Budget for an entity costs far, far, far more than just salaries alone. Also, all in cost on a salaried employee is usually 2-3x their actual salary cost… this isn’t 100k people. It’s roughly 35k people (per their own publicly available info) as well as presumably a large amount of actual physical costs. You gotta pay for offices, equipment, consumables, etc etc.
> You gotta pay for offices, equipment, consumables, etc etc.
aka literally what I said in the next line :-)
35k is same Order-of-magnitude as the 50k I set. Still no idea what to do/compare with those numbers tho
---
numbers in sister comment say FBI has same budget/headcount, so... 300m pop vs 35k agents is ~10k:1, and since area-wise ~1% is urban and ~10% is forests... each Forest Service employee gets to keep and eye on ~100k house lots worth of trees?
The US collected $5.23T in tax revenue in 2025, $2.1T is individual income tax [0]. GDP is estimated at around $30T.
Spending on social security is about $680B, medicare is $480B, defense is at $410B [1].
Microsoft's valuation is approx. $2.8T [2], Google $3.8T [3], Amazon $2.3T [4], Facebook $1.6T [5] (Linux supply side is valued at approx. $8.8T).
The FBI employs roughly 38k people with about $10B in funding [7]. The CIA employs roughly 22k people with about $15B (?) in funding [8].
So, from that perspective, $10B is roughly .5% of yearly tax revenue (and about how much the FBI/CIA are funded) and estimated 50k people is about the size of the FBI and CIA combined.
not a big fan of this theory, but as we've seen in other instances, money from the public coffer is 'free', so even at a substantial loss, if the result ends up in the right private account, its still a net win for someone. and net a loss for the public even larger than "I'm suing the government for $50B, oh wait, that's me, I guess I'll just have to pay myself"
they are certainly not, visual feature detection, multi sensor fusion and a whole raft of other techniques have been under active development and fielded in working systems for decades.
I didn't find the questions very representative about estimation. that is maybe if happen to know many of random root facts about the world under which they were based, then their application might be a revenant question about ability to estimate. I really felt more like I was making uneducated guesses (0.155). I suppose I was expecting more ping pong balls in airplanes
The point I was going for was more so how people handle questions they don't know the answer to. Someone that is "well-calibrated" would set things they are uncertain about at closer to 50% instead of guessing one way or the other (overconfident). That score is excellent, so it suggests you did exactly that!
sadly the alts were a bit of a mixed bag. the root problem was that anyone could issue a control message to create a new alt group. which I verified personally. because of that intermediate nodes would choose not to download updates. partially because it was a cesspool, and largely because because bandwidth was quite limited and that's where all binaries were distributed. so alt groups had spotty distribution, which is reflected in the archives.
Dang. I had previously gone back and found some old posts I remember, I believe it was through Dejanews, so theoretically they exist out there. What's your data source?
my data source? I ran a data center in the 80s, including nntp distribution and archiving as was the general practice back then. so, just personal opinion I guess.
that makes absolute sense. on one hand legally voting process is delegated to the states, and we can argue about to what degree congress might be able to impose federal standards. but an executive order has absolutely no bearing on the situation legally.
but if you believe, as many people claim to, than an executive order is actually a federal law, then if some blue state decides to ignore such an executive order, then you can claim that the election process was tainted, illegal, and illegitimate. maybe you can even round up all the ballots in order to perform an 'investigation'. maybe send federal officers to check IDs. all kinds of things.
I have yet to see any statement from the conservative perspective giving any rationale whatsoever to justify restrictions on recording police activity in public spaces. or any of the other erosions of civil liberties. I would personally love to understand why this is necessary. The only opinion expressed here seems to be that immigration is such a existential issue that we don't need to bother with due process or any of that other crap, and the the other side is really just as bad.
I remain deeply confused about efforts to ensure that the 'conversative viewpoint' is fairly expressed in forums like the universities, because there really just doesn't seem to be a meaningful conservative viewpoint at all. global warming is actually happening. vaccines save lives. ICE is acting unconstitutionally. these are just facts. if you want to call them into question loud mouthed assertions just aren't sufficient, show up with some kind of actual argument. wanting to step up immigration enforcement is a totally legitimate policy position. claiming that federal agents don't need to obey the constitution kinda isn't really.
its not either or. if we expected support from European countries, we could have given them a heads up and understood their position in advance. it was not an emergency situation. we had an agreement, I know that doesn't mean shit to the current administration, but not every country is willing to go cowboy, and give up their sovereignty just because the US doesn't like rules and laws anymore. the US would clearly be in a better position now if it hadn't said 'screw you guys' and started shooting.
I largely don't disagree with you, but at the same time had Trump asked they would have told him no anyway because Europe has little to no ability to help here and they're scared. As European prime ministers and officials have said already, and I'm paraphrasing "what can a few frigates do that the mighty US Navy cannot?". It rings true, as did the comment from the I believe Polish prime minister (or perhaps the foreign minister, either way) which said 600+ million Europeans are asking 300+ million Americans to defend them against 180+ million Russians. Something doesn't quite add up here.
places where there is remaining land to build more single family homes don't actually have zoning regulations requiring developers to build high-density units. there is nothing stopping anyone from buying land and building there, except a lack of demand.
the place where there is leverage is in taking high-demand areas historically zoned for single-unit and opening them up to the market to build higher density housing.
> the place where there is leverage is in taking high-demand areas historically zoned for single-unit and opening them up to the market to build higher density housing.
And if the current residents don't want to open up, then what?
And they are not the only opportunity to increase density or satisfy demand, just the most politically convenient one for the party in power in almost every case.
what's your alternative? (a) leave things they are and if people near cities get desperate enough they can move to the sticks even though they don't have jobs there (b) ?
My alternative to higher levels of government deciding to overrule local preferences is that people move to "the sticks", get roommates, or compensate current residents for the decrease in their quality of living that comes with increased density.
its seems far more likely that they are just playing politics as sport. that is they are quite content to cause suffering if they can point the finger at the other team. just like the snap monies in the last shutdown.
You know, prior to this sentence "they" could have referred to either party. After all, the last shutdown was largely because the Democrats were fighting for ACA subsidy extensions, but I guess it's only "playing politics as sport" when you don't agree with the justification?
this is the problem isn't it? this is supposed to be why trump co is running the country. that governance has collapsed and they were supposed to refocus it on things that's mattered. see how that's going.
but yes, I think the result is that we have even less effective governance then we had a year ago. and I find it pretty troubling that the narrative that's being actively reinforced is that we really don't need to bother with the legislative process anymore since they are obviously completely useless
reply