Because the fee revenue was created by congress, so the money goes 1/3 to Treasury to help pay national debt (doesn't really make a dent), about $1.6B goes to the government general fund. But FY24 collected $4.5B in fees, but the budget was almost $9.5B.
So even if all the money went to TSA, less than half their budget is covered. There is inherently bloat in that, but that is for a different discussion.
But bigger still, if Congress didn't reappropriate that money from TSA, they'd either have to spend less (less likely), raise taxes (not likely), or go deeper in debt (very likely) in order to cover whatever they are currently covering with their 70% share of the fee.
> We have not seen a tidal wave of untechnical people vibe coding up their own software solutions.
When my little brother who is a drummer, and has never even looked at "code" before, had claude on-shot a python app that let him download songs on youtube, extract the stems, collect tempo/key/etc information, then feed that into his DAW, all without ever looking at code, knowing what any of it did, etc., I knew that we were about to see a LOT of single-use applications.
I'm not against it, honestly. I have always written little one-off scripts and apps that accomplished something faster than manually, now that those one-shots are possible with an LLM in seconds sometimes, it makes all my personal scripts so much easier... that said, I definitely read the scripts that are output, and attempt to step through them in a debugger before assuming it is all good.
I remember my first shell programming I ever did was batch in windows back in the 3.11/95 days.
The first line was always to turn off echo, and I've always wondered why that was a decision for batch script. Or I'm misremembering. 30 years of separation makes it hard to remember the details.
I've been tasked with code reviews of Claude chat bot written code (not Claude code that has RAG and can browse the file system). It always lacks any understanding of our problem area, 75% of the time it only works for a specific scenario (the prompted case), and almost 100% of the time, when I comment about this, I'm told to take it over and make it work... and to use Claude.
I've kind of decided this is my last job, so when this company folds or fires me, I'm just going to retire to my cabin in the rural Louisiana woods, and my wife will be the breadwinner. I only have a few 10s of thousands left to make that home "free" (pay off the mortgage, add solar and batteries, plant more than just potatoes and tomatoes).
Though, post retirement, I will support my wife's therapy practice, and I have a goal of silly businesses that are just fun to do (until they arent), like my potato/tomato hybrid (actually just a graft) so you can make fries and ketchup from the same plant!
I'm always looking for people to share my weird ideas that have absolutely nothing to do with software or computers. Unfortunately my only friends are all software people who have no interest outside of computers. Something I've found to have very little interest in anymore.
Did you see this last year about the origins of potatoes?
I'd like to get into grafting fruit trees, my uncle was a major fruit eater and filled the yard with many varieties of apples and pears. The apple tree where I live was a mess and I've jsut started the pruning to get it under control.
This might be a little dark, but the majority of our street is very elder, and none of there families want to move over here.
They were the original non-familial homesteaders from 50+ years ago when all this land was my wife's great grandfather's, and he sold off small plots to people. He, infact, inherited it from his father, who bought a half mile square back in the 20s or 30s (I believe). The first house on the road was his (Great Great Grandpa). The road WAS his driveway, then slowly but surely new generations of the family started building houses a few hundred yards away from each other, then they started selling plots to people in the 60s, and sold the last of the original land in 2023 about a year before grandpa passed.
Now the only land left in "the family", is this 1.25 acre plot that I live on. I don't really have the desire to buy more from the folks that are dying, but my neighbor has already bought up about half of the vacant land.
That sounds lovely. I think too many people get attached to the structure of life as they've lived it for the last n years and resist natural phase transitions for far too long. Good luck with retirement and your dream of being the botanical equivalent of the mean kid from Toy Story:p
Worse than that, they hold their value, so buying a used M1 mini is still a few hundred bucks, and saving $200-300 by purchasing a 5 generation older mini seems like a bad deal in comparison.
Someone came to be excited they got a "deal" on the newest Intel Mac Mini for hosting OpenClaw. 8GB model for $300. I kind of regret bursting their bubble by telling them you can walk over to Costco (nearest one at time of discussion was walking distance) and pay $550 for one with an M4 and 16GB of RAM.
I like the aluminum body a lot. I'm not particularly clumsy, but each of my macbooks ends up with some fall damage at some point over the 5+ years that I have it.
When I used to be assigned a plastic Dell work laptop, I dropped one onto the carpeted floor of my office because I thought it was going into my padded sleeve of backpack and that cracked the case, and broke the screen. I've accidentally yoinked my MBA (last intel one they made) off my desk, and while it dented the body of it, nothing broke. That is now my drum computer, and it gets regularly pelted with drumsticks when my grip tires.
My father recently dropped my macbook air from the car essentially on concrete bricks.
It has just gotten a single dent for something less than 0.5 cm and its on the side (although this damage was done when the laptop was closed so some damage is just above the laptop's display aluminium shell.
To be honest, its barely visible and everything is working and there was no damage on display or anything else for what its worth.
I usually don't like apple but damn the macbook air is tiny and can take some damage.
Although I am still just a little sad about the damage because the laptop was perfect condition beforehand now that we talked about it but its incredibly better than any other laptop atleast with that thing in mind. Gonna use this laptop for a long time (M1 Air)
As someone clumsy, I'm so grateful that my MacBook Air can take a beating. It has one slight dent of about 1mm in the 4 years I've had it and I definitely drop it or knock it off a desk or something a few times a year.
I'll take the extra weight of aluminum (0.3lb, 130g). Yes, someone might say the ThinkPad X1 Carbon is 14", but the 13" MacBook Air actually has a 13.6" screen.
