Mandatory spending (mostly social security, medicare, pensions, and welfare), plus interest, now exceeds total federal revenues. We could eliminate every discretionary budget item, shut down everything from NASA to the Army, and we'd still see the debt continue to increase.
The debt is about to hit $37 trillion. If we cut all spending in half, everything down to Grandma's social security check, that would give us a $1 trillion surplus, and it would still take half a lifetime to pay everything back.
If we eliminated all spending, including collecting social security taxes but paying no more benefits, it would still take around 9 years to pay off the debt, not just a few.
roystgnr
25d ago
But Trump's election was specifically a repudiation of the Republican establishment's weakness on illegal immigration, wasn't it? Even his eagerness to be obnoxious to opponents was seen as insurance against the possibility of him becoming yet another Republican who would go weak-kneed and try to thread the needle between "grr, we hate illegal immigration" among their voters and "oh, but what can we do about it in a divided government? better trade another sweeping amnesty for some minor hypothetical enforcement concessions" in DC. The Democrats' only difference from the repudiated Republicans was that they were supporting the same outcome overtly rather than dishonestly, and Trump's base was centered around opposition to that specific outcome, not principled opposition to dishonesty, so there wasn't a lot of room for collaboration there.
The Democratic strategy of "help get people pissed off at an opponent who's pretty good at pissing people off" would have been a great one (for their own strategic interests; perhaps not for the country as a whole), if only they'd been able to field candidates and policies that weren't also pissing everyone off in different ways.
roystgnr
25d ago
I'm pretty sure the part where Elon started insinuating Trump is a pedo wasn't staged:
Time to drop the really big bomb:
@realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public.
Have a nice day, DJT!
roystgnr
25d ago
Most ironically, he was too liberal. This was the characteristic of Joe Rogan that was damning to them and that elicted the reaction that was damning of them. He may never have been too immoderate for them in the modern sense of "liberal"=="leftist", but he was far too much for them in the older sense of "liberal"=="open minded". While the modern left was discovering the delicious joys of shunning and deplatforming, Rogan was still stubbornly letting any idiot with any wacky or problematic ideology come to him and make a case for it to him and his audience. The last straw for them in 2024 may have been that, when he offered to let their idiot take advantage of his liberalism, at a point where she clearly needed it, she simply chose not to accept!
It's possible that she was doomed either way, that she had good reason for insisting on an hour interview surrounded by her staff rather than multiple hours one-on-one in his studio like all his other interviewees, but if that's the case then what they needed instead wasn't a liberal version of Joe Rogan, it was a didn't-finish-at-the-bottom-of-the-Democratic-primaries version of Kamala Harris.
roystgnr
26d ago
I think that's normal. Right? It's normal for every day to be an MMA cage fight against a little monkey.
Were you also a little MMA monkey, long ago?
Turns out that it's normal for your kids to be like little mixtures of how you and your spouse were as kids, rather than for them to be like kids in general.
That sounds banally obvious when I put it into words, but before I had kids I'd never really put it into words, so I never thought of myself as a person who would end up really liking kids. Turns out that, although I still don't especially like kids in general, I really like my wife and I really like myself so I really like my kids in particular. As a slightly-less-obvious bonus, it turns out that kids make friends more readily with other kids who they have things in common with, so I like all my kids' friends and I really like most of them.
My son would never have kicked me in the balls, but he will gleefully launch a massive suicidal invasion against my in-first-place-until-then Civilization V nation, thereby distracting me long enough to let my wife win our family game while he gloats, which I guess is the nerd version of a balls-kicking (I don't think I've ever won one of our family Civ V games...). But because it's the nerd version I feel proud rather than upset. Even when he shows me up at sports, it's popular-among-nerds sports like rock climbing and "ninja" obstacle courses that he gravitates to.
I know exactly zero men who would choose to get kicked in the balls even once to have a child
I'm also a counterexample here. Personally I thought that the months of sleep deprivation during newborn care were worse than a more-acute-but-more-brief testicular injury (which I haven't suffered since I was a teen, thankfully), but each of the kids were still a net positive before they turned 1. Maybe I've just never taken a hard enough hit to the balls.
roystgnr
26d ago
Shunning used to be something cults did, but wokeness mainstreamed it as part of its attacks on free speech.
Is this the setup for a Mitch-Hedburg-style joke?
"Shunning used to be something only cults did. It still is, but it used to be too."
roystgnr
26d ago
My wife and I agreed to stop after 3 kids, and she got a tubal ligation during the birth of our third.
