I make this distinction because, in recent memory, Bill Clinton has been the only US president who has actually decelerated the increase in US national debt. When he left office [IIRC] he did so leaving his successor, George W. Bush, with a tiny budgetary surplus.
The US government when Clinton was POTUS didn't run a surplus because the government collected more taxes than it spent - it hasn't done that for a long time. Rather it borrowed money from the social security trust fund and spent it. Well it's a bit more complex than that, but that was the net result:
Notice that while the public debt went down in each of those four years, the intragovernmental holdings went up each year by a far greater amount--and, in turn, the total national debt (which is public debt + intragovernmental holdings) went up. Therein lies the discrepancy.
When it is claimed that Clinton paid down the national debt, that is patently false--as can be seen, the national debt went up every single year. What Clinton did do was pay down the public debt--notice that the claimed surplus is relatively close to the decrease in the public debt for those years. But he paid down the public debt by borrowing far more money in the form of intragovernmental holdings (mostly Social Security).
Update 3/31/2009: The following quote from an article at CBS confirms my explanation of the Myth of the Clinton Surplus, and the entire article essentially substantiates what I wrote.
"Over the past 25 years, the government has gotten used to the fact that Social Security is providing free money to make the rest of the deficit look smaller," said Andrew Biggs, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
Interestingly, this most likely was not even a conscious decision by Clinton. The Social Security Administration is legally required to take all its surpluses and buy U.S. Government securities, and the U.S. Government readily sells those securities--which automatically and immediately becomes intragovernmental holdings. The economy was doing well due to the dot-com bubble and people were earning a lot of money and paying a lot into Social Security. Since Social Security had more money coming in than it had to pay in benefits to retired persons, all that extra money was immediately used to buy U.S. Government securities. The government was still running deficits, but since there was so much money coming from excess Social Security contributions there was no need to borrow more money directly from the public. As such, the public debt went down while intragovernmental holdings continued to skyrocket.
The net effect was that the national debt most definitely did not get paid down because we did not have a surplus. The government just covered its deficit by borrowing money from Social Security rather than the public.
The last time the US government ran a true surplus was in the 60's.
Clinton did not have a surplus of $230B in the year 2000 because he had to borrow $246.5 From numerous other off budget funds. Clinton NEVER ran a surplus during his 8 years in office, he just borrowed yearly from different budgets, (primarily the SS budget) to offset the general fund losses. In 2000 the following funds were borrowed which resulted in a $16.5 deficit.
$152.3B from Social Security $30.9B from Civil Service Retirement Fund $18.5B from Federal Supplementary Medical insurance Trust Fund $15.0B from Federal Hospital Insurance Trust Fund $9.0B from the Federal Unemployment Trust Fund $8.2B from Military Retirement Fund $3.8B from Transportation Trust Funds $1.8B from Employee Life Insurance & Retirement fund $7.0B from others
The Obama administration planned to upgrade all legs of the âtriadâ(TM). This includes a new nuclear-capable Long Range Standoff (LRSO) cruise missile, 12 Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs) to replace the Ohio class, Ground Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) to largely replace silo-based Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and new Northrop Grumman B-21 Raider long-range nuclear bombers.
The Trump administration will continue those efforts, plus add low-yield submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) and a new nuclear sea-launched cruise missile (SLCM). Undersecretary of Defense for Policy John Rood told reporters the funding numbers for this new plan would not be revealed until the fiscal year 2019 budget is submitted later in February.
And one of the justifications for the LRSO was that it has selectable yields, unlike other US nukes. However the new SLBMs and SLCM duplicate this. Actually the US did have nuclear SLCMs before but phased them out - there were nuclear armed Tomahawks.
I.e. there's a fair bit of fat that could be trimmed off either proposal.
If it were up to me I'd build new subs, keep the current Trident II SLBMs, replace Minutemen and keep the cruise missiles and spend any spare cash on missile defence.
Or you could go really radical and go to a pure SLBM/SLCM system because subs are very hard for an adversary to zap in a first strike and then use all the spare money on missile defence. Those silo based missiles are vulnerable to a first strike.
Maybe do a deal with Russia and China to phase out silo and bomber based missiles? I'm not sure they go for that though - they presumably fear that US missile defence would at some point give the US nuclear primacy. Still the US had that in 2006 and it didn't seem to worry them then. Since then they've both introduced SLBM subs which are not vulnerable to a first strike on patrol.