If I were in the market for a PC laptop, I'd definitely take a look at the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, but I'm also not worried about the weight of my MacBook Air. The X1 Carbon Intel ones are on sale right now since Panther Lake will be a huge upgrade coming soon, but even on clearance they aren't cheap. An X1 Carbon with 32GB RAM and 1TB storage (Ultra 7 268V, the cheapest one due to the sale) will cost $1,679 while a similar MacBook Air will cost $1,699 - and the M5 has 48% better single-core performance and 56% better multi-core performance (Geekbench). A 16GB/512GB (Ultra 5 225U) X1 Carbon is $1,538 compared to $1,099 for a MacBook Air - and the M5 has a 74% single and multi core advantage there.
Panther Lake might narrow the performance gap, but early indicators don't seem like that's the case. Even the top of the line Ultra X9 388H sees the M5 with a 36% single-core advantage while the Ultra X9 388H gets 3% faster multi-core. And I'm not sure the higher wattage "H" processors work for something like an X1 Carbon.
The highest non-H Panther Lake processor (Ultra 7 365) sees the M5 get 51% better single-core and 58% better multi-core. Maybe we'll see better, but it looks like Intel isn't closing the gap in 2026.
Does it? In my case, it was my father who dropped my mac but luckily everything was all safe with tis but a scratch. So perhaps that can be taken into factor as well that its more than one variable.
That being said, I am pretty clumsy but I have never dropped any hardware except a dumb phone which I threw out a lot and it was so small and tiny but it never had any problem.
And then one day I dropped it from top just a little bit and let it drop/slide inside my bag (like a cushion) and that day it died. I recently asked someone about it and turns out that its battery got inflated.
Steam thinks I was born Jan 1, 1970. Not that I needed to lie when I did my age verification back 15 years ago, I just randomly scrolled the year down and selected one.
As the years have marched on, though, that "birthdate" becomes significantly closer to my real birthday.
Only when chatting in a large channel at work, did I realise nearly 1/3 of the people there also set theirs as 1/1/1970. Which I presume is the first date that phisers will try to enter to reset people's accounts.
I am fully aware that my standard fake birthday is now used by me in some many places, that I have started to have a fake fake birhday. I should really just randomise and store it in my password manager.
But obviously the context of this OP story ruins all that.
When you're 10, a year is a long time, when you're 60 it is not. There's an implicit "relatively" here, which is unusual but not unknown in English. Almost poetic, I like it.
Thanks now I understand. I am "only" 26, but I remember being 20 like yesterday. I can't believe I'm on the second half of the way to 50. COVID lockdowns and responsibilities didn't help.
I feel time has gone faster since I got a job, if that makes sense. Every day yearning for it to be 5o clock so I can check out, every week yearning for the weekend, every month yearning for the last day to get paid. Doing this is just asking for time to be over sooner.
When a 10-year-old registers for an adult website, they pretend they're 100 years old. Their age is 90 years different from the stated birthday. Eighty years later, the birth date is just as far off—but the implied age is now only 10 years off.
We're keeping the same date here. 80 years later, the site thinks they're 180 years old. So it's still 90 years off, but now it's only 2x off instead of 10x off.
We aren't talking about depictions of incest either. There is no relation between step-siblings/parents/etc. And in these videos, every single person is unrelated to every other person even in the depictions. The step-child has both a step-mom and step-dad... Where I come from, that would be an adoption? I would guess the next form of these videos will be adoption porn.
I assumed it was 'step' relative inorder to stop it being incest, and that it's basically a wink to the audience without changing the 'script'. Personally I don't think changing the title is morally relevant so it doesn't matter to me what precise relation the script and title uses.
Which takes us back to depiction, they're all actors so what ever the laws are, it doesn't matter. Or shouldn't.
You think incest is about inbreeding. It isn't just that. If you take that line to its logical extreme, then that means that it is okay if contraception is used or if same sex relations are involved.
I don't think it's healthy for fathers and adult sons to be having sex with each other, for example. Or that any of this becomes okay when a daughter turns eighteen (or whatever it is in your jurisdiction) and her father wears a condom. That is psychologically and socially unhealthy. Nothing to do with inbreeding.
If a school teacher repeatedly had sex with pupils a day after they left school (and were legal adults), that would raise numerous ethical issues. Consent isn't some kind of carte blanche or moral justification.
But no one is talking about actual incest, they are talking about a cheap storyline in a stupid online video made by consenting adults pretending (and actually) not related by blood.
If you have a moral objection to the content of the video, don't watch it, if you don't want to let people consume media that has objectionable themes, let's ban all violence as well, not just in porn, but movies, music, literature. No more Jason Statham, no more Daniel Craig, no more Dwayne 'the Rock' Johnson, no more Marky Mark, no more Eminem, no more Homer (sex and violence), no more The Bible (sex, incest, violence, rape, genocide, polygamy, slavery, child sacrifice).
"Step-cest" - a term I am sure has existed before, but I'm claiming it now, is make believe. And I'd bet 90+% of the watchers have it on mute.
So even if all the money went to TSA, less than half their budget is covered. There is inherently bloat in that, but that is for a different discussion.
But bigger still, if Congress didn't reappropriate that money from TSA, they'd either have to spend less (less likely), raise taxes (not likely), or go deeper in debt (very likely) in order to cover whatever they are currently covering with their 70% share of the fee.
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