understand why this human intelligence source is being thrown away. It was tremendously valuable to understand what was happening on the ground in a lot of developing countries.
Certainly not 90%! Many American men are religious, and those that aren't are often feminists. The fraction of American men who are in neither set couldn't be more than 20-30%.
Exactly right. Revanchist politics lead to boom/bust debt cycles in government. One party spends way too much and hurts the citizens, the other party uses their mandate to fix the overspending as a pretext to subvert government controls and agencies, and slash and burn in a way that hurts citizens. And 95% of the population blindly, religiously even, suport this and yet don't feel at all responsible for the current state of affairs. "They did it!" seems like the new American ethos.
Simply untrue to suggest "one party spends way too much" or that the other's "slash and burn" is at all related to strengthening our financial situation.
But that's it. I don't think slash and burn is related to debt, least not directly. That was my whole point. It's revanchist escalatory politics on both sides. When more than a few democrats acknowledge the debt and talk about cutting, and when more than a few republicans talk about increasing taxes, we can make progress. Until then we'll get more partisanship and sctivism, which means more games with the budget and thus more volatility and inefficiency in Washington, to the detriment of all federal workers, but to citizens also. The parties and powers that be are the winners. Everyone else loses. Moderate politics and less change is better for most people on average, certainly better for institutional stability, which is the core issue with DOGE's chainsaw approach to belt tightening.
I think most government workers including elected officials in both parties will be biased towards spending and granting themselves more power over time. I think if each party actively damages the other party's cherished institutions and programs (eg by creating policies undermining the defense industrial base, or undermining SNAP) it will require excess spending just to stand still. Each party is stuck rebuilding stuff every 4 years and nothing gets done for either party's agenda, at astronomical expense. Tragic, and obviously unsustainable. In a perfect world, liberals push spending on useful well run programs and conservatives resist foolish spending on fads and over zealous interventions and policy with little impact. We need that balance. We do not have it. As such, those that want to burn it all down will win, unless the left change their ways. (Moderates on the right are and forever will be outgunned by the more intelligent, typically wealthier Milton Friedman types.)