Friday's pact, signed by President Donald Trump, adds $165 billion to the Pentagon budget over two years. That means the military will receive at least $1.4 trillion in total through September 2019 to help buy more fighter planes, ships and other equipment, boost the size of the ranks, and beef up training - a level of funding that seemed a long shot just months ago.
Senate Armed Services Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.), who has long pushed for a $700 billion annual budget for the military, said in a statement that the agreement finally gives the Pentagon the "budget certainty it needs to begin the process of rebuilding the military."
"The deal is a huge win for defense hawks," said Mackenzie Eaglen of the American Enterprise Institute. "The groundwork was being laid for years culminating in what I predict will be the peak year of defense spending since the last peak in 2010."
Basically the deal is that everyone gets what they want and the deficit goes through the stratosphere. GO USA!
Yup. It turns out that if you can think and plan ahead it's possible to live below sea level with much more primitive technology than we have today - basically earth walls.
The construction method of dikes has changed over the centuries. Popular in the Middle Ages were wierdijken, earth dikes with a protective layer of seaweed. An earth embankment was cut vertically on the sea-facing side. Seaweed was then stacked against this edge, held into place with poles. Compression and rotting processes resulted in a solid residue that proved very effective against wave action and they needed very little maintenance. In places where seaweed was unavailable other materials such as reeds or wicker mats were used.
Another system used much and for a long time was that of a vertical screen of timbers backed by an earth bank. Technically these vertical constructions were less successful as vibration from crashing waves and washing out of the dike foundations weakened the dike.
Much damage was done to these wood constructions with the arrival of the shipworm (Teredo navalis), a bivalve thought to have been brought to the Netherlands by VOC trading ships, that ate its way through Dutch sea defenses around 1730. The change was made from wood to using stone for reinforcement. This was a great financial setback as there is no natural occurring rock in the Netherlands and it all had to be imported from abroad.
Current dikes are made with a core of sand, covered by a thick layer of clay to provide waterproofing and resistance against erosion. Dikes without a foreland have a layer of crushed rock below the waterline to slow wave action. Up to the high waterline the dike is often covered with carefully laid basalt stones or a layer of tarmac. The remainder is covered by grass and maintained by grazing sheep. Sheep keep the grass dense and compact the soil, in contrast to cattle.
But hey, not everyone can pass the marshmallow test like Northern Europeans I suppose. So they blame Northern Europeans for climate change and demand cash.
That follows the abrupt enforced shutdown of vb.ly, a "link shortening" site run by Ben Metcalfe and Violet Blue, after it was declared that the content of the site was "against Sharia law".
An image of Violet with bare arms, drinking from a bottle of lager, was emblazoned across the front page of the site when the government-owned Libya Telecom & Technology got in touch earlier this month. "Pornography and adult material aren't allowed under Libyan law, therefore we removed the domain," the letter said, adding: "The issue of offensive imagery is quite subjective, as what I may deem as offensive you might not, but I think you'll agree that a picture of a scantily clad lady with some bottle in her hand isn't exactly what most would consider decent or family friendly at the least."
But other moves made by the ministry could threaten the business of another web startup, bit.ly, which has had millions of dollars of investors' money poured into it - including funding of $10m (£6.3m) received earlier this week - following the announcement in June by the Tripoli regulator for domain registry that domain registrations with fewer than four characters were restricted for use by registrars "having presence" in Libya - that is, based in the country - where they would be under local Sharia jurisdictions.
I.e. it turns out that 'respecting' cultures on the other side of the world that you know nothing about by denying that they are in any way different from yours is not a good idea. Who'd have thought it?
Nvidia don't care about Nouveau drivers for Linux. In fact they probably see it as being a long term threat to them because an open source driver might reveal that their hardware violates patents.
They care about gaming on Windows, scientific computing on Linux and having decent Android performance. And all of those use the closed source drivers.
Actually they do have an open source driver they support, NVGPU. But that's probably only ever be intended to be just enough to get a GUI working on Linux. So if you download an purist open source Linux, your card will work.
What they don't want is a third party, full featured, accelerated open source driver which they don't have any control over.
What's your address? Do you have a lot of friends and family who'd be curious if you disappeared? Are the local police diligent in investigating disappearances or are they a bit sloppy?
The neo-noir epic popularized the concept of intelligent machines being virtually indistinguishable from humans and asked the audience where our humanity ends and theirs begin.
