The country has been _run_ by fools for 26 years. Congress has had 26 years to do something about the fiscal situation, and we've had four presidents, and the fiscal responsible side of the electorate is never listened to.
Both sides are to blame - neither will fix the problem. Obama could've made that his goal - he was competent, had a lot of political good will, and many people were frustrated at the bailout policy Bush did, but instead it was inflationary printing (quantitative easing), Obamacare and Cash 4 Clunkers (which the used car market still hasn't recovered from).
I never voted for him - I didn't view him as honest, nor did he seem to indicate that he liked America, but was rather just a good talker - but I think he could've been a great president given a less radicalizing agenda.
He was probably the best situated president in terms of timing to fix the debt problem, but instead it was a good time for divisive politics. By the time Obama finished, it became clear neither party actually cared about the fiscally conservative Ron Paul supporting voting block.
Why specifically 26 years? I agree that Congress has been increasingly useless, leading to more and more rule by presidential decree in order to have a government that runs at all, but there wasn't a step function 26 years ago.
its because prior to that (2000 Bush era), congress and president had a plan to payoff debt and had a balanced budget plan in place to avoid over spending.
I would love to hear what was "radical" or "divisive" about Obama's policy. A significant portion of the country disliking him because of his skin color doesn't make his policies "radical"
A universal health care mandate were both radical and divisive, and the popular nickname for the ACA today is "Obamacare".
I happen to think the policy was a good idea, and voting to keep it in play was the best vote of John McCain's career ... but it was definitely both radical and divisive.
Now, much of the "mandate" has been stripped away, health care remains a mess, and access is far from affordable, but you can't really blame that one on Obama.
> A universal health care mandate were both radical and divisive
It seems quite ironic, given the frequent complaints about the inability of Congress to either govern effectively or fix health insurance (for many and various definitions of "fix"), that the ACA was so divisive. At least it got passed! Yet given the opportunity twice (2017-2019, 2025-2027), a politically viable alternative hasn't been offered up by opponents of the ACA, let alone being able to fully repeal it.
Lol cool so health care is your definition of "radical" and "decisive". Hint: it's neither of these things and the only reason it was considered as such was because Obama was black (see tan suit). Seems like we need a few more years of woke cause you still can't see the obvious
> The country has been _run_ by fools for 26 years.
It's hard to accept the 'everyone is the same' in light of Trump's antics. Remind me again which presidents started wars of choice at the behest of Israel even when they were explicitly warned of the consequences?
We'll continue through the depression we've started since 2008. (GDP growth should be closer to 3.5%-5%, but we haven't really escaped sub-2% since 2008) - our GDP has been depressed by at least 1-2% growth since that crisis, and I think a large part of it has been the inflationary cycle we started and never stopped.
The wars already put us into too much debt, Obama continued it for 8 years (granted, the deficit slowly went down, but it wasn't fixed). Trump and Biden did a huge disservice to the debt (but neither really cared much about it), and now I fear the path Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden have laid will not be easily fixed.
I agree with you. We are still paying for 2008, and compounded the problem with Covid stimuli. I sure wish we would just rip the band aid off at this point, but it might already be too late. The global economy is jacked, China needs everyone to be consumers, and that well is running dry, globally.
GDP growth is never going to be that high again. GDP growth is just per-capita GDP growth (1-1.5% per year) + population growth (used to be 1%, now is 0% or slightly negative). GDP growth of 1-1.5% will be normal going forward and could even go lower if population decline is at -.5% per year, for example.
I did list GDP growth per capita[0], so that already was accounting for population changes.
Having said that, you are depressingly very correct. A negative population growth will cause the post-2008 depression to continue even longer, and probably more agressively.
An R9700 has 32 GB RAM. Is your comparison against a similar size model? Or shouldn't you be comparing it against the cost of a hosted model matching the one you’re using locally?
>>> Claude Code is $100+ or else be constantly throttled
>> Is your comparison against a similar size model? Or shouldn't you be comparing it against the cost of a hosted model matching the one you’re using locally?
> You should be comparing the value you get
But the GP commenter specifically compared the cost of solutions such as Claude Code against a 32 GB model.
If they are going to compare cost, they should compare to the cost of a hosted ~32 GB model.
Or if privacy trumps everything for them, then just say that and don't bother comparing costs of incredibly disparate solutions, as Claude Code costing $100+ a month was a red herring if they're happy with 32 GB model output - they could have compared to a far cheaper option that matched their local model's quality.
It would be like someone saying they were able to buy a bike to get to work, saving them $x million compared to buying a Bugatti. When really, if they're going to compare cost they should compare to a cheap car, or not bring up the cost of an expensive car at all if exercise trumps everything else for them.
Well, I don't see a value issue of using Qwen3.6 27B vs Sonnet 4.6 (not sure about 5 yet)
I still have to use GHCP at work, and I self-host at home, and aside from the fact self-hosting also forces you to tinker, optimize, etc. - there's not a huge difference in my end result in end user results. I spent quite a bit of time trying to optimize llamacpp and compare 35b to 27b, etc. I don't compare models that much at work.
I guess the other part of it is I didn't really know much about cheaper cloud models, but I was attracted to the idea of no longer renting against Claude code, etc. I figured if I could run something functionaly similar from my bedroom on a normal outlet, then all this talk about data centers needing to be built everywhere in the news cycle is obviously just plain stupidity and hype.
