will the external cameras finally be available to apps? they're crowing about mixed reality, but previous quest can only do passthrough - even the most basic use of the external cameras is extremely limited and requires workarounds.
Yes current generation can only do pass through, the app cannot see the cameras to do any sort of computer vision on your environment. Think running a real-time style GAN on your external cameras - can’t do it with pass through. All you can do is overlay stuff in the world, with extremely limited information on what you are overlaying it on.
Their total budget in 2023 was $16 billion and it's generally not increased (or it's even cut) yearly.
So it's not keeping up with inflation and GDP growth without additional funding like the "Inflation Reduction"(since everyone knows that you can reduce inflation by spending even more money..) Act.
The chart on the right. Year is the bottom axis and the vertical axis shows the budget. When the curve goes down it means that the budget has decreased from a higher amount to a lower one (before you say it.. I never claimed it happened every year).
I would also suggest you that you look up figures from before 2014 because that's when most of the cuts happened.
cool, this will run the government for.. (checks watch) almost 2 hours!
news flash, folks, every billionaire in the USA, combined, has a combined net worth of about 5 trillion dollars. making billionaires not exist by confiscating all of their wealth (and crashing the stock market in the process) would fund the government for around nine months.
not saying that the ultra-wealthy shouldn't pay their fair share, but we only have 2 real choices: dramatically cut spending and/or dramatically increase productivity/gdp. raising taxes is just window dressing and mostly just hurts people who have a w2 income.
If I stopped paying my taxes my goverment will not even notice. It cannot run on my money alone for even seconds.
Is that an argument for me to not pay my taxes?
> (and crashing the stock market in the process)
Some scaremongering there for a straw man's argument that you made up.
Put thieves, tax avoidance is theft, into prison. Getting the money back is not enough. Society needs justice, and people stealing from everybody should not only pay their fair share but also be punished when they steal from society.
I think it's indisputable that tax policy has an impact on a government's health.
Yes, that's not exactly the same thing as prosecutable tax avoidance. But my sense is the real problem here is quasi-legal tax avoidance, and that this small $1.3 billion figure is just hinting at how easily more taxes could be recovered with less lenient tax policies. (As well as better-funded enforcement officers...) But that gets dangerously close to also saying, "let's raise the tax rates on millionaires (not just billionaires) back to where it was a few years ago..."
And let's be honest: that's why we're having this discussion. Government spending is bad and part of the problem, according to one side - with taxes just a way of enabling it. There's been a lot of words devoted to extolling the values of lower taxes in creating jobs and innovation.
So I think at some point, people just start rooting for tax avoidance.
legal tax avoidance has nothing to do with the $1.3b discussed in this article. I'm all for collecting legal taxes - but I'm against pretending like we can fund the budget with any reasonable tax policy. i'm trying to make the point that if we try to fund the bloated budget at the current gdp, it won't (just) be the super-wealthy who suffer, it will be the people who can't retire, the people whose kids still need scholarships and loans for colleges, the workhorses of the economy, the middle class.
Business needs to profit to exist in the long run. If costs are above revenue it has to close eventually. The bigger components of costs are usually payroll and tax. And a part of payroll also goes to government systems.
This is why high tax countries have terrible GDP. Unless a good part of the tax goes to subsidize companies in some way. And subsidies are very hard to do right and most likely bring corruption into government.
But billionaires do not pay their fair share; you don't need to raise anything and just get from them the same % as from others. The fact that they can legally avoid paying them is a problem. And sure, maybe it's a drip in the bucket, still doesn't mean it shouldn't happen.
Yes, I agree. A lot of things are needed to fix the actual budget/debt issues. Not sure if anyone has solutions for that; must be a popular research topic.
Many goverment expenses come from corruption, from expensive payments for health care (that exists because billionaires put money into politicians pockets, to overspending in the military that also come from kickbacks, etc.). So, reducing the numbers of billionaires reduces corruption and overspending. (And even what is spend can be done so more efficiently, money going to teachers and nurses instead of profits for big corporations).
Cutting on corruption has a big impact into goverment spending. Billionaires and inequality increase corruption, as there is easy money used to bribe politicians. End one and the other follows.
In summary, income inequality is likely to be a significant and no less important
determinant of corruption than economic development (and thus many other variables
for that matter). ... Inequality increases corruption, which in turn deters investment and growth.
“Correlation is not causation”
The paper shows that wealth inequality and corruption are correlated, and pontificates that maybe reducing inequality with wealth redistribution might reduce corruption, but offers no evidence that this is the case. Your chain of reasoning is not really supported by the paper.
Tricare is perhaps the closest thing we have to direct government healthcare, it handles healthcare for active duty military, it is part of the DoD and contracts out to providers directly (including therapists) and compared to other private insurers they are among the most difficult to work with. My partner is an independent psychotherapist and contracts with various healthcare providers and Tricare has by far the highest rate of spurious rejections, short paychecks, heavy audit requirements, etc and their resolution department is the hardest to work with.
So we already have evidence of how it goes when the government manages it directly and it’s worse than private industry.
This is really the best answer. I finally learned to go to bed on time when I had to quit caffeine. It took a couple of weeks for my body to learn to fall asleep and I supported it with calming music (singing bowls and chants at a quiet volume) and not using screens within an hour of bedtime, as well as getting more exercise during the day. The results have been life-changing though. Some words of wisdom: never stay up late to do something you wouldn’t wake up early for.
