unless reasonable suspicion that the person is [...] in violation of U.S. immigration law
Ah so this is another powderpuff order to be ignored. Why not just say "has concrete evidence"? Don't want to make it too obvious the house of cards has already collapsed when they completely ignore you?
Are there any insights on what the policy implications of new leadership might be? Or is it less a factional takeover and more a "meet the new manager"?
It's still a fine needle to thread. No matter the reason, loyalty is being sacrificed for competency. Lose too much loyalty and you lose control completely.
We've been in a pseudo-birth strike for decades, kids have been increasingly expensive as real wages dropped. The only thing it's gotten us is regressive assaults on reproductive rights.
That makes no difference to their budget. They can still spend what they want, maybe with a little extra inflation, and they still balance their books anyway. The only thing they miss is that free couple hundred dollar loan from the 65%-ish that over withhold.
A government doesn't need fiat currency, they just need to control the flow of it in/out of the economy. Sitting on your taxes is as good as paying them. Also, income tax is 48% of revenue and ~30% is paid by the top 5% of earners. I don't think a 6 month delay on <18% of revenue would be noticeable.
It's not uncommon for a donor to support both candidates because whoever wins will have a debt. Like you said this is peanuts to them.
The other factor is non-monetary support. A $1 billion check to a candidate's campaign fund has a lot of red tape. It isn't as effecient as a $100 million donation and $900 million spent blasting propaganda across your personal media empire.
This is bad because it means if you want to run for office, your campaign is mostly floated by this tiny group of people. $5.5 billion sounds small until you realize that breaks out into millions of dollars for any individual campaign. Unless you're rich enough to ante up (and repeat that every election cycle), you'll never play the game.
More isn't spent because it doesn't need to be, not because it isn't effective. The policy goals of the 0.01% are basically in lock step, why would they bid against each other? Regardless of the raw number, the average politician has to equally weigh their representation between the needs of the 0.01% and the 99.99%.
That's the secret with a starve the beast tactic. Either your funding cuts don't impact performance so you can claim there was bloat or your cuts ruin the program so you can say it needs to be dismantled.
Waiting for the handful of weird Maga trolls on here to comment. It's always funny to see them argue "Commander in Chief" means unlimited authority to do anything with the military.
Pretty obvious you have no fucking clue how the American political system works or any idea what daily life is like.
Half of Americans have less than $500 in savings and something like 30-40% have insecure housing. There's no social safety net if you lose your job; political activism can easily spiral you (and any dependants) to an early grave. Transportation is incredibly expensive in both time and money, just getting to an urban area for a critical mass movement is quite literally more than people can do.
So that's how you end up with one of the top 2-3 largest protests in US history being on a weekend and distributed over thousands of cities. And you're right, concentrating that in Washington DC would be much more impactful. But is it reasonable to expect people to give up their livelihood and stop supporting their family to do that? To throw away everything they have in their lives just by trying?
If you think the answer is yes, that's perfectly valid. But consider this: if you live in a major city in Central America or western Europe or Canada you could get to DC easier and faster (and possibly cheaper) than the majority of people in the US. Why aren't you on a plane right now? Oh right, because you're exactly like your American strawman: you don't give a shit about stopping fascism.
How many trillions of neuron firings and chemical reactions are taking place for my machine to produce an output?
Where are these taking place and how do these regions interact? What are the rules for storing and reshaping memory in response to stimulus? How many bytes of information would it take to describe and simulate all of these systems together?
The human brain alone has the capacity for about 2.5PB of data. Our sensory systems feed data at a rate of about 109 bits/s. The entire English language, compressed, is about 30MB. I can download and run an LLM with just a few GB. Even the largest context windows are still well under 1GB of data.
Just because two things both find and reproduce patterns does not mean they are equivalent. Saying language and biological organisms both use "bytes" is just about as useful as saying the entire universe is "bytes"; it doesn't really mean anything.
If you want to boil down human reasoning to pattern recognition, the sheer amount of stimuli and associations built off of that input absolutely dwarfs anything an LLM will ever be able to handle. It's like comparing PhD reasoning to a dog's reasoning.
While a dog can learn some interesting tricks and the smartest dogs can solve simple novel problems, there are hard limits. They simply lack a strong metacognition and the ability to make simple logical inferences (eg: why they fail at the shell game).
Now we make that chasm even larger by cutting the stimuli to a fixed token limit. An LLM can do some clever tricks within that limit, but it's designed to do exactly those tricks and nothing more. To get anything resembling human ability you would have to design something to match human complexity, and we don't have the tech to make a synthetic human.
Surely we've gone beyond necessary consumption and hit diminishing quality-of-life returns. And all of this is considering just production, excluding the complications of replacing infrastructure, transportation fleets and upgrading the grid.
Those projections also don't include gen-AI datacenters, which will consume ~12% of total usage by 2028. Electric trains are between 2-10x more efficient per passenger/kWh than BEVs. With a focus on more efficient transportation you could turn off those datacenters, skip the complex and expensive BEV infrastructure and come out with a much lower 2050 consumption.
This sounds like quite a rube goldberg machine to avoid simply supplying a predictable baseline with nuclear. If you try to out-surplus increasingly common climate catastrophes, you're going to be in for a rude awakening.
Any surplus or pricing plan will be gamed by power hungry datacenters or other wasteful capitalist scam-de-jour. Like you said, demand is elastic so any spare watt will eventually be sucked up as the price curve is optimized. The combined fluctuations on supply+demand is not what you want for a stable grid.
I predict a scenario where storage has to shore up that instability; much more storage than people think. The potential for a zero-supply floor (independent of demand growth) with massive surplus peaks requires building out an equally massive buffer. What will that ecological damage will look like? Will our current projections and efficiencies hold true at that scale?
The cheap energy -> increased demand -> increased storage -> more surplus cycle will cement our reliance on cheap energy, which requires more stability which means more storage, etc...
Let me clarify here that renewables are important for planning a responsible energy future, but only chasing cheap energy isn't the solution. It's not possible for us to out-produce the over-consumption that got us here.
Ah so this is another powderpuff order to be ignored. Why not just say "has concrete evidence"? Don't want to make it too obvious the house of cards has already collapsed when they completely ignore you?