"We like to say 'robotity,' not necessarily 'humanity,' because it's more inclusive"
Exactly. When you're doing Dark Web stuff $50 non negligible amount of money. You could pay a crackhead to bumrape someone for that, or buy some heroin or get a Saturday night special. Or half to two thirds of a pony.
This is useful for pranking people. For example you can add a bunch of reference to the mother of the person you're talking to blowing goats to a Wiki article, use a link with a revision in it and you're good to go.
The only downside is that you need to burn one of your IP addresses and accounts to do it, because the Wikipedos are a humourless lot and will IP ban you.
Math articles are also extremely well written and both subjects tend to be fairly immune to political or social vandalism.
Agreed. For the math/hard science stuff it's OK. For the soft science/social science/politics stuff it is terrible because one side of the argument will be more numerous initially. They will then completely purge any reference to the other side's arguments. At which point you know less about the subject than if you hadn't read the article, as some study once said about the viewers of a highly biased US cable news channel.
Ok "cheap printer, expensive ink" then. Though I suppose someone's going to tell me that HP for example sell you a new printhead with each cartridge and that's the expensive part.
A lot of devices are sold on the 'cheap razor, expensive blades' model. Having the government mandate people getting root would effectively make this model non viable.
It would also stop a model where people get cheap but temporary access to IP, ie the Tivo model because if they could get root they could rip the IP.
Slashdot Mirror
I make this distinction because, in recent memory, Bill Clinton has been the only US president who has actually decelerated the increase in US national debt. When he left office [IIRC] he did so leaving his successor, George W. Bush, with a tiny budgetary surplus.
The US government when Clinton was POTUS didn't run a surplus because the government collected more taxes than it spent - it hasn't done that for a long time. Rather it borrowed money from the social security trust fund and spent it. Well it's a bit more complex than that, but that was the net result :
http://www.craigsteiner.us/art...
Notice that while the public debt went down in each of those four years, the intragovernmental holdings went up each year by a far greater amount--and, in turn, the total national debt (which is public debt + intragovernmental holdings) went up. Therein lies the discrepancy.
When it is claimed that Clinton paid down the national debt, that is patently false--as can be seen, the national debt went up every single year. What Clinton did do was pay down the public debt--notice that the claimed surplus is relatively close to the decrease in the public debt for those years. But he paid down the public debt by borrowing far more money in the form of intragovernmental holdings (mostly Social Security).
Update 3/31/2009: The following quote from an article at CBS confirms my explanation of the Myth of the Clinton Surplus, and the entire article essentially substantiates what I wrote.
"Over the past 25 years, the government has gotten used to the fact that Social Security is providing free money to make the rest of the deficit look smaller," said Andrew Biggs, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
Interestingly, this most likely was not even a conscious decision by Clinton. The Social Security Administration is legally required to take all its surpluses and buy U.S. Government securities, and the U.S. Government readily sells those securities--which automatically and immediately becomes intragovernmental holdings. The economy was doing well due to the dot-com bubble and people were earning a lot of money and paying a lot into Social Security. Since Social Security had more money coming in than it had to pay in benefits to retired persons, all that extra money was immediately used to buy U.S. Government securities. The government was still running deficits, but since there was so much money coming from excess Social Security contributions there was no need to borrow more money directly from the public. As such, the public debt went down while intragovernmental holdings continued to skyrocket.
The net effect was that the national debt most definitely did not get paid down because we did not have a surplus. The government just covered its deficit by borrowing money from Social Security rather than the public.
The last time the US government ran a true surplus was in the 60's.
https://www.answers.com/Q/When...
Clinton did not have a surplus of $230B in the year 2000 because he had to borrow $246.5 From numerous other off budget funds. Clinton NEVER ran a surplus during his 8 years in office, he just borrowed yearly from different budgets, (primarily the SS budget) to offset the general fund losses. In 2000 the following funds were borrowed which resulted in a $16.5 deficit.
$152.3B from Social Security
$30.9B from Civil Service Retirement Fund
$18.5B from Federal Supplementary Medical insurance Trust Fund
$15.0B from Federal Hospital Insurance Trust Fund
$9.0B from the Federal Unemployment Trust Fund
$8.2B from Military Retirement Fund
$3.8B from Transportation Trust Funds
$1.8B from Employee Life Insurance & Retirement fund
$7.0B from others
Total borrowed from off bu
https://imgur.com/a/7BVhN
https://usercontent.irccloud-c...
http://www.janes.com/article/7...