With hindsight, I think this was the right decision - her births went from "C-section" to "with minor complications" to "with emergency post-op surgery", and one of my worst memories is of scouring medical journals on my laptop to try to figure out her survival odds while she was in that last surgery (around 99%, which sounds high now but sure felt terrifyingly low then).
With more hindsight, she now disagrees with me. She utterly hated being pregnant, and she doesn't have a death wish, but even in the hypothetical case of "what if the odds kept getting worse and you'd have been down to 90% next time" she thinks that would have been worth it for a fourth.
Her sister once had a kid who lost your game of Russian Roulette, with a severe mutation expressing both physically (he had stubs instead of lower arms or hands, legs he couldn't walk on, and cardiopulmonary problems that the doctors thought would kill him by age 3 or 4, and he eventually died of the flu at age 11) and mentally (at age 11 years he was mentally closer to 11 months). She still thought having him was worth the ordeal of caring for him.
I'm not sure what a good upper limit is, though. That sister has been raising (or completed raising; there's a wide age range) 4 other kids happily - but that might be partly due to good fortune in most of their lives? My father was the oldest of 6 young kids when his father died, and though his mother was a saint there's a limit to what a single parent on a limited survivor's pension can do to raise such a large family well.
I think that's the only reason I'm still glad we stopped at 3. As a terminal value I'd consider a 4th kid like our first 3 to be worth much more than a 10% chance of me dying, so I can't tell my wife not to feel likewise, but there's also the instrumental value of our lives to consider. If she had died then even our first 3 wouldn't be "like our first 3", they'd be in a sorrier state if they'd had only me (with a couple of her nearby relatives to help) raising them.
with reliable genetic screening to make sure they were healthy
Nucleus Genomics just launched their "Nucleus Embryo" product yesterday, if you want to do IVF to get improved odds on the kid's genes. I'm not sure what their process is or how reliable it is, though.
I do think lots and lots of women would have at least one kid if it wasn't so scary and risky and painful
Mean desired total fertility rate among young women in the USA is still over replacement; it's only the actual fertility rate that's now under 1.7 and still falling. But the biggest issues that have women delaying kids until it's too late to reach their desires aren't anything about the risks of pregnancy or difficulties of child rearing, it's the rapidly increasing difficulty of finding a spouse (especially difficulty finding a spouse while still young), combined with worry for their economic future.
roystgnr
26d ago
Was it actually sold to anyone at that price?
$1.25B of it, to "SpaceX, as well as investors" - it was partially a stock buyback.
-13% worldwide sounds like declining, especially with the rest of the EV market growing. -50% in Europe does indeed sound like "tanking".
Yeah, that's all fair. I was looking at total revenue trailing 12 months, but was misled by both the "total" (declining auto revenue is partly offset by rising energy production+storage revenue) and "12 months" (the last released quarter specifically looks awful; I guess people weren't expecting Trump to win and really focus the anti-Elon hate?) parts of that.
roystgnr
26d ago
But the whole "catching the booster" thing seems to be fairly well solved, which is mind boggling.
I literally thought they were joking the first time I heard the "catch the rockets in giant robot arms" proposal. Under careful consideration it makes a ton of sense to keep as much mass and complexity as you can on the ground rather than attached to the rocket, but come on. Giant robot arms.
No one else has any true first-gen re-use capability for even their boosters, and SpaceX has a fairly well developed second gen platform.
New Glenn might be there soon: they successfully reached orbit using a booster that could in theory be landed and reused, even if that first attempt didn't survive reentry.
Maybe Electron too: they've recovered at least half a dozen orbital boosters (albeit via splashdown, not landing), and they've reflown an engine. I'd bet against them reflying a whole booster this year (splashdown is rough, and it sounds like their recovered boosters have only recently started passing any requalification tests), but I wouldn't bet a lot.
It is embarrassing for everyone else who thinks of themselves as a launch provider, though, isn't it? The first reflight of a new orbital booster design was done by SpaceX, and the second was again by SpaceX, now with a design ten times bigger.
based purely on execution and not things like massive government intervention/control (Long March, Arienne).
You say "massive government intervention/control" like it was a benefit rather than an obstacle. Government space used cost-plus contracts, tried to create as many jobs as possible with as many subcontractors as possible, considered commercial applications to be an afterthought to money-is-no-object military use cases, and ended up captured by contractors to the point where Senators wouldn't even allow NASA to talk about any ideas like orbital refueling that might undercut the most expensive contracts' justifications. The only way that kind of behavior can lead to market capture is by making the market look so unattractive that nobody with enough money to enter it would be insane enough to try.
roystgnr
27d ago
Even if you limit the process to the same supposed mechanism as the Slavs, "please rule us to provide an impartial judge for our feuds", Slavs wouldn't be the only example of that Stranger King theory - Wiki lists cases in the Pacific, Iceland, and Sri Lanka (although the latter swiftly regretted it).