It appears I'm using about 20.4/7.6 million in/out tokens a month, or on open router, about $20/month.
That puts $1350 at a 5-6 year break even (thanks to cheap electricity), I guess. Beyond that, running on localhost as a nice feature of 0 no latency when doing rapid tool calling
Weather forecasting is important even before solar/wind. Extreme, temporary temperature swings require the power company to be prepared for the extra power generation.
With just coal/gas/hydro, this can be mitigated much easily, but still needs to be handled with care. If not, then the lack of power generation could cause brownouts for hours or days as backup power generation takes time to spin up.
Since we build for "1-in-a-100", it's expected we'll have these failures, as a 1% chance every year is a pretty high chance that will keep increasing as these power companies rely more on non-failsafe power generation strategies. Texas is the extreme example, where over-reliance on those systems caused too much damage.
Interesting perspective. I toyed with rust a bit from the perspective of a c# background (and a bit of java, php, classic asp, JavaScript, typescript, etc) .
I like rust, but I've come to still prefer c#'s object oriented features. Perhaps it's my naivety, but I've found c# AOT compilation to do plenty of trimming and startup performance optimization that I don't see it as a bad option.
Have you made a personal comparison on Rust vs Object Oriented Languages like c#?
From a software design standpoint, it certainly takes some adjustment going from OOP to the compositional architecture and structural trait system used by Rust, but it's not that big a shift.
The biggest downsides are the poor standard library that ships with Rust and the non prescriptive project structure which puts too much authority on the writer to figure out.
The biggest wins are that runtime exceptions and concurrency bugs are impossible. So you can basically write Rust with your eyes closed and, if it compiles, it's probably right.
Due to the high level of trust the compiler gives you, PR reviews (and reviewing AI generated code) is limited to design decisions and logic implementations.
I only really think about architectural decisions, like "this code belongs to X domain, so I should put it in X crate" or "my project should use a hexagonal architecture, does this change violate that? Should I create a package/crate to contain this logic?"
If you don't care about optimisations, a naive implementation in Rust will effortlessly outperform C# and use orders of magnitude less resources, but optionally, the pay off for optimisation is high.
It is mathematically impossible for a Java program to be faster than a well optimized Rust program, so long as the JVM exists and requires non-zero resources to run (to say nothing of GC etc).
This isn't me glazing Rust, this is just the boring observation that a VM language is necessarily going to be outperformed by a language without a VM. VMs have good attributes, but they are never zero cost.
Key is "well optimized". At some point and scale, it becomes almost impossible to chase those manual optimizations, not to mention that usage patterns at runtime can change in such a way that make such an optimization prohibitively expensive, if not outright impossible. And even then, you would end up matching what the JVM JIT offers anyway.
What I mentioned is already something that people have observed for both Rust and C++ against programs written in Java. Now add features like observability, profiling, debugging, and dev productivity, and it becomes a worthwile tradeoff a lot of the time.
For constrained environments, GraalVM offers native image.
"What if there's no electricity!!!"
"What if there's no roads!!!"
What if's can be used to kill a conversation or discussion because they are impossible to argue.
"If there's no Electricity i'll just use my diesel generator to power the store. WhAt if YoU ForgoTT to FueL IT?!". There is no discussion to be had because one side is not interested in it.
What you should be asking is What is plausible.
IS it plausible that you buy a phone that doesn't support the app?
No, there's two OS's for mobile phones. They will have an app you can pay with.
IS it plausible you forgot your phone or it got stolen?
Yes. But you are just as likely to have your wallet stolen. So its not really applicable.
"How are you allowed to function if the app is missing?" Is an illogical question.
The apps already exists in several countries and works flawlessly.
Strawman, but you raise a good point. Credit card terminals can still work in certain disaster situations more reliably than trying to get everyone to not lose their phones and keeping them charged and wasting precious energy on a transaction.
A credit card doesn't require electricity, and even the classical process of carbon copying can work without power or internet to the pos (though that has its own problems - but we're talking "disasters")
Regardless, a person not having a smart phone should not be grounds of exclusion from society. It's too vulnerable of a device for it to be a single point of failure. It already is too critical of a device even for those that have one, that losing it is already a very big burden. Even just switching to a new phone via the migration process on Android can still be a burden.
No, but my credit card has no battery, requires no cell service, is waterprrof and quite durable.
I see the advantages of the Chinese system but I really found myself missing my card.
- While payer-offline payments were possible most merchants didn't want to (and some seemed unable to) so payments in places with bad cell service were painful.
- It was a lot more steps to open the app and enter scanning mode or display your code than to just tap a card or phone.
- It was always unclear if you were scanning or being scanned, leading to friction for every payment (generally larger brands scan you and you scan for smaller merchants).
Honestly for in-person card payments are just nicer.
For online WeChat was better, but no different than Apple Pay or Google Pay except for course that it is standardized by the government.
Well, in my state, you don't "apply" for a gun like you apply for a license. It is just document that you purchased it after the seller runs a background check.
The government isn't attesting to your capabilities - that is still on you as a citizen.
> you don't "apply" for a gun like you apply for a license.
>... background check
Who requires these background checks? Because the seller wouldn't do them unless obligated. Obviously the check and paperwork around it constitutes at least a de facto application to the government for permission to purchase the firearm.
I've noticed Qwen3.6 struggles a bit with today/date based logic.
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