The Obama administration planned to upgrade all legs of the âtriadâ(TM). This includes a new nuclear-capable Long Range Standoff (LRSO) cruise missile, 12 Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs) to replace the Ohio class, Ground Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) to largely replace silo-based Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and new Northrop Grumman B-21 Raider long-range nuclear bombers.
The Trump administration will continue those efforts, plus add low-yield submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) and a new nuclear sea-launched cruise missile (SLCM). Undersecretary of Defense for Policy John Rood told reporters the funding numbers for this new plan would not be revealed until the fiscal year 2019 budget is submitted later in February.
You can argue that the Columbia subs are necessary - the UK is doing the same thing. I suppose the same argument applies replacing the Minutemen. The LRSO is basically an updated version of the ACM - a missile the US deployed and then withdrew
And one of the justifications for the LRSO was that it has selectable yields, unlike other US nukes. However the new SLBMs and SLCM duplicate this. Actually the US did have nuclear SLCMs before but phased them out - there were nuclear armed Tomahawks.
I.e. there's a fair bit of fat that could be trimmed off either proposal.
If it were up to me I'd build new subs, keep the current Trident II SLBMs, replace Minutemen and keep the cruise missiles and spend any spare cash on missile defence.
Or you could go really radical and go to a pure SLBM/SLCM system because subs are very hard for an adversary to zap in a first strike and then use all the spare money on missile defence. Those silo based missiles are vulnerable to a first strike.
Maybe do a deal with Russia and China to phase out silo and bomber based missiles? I'm not sure they go for that though - they presumably fear that US missile defence would at some point give the US nuclear primacy. Still the US had that in 2006 and it didn't seem to worry them then. Since then they've both introduced SLBM subs which are not vulnerable to a first strike on patrol.
E.g. there's a shitload of extra cash for the military
https://www.politico.com/story...
Friday's pact, signed by President Donald Trump, adds $165 billion to the Pentagon budget over two years. That means the military will receive at least $1.4 trillion in total through September 2019 to help buy more fighter planes, ships and other equipment, boost the size of the ranks, and beef up training - a level of funding that seemed a long shot just months ago.
Senate Armed Services Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.), who has long pushed for a $700 billion annual budget for the military, said in a statement that the agreement finally gives the Pentagon the "budget certainty it needs to begin the process of rebuilding the military."
"The deal is a huge win for defense hawks," said Mackenzie Eaglen of the American Enterprise Institute. "The groundwork was being laid for years culminating in what I predict will be the peak year of defense spending since the last peak in 2010."
Basically the deal is that everyone gets what they want and the deficit goes through the stratosphere. GO USA!
Yup, that budget is a travesty.
Yup. It turns out that if you can think and plan ahead it's possible to live below sea level with much more primitive technology than we have today - basically earth walls.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The construction method of dikes has changed over the centuries. Popular in the Middle Ages were wierdijken, earth dikes with a protective layer of seaweed. An earth embankment was cut vertically on the sea-facing side. Seaweed was then stacked against this edge, held into place with poles. Compression and rotting processes resulted in a solid residue that proved very effective against wave action and they needed very little maintenance. In places where seaweed was unavailable other materials such as reeds or wicker mats were used.
Another system used much and for a long time was that of a vertical screen of timbers backed by an earth bank. Technically these vertical constructions were less successful as vibration from crashing waves and washing out of the dike foundations weakened the dike.
Much damage was done to these wood constructions with the arrival of the shipworm (Teredo navalis), a bivalve thought to have been brought to the Netherlands by VOC trading ships, that ate its way through Dutch sea defenses around 1730. The change was made from wood to using stone for reinforcement. This was a great financial setback as there is no natural occurring rock in the Netherlands and it all had to be imported from abroad.
Current dikes are made with a core of sand, covered by a thick layer of clay to provide waterproofing and resistance against erosion. Dikes without a foreland have a layer of crushed rock below the waterline to slow wave action. Up to the high waterline the dike is often covered with carefully laid basalt stones or a layer of tarmac. The remainder is covered by grass and maintained by grazing sheep. Sheep keep the grass dense and compact the soil, in contrast to cattle.
But hey, not everyone can pass the marshmallow test like Northern Europeans I suppose. So they blame Northern Europeans for climate change and demand cash.