Wiki doesn't list the Slavs, though. IIRC when I looked into it the historians' consensus was that in their case it was a false narrative invented by writers centuries later.
roystgnr
27d ago
SpaceX has a hell of a lot of long-term government and military contracts.
Yeah, and those are getting to be less important. SpaceX used to have relatively equal revenues from government vs private launches, and nothing else; today they have larger but still relatively equal revenues from government vs private launches, but the sum is being dwarfed by Starlink subscriptions. Even when they get a peer competitor for launch provision, that competitor is going to need some time to launch a competitor to SpaceX's several-thousand-satellite constellation.
Blue Origin currently has its own major problems and dysfunctions and doesn’t have much actual developed capability yet.
Well, they've had one successful launch (albeit with an unsuccessful booster recovery) of a rocket that's aiming at roughly twice the payload of Falcon 9 for the same price. Their development's been extremely slow but it's likely to start ramping up soon and they've got incredibly deep pockets to keep trying.
SpaceX’s only actual peer competitor, Roscosmos
If you mean present peer competitor, Roscosmos doesn't make the cut. Dozens of launches a year is nice, but it's not hundreds. SpaceX has no present peer competitors.
If you mean future peer competitor, there's a pretty wide field of relatively near-term possibilities. China's got a half dozen space startups working on Falcon 9 class vehicles; none are at SpaceX's level yet but like 4 of them have at least reached orbit. Rocket Lab has put Electron in orbit dozens of times now and Neutron should be a decent Falcon 9 competitor. Firefly has made orbit a few times, and (after launching on a Falcon 9, admittedly) was the first commercial company to successfully soft-land on the moon. Relativity Space and Stoke are long shots right now, but Stoke is an interesting long shot working on full reusability.
Starship is just the flashy sports car to create brand awareness, and potentially develop future capabilities. It’s not the bread and butter. The cost of the Starship project is quite small compared to the SpaceX bottom line and even if it flames out completely it’s not going to even get close to tanking the whole company.
Yeah, but SpaceX needs the future capabilities to continue being SpaceX. Mass delivery of remote high-speed internet is a sweet cash cow, but it's not The Dream that got a bunch of high talent to work for them for super-long hours at barely-competitive salaries. Falcon rockets won't take anybody to Mars, and SpaceX without the driving goal of putting humanity on Mars would just turn into another decaying Boeing.
Also, the Starship program is also pretty significant a cost still. They've spent like $5B over the project lifetime, and are ramping up hard now, probably nearly $2B this year out of revenues of maybe $15B. It makes sense, since they're probably also spending like $2B this year on Starlink launches and are salivating at the prospect of cutting that by an order of magnitude while increasing capacity, but it only makes sense if it eventually works. Everybody used to say that the R&D to make Falcon 9 reusable was a waste, that it would never pay for itself, and they were so wrong about that that nobody thoughtful seems to dare to suggest the same for Starship, but it's still not impossible that they just can't get cheap second stage reuse working and the pessimism will turn out to be right this time.
roystgnr
27d ago
Tesla is Musk's biggest source of capital
Not anymore, surprisingly. Musk owns about an eighth of Tesla, for about $125B of market cap (if he could sell it all without tanking the stock, which he can't, but that applies to all his equities), but he's got over 40% of SpaceX, which at its latest valuation gives him more like $135B capital there.
Tesla's sales are tanking accordingly
Nah, but they've been flat for 2 years after skyrocketing for the previous 2, which is nearly as bad a change for anyone holding stock at a P/E justified by future growth.
a fair amount of Trump's base isn't so hot on exploding budgets
That's true, but it's not the budget that'll explode (except for the military, by like 25%?), it's just the deficit, via tax cuts. And nearly all Trump's base (like most other Republicans and probably most Democrats, to be fair) are fine taking lower taxes now at the cost of larger but more complicated fiscal and monetary problems at some uncertain future date.
roystgnr
27d ago
Yeah, that's good consolation. I'm likewise pretty sure that even if I'd cleverly scooped up a thousand bitcoin at $1 I'd just have sold almost all of them at $25.
roystgnr
27d ago
Generation X appears to be sitting on their 3% mortgages very, very quietly.
2.25% (15y refinance), and I won't shut up about it!