I have children, and it’s always more work for me to give them consequences for bad behavior than to let it slide. The examples given in the article for why prisoners are put on the nutraloaf program seem pretty reasonable, especially if it’s effective at curbing recidivism.
> especially if it’s effective at curbing recidivism.
There's nothing in the article examining its effect on recidivism. It's probably no more effective at that than jail in general, which is to say, there are much more effective interventions.
That’s not recidivism, which is the return to committing crimes after release. This is a punishment for bad behavior while inside the jail. It’s a method of behavioral control in real time. I doubt that anyone who gets out of jail is using the argument of, “maybe I’ll have to eat Nutraloaf if I go back to jail” as a factor in choosing to commit or not commit further crimes.
>That’s not recidivism, which is the return to committing crimes after release.
you raise an interesting point, and I did a bit of a dive into various dictionaries, new and old: chances of re-incarceration after release is an important aspect of criminology and public policy, but it's not built into the word recidivism.
recidivism is "backsliding", so it's more a case of "draw a line or a gradient, then measure recidivism across that line or gradient"
in the context of prisoners, it's probably a good idea to be clear about the sense of the definition chosen.
it's a small point and maybe a different word would have been more clear (because I agree, recidivism commonly refers to committing crimes again after being released from jail), but none of the definitions I found for recidivism were specific to release from jail - the definition seems to be committing offenses again after some type of intervention. in the case of the nutraloaf, you're already in jail and you commit some additional offense (say, starting a food fight). the article seemed to indicate that in most cases, the offender avoided doing the sorts of things that could get them back on nutraloaf - in my opinion, that meets the definition of recidivism.
I see prisoners as people who haven’t yet learned how to act appropriately in the world, what ways are ok to treat others versus what isn’t ok. That’s the similarity I was trying to draw with children.
“You can’t hit people even if you’re frustrated” is a lesson in common, for example.
> Or just get yourself tossed into Cook County Jail, where an inmate who causes serious food-related problems buys himself a one-way ticket to Nutraloafopolis. Get caught making homemade hooch in your cell toilet? You get Nutraloaf. Hurl food at a guard or stab someone with a spork? Nutraloaf.
The article calls out that people who are fed Nutraloaf in prison have committed additional offenses. Are you advocating that it’s ok to stab a prison guard if you feel that your incarceration was unfair?
while I don't really agree with op, you're stretching things here quite a bit.
a) it's a county jail, not state or federal prison. the people there wouldn't be hardened criminals there for extended stays. they'd mostly be, afaik, petty criminals and people waiting for trial dates. I suspect the spork stabbings aren't attempts at murder, particularly against prison guards (esp. considering the article says "stab someone" vs "hurl food at a prison guard").
b) the article, the part you quoted in fact, specifically calls out food-related problems, not "additional offenses". making prison wine and throwing food could probably be laboured into offenses if someone with power was vindictive enough, but those are really basic administrative issues and this nutraloaf is an administrative response.
> Are you advocating that it’s ok to stab a prison guard if you feel that your incarceration was unfair?
There are many different levels of feeling that something is “unfair,” but in the limit of being incarcerated with no crime, it’s indistinguishable by the incarcerated individual from kidnapping by a large, organized gang. Are you advocating that self defense against kidnappers is inappropriate?
Yes, they are. That what is appropriate is not the same as what is fair and just is not relevant to the question of whether prisoners are people who have not learned to behave appropriately.
I’m a big advocate for replacing coffee with cacao. I drink it in the morning instead of coffee. Made from raw cacao paste and hot water, I use an immersion blender to mix it well and then add half and half for flavor. Way more nutrients than coffee and the theobromine is much gentler than caffeine and lasts all day.
Excellent to be concerned about heavy metal exposure. Cacao typically contains lead and cadmium; the reference dose (usually defined as: The amount of a chemical a person, including sensitive groups, can be exposed to on a daily basis over an extended period of time (usually a lifetime) without suffering deleterious effects.) of lead according to EPA is 3.5 ug/kg/day and cadmium is 1 ug/kg/day. The cadmium content of cacao nibs/paste is usually 0.5-1 mg/kg and 0.025 mg/kg lead. So cadmium is the one to be concerned about here; for a 100 kg person, the RfD would be 100 ug or 0.1 mg of cadmium per day. The FDA defines the toxicological reference value for cadmium as 0.2-0.3 ug/kg, or 20-30% of the EPA's RfD. 100 grams of cacao at the high side, 1mg/kg would contain 0.1 mg of cadmium. So a daily dose of 1-2 gram of cacao per kg of body weight should be within the RfD, and 0.2-0.6 grams cacao per kg body weight would be within the TRV. It should be noted that root vegetables such as potatoes and beets also tend to contain cadmium at a rate of about 1/10 per weight compared to cacao, but I would find myself just as likely to eat 500 grams of potato or beet vs 50 grams of cacao, which would net the same amount of dietary cadmium.
So definitely don't overdo it on the cacao and eat hundreds of grams per day, but IMO no reason to avoid it completely, relative to other vegetables that can accumulate cadmium. This is not medical or dietary advice.
I am not a lawyer or accountant, but you can fund your business with a loan from your person, and then if the business fails, you can write off the loan against your personal capital gains, and up to $3000 of regular income per year. This is not financial or legal advice.
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