Exactly. The whole 'global sea level rise means island nations will drown' narrative is fake news.
It's more complicated than that
https://news.nationalgeographi...
It's post modernist thinking, that's what it is
I thought it was funny when Gaddafi fell and a load of millennials found out what the .ly in vb.ly stood for.
https://www.theguardian.com/te...
That follows the abrupt enforced shutdown of vb.ly, a "link shortening" site run by Ben Metcalfe and Violet Blue, after it was declared that the content of the site was "against Sharia law".
An image of Violet with bare arms, drinking from a bottle of lager, was emblazoned across the front page of the site when the government-owned Libya Telecom & Technology got in touch earlier this month. "Pornography and adult material aren't allowed under Libyan law, therefore we removed the domain," the letter said, adding: "The issue of offensive imagery is quite subjective, as what I may deem as offensive you might not, but I think you'll agree that a picture of a scantily clad lady with some bottle in her hand isn't exactly what most would consider decent or family friendly at the least."
But other moves made by the ministry could threaten the business of another web startup, bit.ly, which has had millions of dollars of investors' money poured into it - including funding of $10m (£6.3m) received earlier this week - following the announcement in June by the Tripoli regulator for domain registry that domain registrations with fewer than four characters were restricted for use by registrars "having presence" in Libya - that is, based in the country - where they would be under local Sharia jurisdictions.
I.e. it turns out that 'respecting' cultures on the other side of the world that you know nothing about by denying that they are in any way different from yours is not a good idea. Who'd have thought it?
Easy on there. I'm just joshing him. GPUs are expensive, but they're not that expensive.
XPP - Partial Pony has been volatile recently.
Because (((they))) want you to eat soy to lower your testosterone levels. Stick to Super Male Vitality, stay woke.
You fancy a kale smoothie for lunch. Also for dinner.
This post sponsored by the Kale Marketing Board.
It's short for "Microsoft Mash for Windows, 2018".
NVidia should hire some people to contribute patches that optimize mining on AMD hardware.
Nvidia don't care about Nouveau drivers for Linux. In fact they probably see it as being a long term threat to them because an open source driver might reveal that their hardware violates patents.
They care about gaming on Windows, scientific computing on Linux and having decent Android performance. And all of those use the closed source drivers.
Actually they do have an open source driver they support, NVGPU. But that's probably only ever be intended to be just enough to get a GUI working on Linux. So if you download an purist open source Linux, your card will work.
What they don't want is a third party, full featured, accelerated open source driver which they don't have any control over.
What's your address? Do you have a lot of friends and family who'd be curious if you disappeared? Are the local police diligent in investigating disappearances or are they a bit sloppy?
The neo-noir epic popularized the concept of intelligent machines being virtually indistinguishable from humans and asked the audience where our humanity ends and theirs begin.
"We like to say 'robotity,' not necessarily 'humanity,' because it's more inclusive"
Exactly. When you're doing Dark Web stuff $50 non negligible amount of money. You could pay a crackhead to bumrape someone for that, or buy some heroin or get a Saturday night special. Or half to two thirds of a pony.
That undercover employee ("UCE-1") was Carter Page.
How does the NYT article you linked to show that UCE-1 and Carter Page are the same person?
This is useful for pranking people. For example you can add a bunch of reference to the mother of the person you're talking to blowing goats to a Wiki article, use a link with a revision in it and you're good to go.
The only downside is that you need to burn one of your IP addresses and accounts to do it, because the Wikipedos are a humourless lot and will IP ban you.
But sometimes it's so worth it.
Math articles are also extremely well written and both subjects tend to be fairly immune to political or social vandalism.
Agreed. For the math/hard science stuff it's OK. For the soft science/social science/politics stuff it is terrible because one side of the argument will be more numerous initially. They will then completely purge any reference to the other side's arguments. At which point you know less about the subject than if you hadn't read the article, as some study once said about the viewers of a highly biased US cable news channel.
Ok "cheap printer, expensive ink" then. Though I suppose someone's going to tell me that HP for example sell you a new printhead with each cartridge and that's the expensive part.
A lot of devices are sold on the 'cheap razor, expensive blades' model. Having the government mandate people getting root would effectively make this model non viable.
It would also stop a model where people get cheap but temporary access to IP, ie the Tivo model because if they could get root they could rip the IP.