(You've got to let me have this one; in hindsight the biggest financial decision of my life was "I guess gwern makes some good points about this 'bitcoin' thing, but I just can't bring myself to buy any fake money tokens for nearly a dollar a piece!")
roystgnr
27d ago
It’s still kind of like paying truckers if they include at least one anti-tank weapon. America would have a heck of a time getting either to stand up against a serious military.
What could some jerks with trucks, consumer goods, and explosives do against, to pick a random example, a fleet of Tupolev bombers, right?
In theory I agree with you 100%, at least now that a serious military needs to have nuclear-tipped ICBMs.
In practice, Suez canal traffic was still down nearly 70% from 2023 Q1 to 2025 Q1, after third-world terrorist separatists took 10% of world trade hostage, because it took more than a year for a serious military to bomb them into agreeing to (not even a surrender!) a ceasefire. I do feel confused that the march of technology hasn't yet brought us to an era in which leading military superpowers can successfully pacify places like Afghanistan, with much less than a couple decades and a couple trillion dollars of effort, but here we are.
roystgnr
28d ago
my tentative conclusion is that they were fine with cannons
One of the coolest parts in Paine's "Common Sense" was the suggestion that we could get by without a standing navy if only we subsidized merchant ships who use some of their cargo space for cannons, to deter piracy without a dedicated navy but also to make it possible to organize a dedicated navy quickly in the event of war. The question wasn't "should people be allowed to own cannons?", it was "are we getting enough of the positive externalities of people owning cannons?"
There was a wonderful period in between the ancient "Divine Right of Kings" and the modern "Divine Right of Governments" where intellectuals seemed comfortable with the idea that governments are just made of people. Five years ago I'd hoped the left might get back to that point, since "Defund The Police (who can't be trusted) but also Ban Guns (using Police, the only ones who can be trusted with guns)" is just too clearly oxymoronic, but in hindsight my definition of "clearly" may have been overly expansive. English grammar doesn't have the concept of "transitive adverbs", which is a shame since English vocabulary has transitive adverbs.
roystgnr
29d ago
Well, that would certainly be easier to square with the need to protect the remaining non-eliminated bombers.
Thanks. Do you have a citation for that?
I've heard the claim that US and Russian strategic bombers are currently required to be stored in a way accessible to satellite recon, as part of the verification sections of our arms control treaties.
Skimming through summaries of New START (and the long-expired START I, in case this was an outdated claim), though, I can't seem to find any such requirements, so it's possible this was just a misunderstanding or a fabrication. I do see requirements for allowing frequent on-site inspections, though, which you'd hope would be sufficient alone. If I missed something about bomber storage and there is some need to change the verification requirements, now would be a great time to do it - the latest extension of New START expires next February.
Edit: ... and apparently nobody cares when New START expires, because Putin suspended Russia's participation in it in 2023.
roystgnr
1mo ago
Of course, a lab for studying zoonotic coronaviruses is located near where zoonotic coronavirus spillovers tend to happen.
[Citation needed] - where did previous coronavirus zoonoses happen, specifically?
The "geographic context" map from the Wikipedia "Zoonotic Origins of Covid-19" page shows SARS-CoV-2's emergence in Wuhan (Hubei province), its closest relative in Yunnan province (1000 miles away), and other close relatives in Thailand, Cambodia, and Zhejiang (1000 miles away or more, each). The only coronaviruses it shows native to Hubei are more-loosely-related pangolin viruses that are basically everywhere in China, also not specific to Hubei. The Origins of SARS-CoV-2 - Zoonosis section mentions that the most likely wild source was SE Asian bats, probably with "the wet market imported an intermediate host" as the necessary step for getting the bat virus so far from its original reservoir. None of this conflicts with my own recollections on the subject.
What intelligence did the Germans have and bury? I see the BND performed a 2020 analysis that came to pro-lab-leak conclusions and only got revealed in 2025, but (at least at the "why do we trust reporters with the first draft of history, exactly?" level of perfunctory research) I'm not seeing that their analysis was founded on any information that only they knew.
Nor do I see what their motive for a coverup would be. They were contemptuous of and butting heads with President Trump, and their most recent big interaction with China was signing on to a condemnation of the treatment of the Uyghurs. I can see why some people in China and the US might want a coverup, but it's hard to see how a revelation of "A Chinese lab working with Americans leaked the pandemic" would cause German intelligence any suffering worse than an overdose of schadenfreude. Does the German secret service publish many of their analyses openly, such that this one was an exception?
roystgnr
1mo ago
Tuberculosis, a 'CURABLE DISEASE' !! kills 1.25 million every year.
