NASA making their own rockets/spacecraft certainly wouldn't make the government leaner. NASA was always using contractors, but usually NASA was taking a bigger part in the development/operation of rockets/spacecraft. For human spaceflight, that changed with the Commercial Crew Program, with the contracts for the development of the crewed spacecraft that would be designed, produced and operated entirely by commercial companies. SpaceX received $2.6 billion for the development of Dragon, Boeing received $4.2 billion for Starliner. So SpaceX was the cheaper option, and they started operational crewed missions to ISS in 2020. Boeing got much more money, and in 2025 they still don't have an operational spacecraft.
Commercial Crew Program (and also commercial resupply flights to the ISS) started during Obama presidency, so we can thank Obama for commercializing space and making NASA leaner and saving taxpayer dollars.
Yes? With internet access being more prevalent than ever, it is expected that new product categories will have faster adoption. This demonstrates how much faster using ChatGPT and Google as proxies for their respective product categories.
If your ideal is a perfect society where everyone follows the all rules all the time you are going to be sorely disappointed. The ideal collection amount is the size of the fine multiplied by the actual occurrence of the offense. And that revenue should be strictly used for rehabilitative or restorative justice. For example, speeding fines should go to road improvements that deter speeding making roads safer. If no one’s speeding, there’s no need for that. But people will always break the law.
> The ideal collection amount is the size of the fine multiplied by the actual occurrence of the offense.
I don't think that's a logically self-consistent idea. The "actual occurrence of the offense" is not an inevitable pre-existing fact, it exists downstream of the size of the fine and efficiency of enforcement. If you fine people 5% of their annual income for going 1 mph over the speed limit, and put more traffic enforcement on the road, fewer people are going to speed.
So to answer the question "what's the ideal collection amount", you have to consider what the costs (economic and social) of rule breaking behavior are, and trade those off with how much behavior can be modified by fines, as well as the costs of enforcement.
Furthermore, just taking the statement at face value, the only way to actually collect the size of the fine multiplied by the actual occurrence of the offense is to successfully fine 100% of offenders or fine some non-offenders, but even if this is possible it's almost certainly not the "ideal" amount of enforcement.
I just want to say that in modern times safety is put as #1 priority, while it's actually always a balance. E.g. we wanted the safest airline industry, we'd close the airports. But we balance the safety vs usefulness.
Yes I agree. I was replying to the suggestion to put the proceeds from fines into a general slush fund. Doing that creates an incentive to use speeding tickets to pay for police overtime and radar guns instead of traffic calming infrastructure.
That says a whole lot all by itself. You acknowledge that reform doesn’t work? There is always money to be made because people don’t like the set of rules set? So when people follow all those rules, make new rules that people will break to keep it going? Where does it stop?
What about private research institutes? They don’t really educate anyone, not in the way that people think of when they say education. Why must all funds only go to public organizations?
Why should the government pay for research? Because the private sector can some times move faster than a public research lab. They may have different capabilities. They have different strengths. They may be more efficient in certain situations. Why is this surprising to you?
Yes, complementing an observation that there are many funding sources that aren't the Federal Government
From my conversations with people, this university funding topic is a mere proxy for their disdain with Trump on every topic, in a fairly incoherent rehash of random headlines. Have found very few people willing to discuss how universities are funded like this article is.
The last 75 years of interacting with the federal government and proletariat will be a footnote in these school’s half millenium history. It won’t even be controversial. Non-upper class people won’t be using them to get into corporations, a mere happenstance of the last 75 years and not what these universities view themselves as. Non-upper class people won’t be worried about how many of them are in, and what criteria is involved, and how fair. And the Federal government won’t be using their one avenue of funding to bother them about it. 75 out of 400, and then 1,000 years. A footnote. Probably laughed about.
“Remember when we had $50bn from daytrading tax free and got the US government to pay for our toys every year until a total populist uprising occurred at the expense of the entire nation. Other People’s Money! Rowing club later?”
In the case of dieticians, investment advisors, and accountants they are usually licensed professionals who face consequences for misconduct. LLMs don’t have malpractice insurance
Good luck getting any of that to happen. All that does is raise the barrier for proof and consequence, because they've got accreditation and "licensing bodies" with their own opaque rules and processes. Accreditation makes it seem like these people are held to some amazing standard with harsh penalties if they don't comply, but really they just add layers of abstraction and places for incompetence, malice and power-tripping to hide.
E.g. Next time a lawyer abandons your civil case and ghosts you after being clearly negligent and down-right bad in their representation. Good luck holding them accountable with any body without consequences.
>E.g. Next time a lawyer abandons your civil case and ghosts you after being clearly negligent and down-right bad in their representation. Good luck holding them accountable with any body without consequences.
Are you talking about a personal experience? I'd think a malpractice claim and the state bar would help you out. Did you even try? Are you just making something up?
I’d be way more excited about a functional consumer protection agency or actual antitrust enforcement than trying to beat a dark pattern with more dark patterns. Just wait til AI agent service providers get in on the regulatory capture game, politicians are cheap to buy these days.
reply