This surprised me a bit: worldwide those deaths are from about 10M new cases every year, so you've got better than 10% odds of dying if you're infected ... but in the USA we still have 500-600 deaths from about 10K new cases every year, so you've still got better than 5% odds of dying if you're infected! Has antibiotic-resistant TB gotten that bad? Do people let TB infections get bad enough to be untreatable before seeking treatment?
It looks like most of our progress against TB predated the cure, too. 10K/340M cases per year is about 3/100K for the US, vs 10M/8B = 125/100K for the world as a whole, so at least we've had incredible success at making TB an avoidable disease... In 1900 the US death rate was nearly 200/100K, from God only knows what infection rate, but it steadily dropped to a fraction of that even before streptomycin was invented ... apparently mostly from better living conditions (less overcrowding and more ventilation, better quarantine of infected patients, less malnutrition making people vulnerable)?
roystgnr
1mo ago
I think it helps me to be old enough to have become aware of the seriousness of the Cold War before the end of the Cold War. I still remember the library shelves where little-me found a book explaining Mutually Assured Destruction, warhead and missile counts, warhead blast radii, etc. We didn't know about all the actual close calls yet, but there was enough there to make it quite clear that at any moment I could be 45 minutes away from incineration, with so little I could do about it that there wasn't even any point to anxiety.
In an objective sense this is much worse than that, because even an all-out nuclear exchange would have left us (well, humanity, anyway; everyone I knew personally would also have been incinerated) with billions of survivors and a viable (at least in some countries) civilization to rebuild from, whereas if Superintelligence actually turns out to be obtainable while Friendliness remains distant and Corrigibility remains intractable then that's the end of that. But for my subjective well-being I think it's good that my reaction to a bit of creeping existential dread is "Hey, I remember you. Long time no see."
roystgnr
1mo ago
so might as well worry about what I can control.
It feels like a triage problem, doesn't it?
When your emergency center has too many victims to work on them all right away, you quickly assess them all and mark each person with one of 3 (in the original "tri"-age) tags: one group is going to live without your help, one is going to die regardless of your help, and one is borderline enough that they'll die without your help but live with it. You don't help the victims who need the most help, you help the victims where your help does the most good.
There's a bunch of wild possible futures where humanity dies out regardless of what I do, and there's a bunch of wild possible futures where humanity becomes so rich that we all end up fine no matter what I do. I might as well continue to focus on the more mundane possible futures that fall in between those extremes, even as the in-between category (which once felt nearly certain) becomes less and less likely, because the in-between futures are the only ones where my actions would have made a difference.
roystgnr
1mo ago
They kept track of death rates among the unvaccinated vs vaccinated (vs boosted, etc.), and it definitely looked like you wanted to be in the group whose first exposure to Covid spikes was of the artificial, non-exponentially-reproducing variety. Vaccine effectivity dropped off with time fast enough that there was no way to stop the disease from spreading, but at least we might have somewhat reduced the fatality rate from more of those first virgin exposures.
The obvious problem with those numbers is that this was anything but a Randomized Controlled Trial, and who knows what other differences those population groups had. IIRC I could find the data age-adjusted, but not controlled for anything else. There's a paradox where, if you tell everybody that e.g. square dancers live longer, you may soon find that square dancers really do live longer, not because it's better than other forms of exercise or whatever, but because now all the people who are doing a lot of other things to take care of their health have started square dancing too. Perhaps people who resisted taking a Covid vaccine are more oppositional toward other sorts of public health recommendations too, either with regard to Covid (letting themselves be exposed more easily) or to other contributing factors (obesity, smoking, "toughing out" serious infections, whatever).
The more subtle problem is that it's hard to tell how Covid-19 would have evolved in the presence of a more universally vaccinated population. Death rates fell way off with the Omicron variant, but would the virus inevitably have evolved in the same way at the same speed?
All I get is, "Of course they worked, it's obvious. You're stupid."
Ask if they think the FDA should have allowed the vaccine to be freely distributed and/or sold after it was first invented, in March 2020, without spending the next several months waiting on slow-but-legally-mandated testing methods and FDA approval before they could ramp up production. It's a little hard to get up on a "not trusting the system and taking the vaccine makes you a stupid anti-vaxxer" high horse when nearly half of the US deaths came during a time period when the system would have jailed anyone who gave you the vaccine.
I'm living the dream!
We don't have them often enough, since my youngest isn't as big a fan as the rest of us, but variety is good too.
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