johnrgrace

The US has made an active policy decision for decades to be the world police, flowing from that policy spending on world policing isn't automatically waste unless it's highly inefficient.

The us has tons of rare earth ores, it's the refining the US lacks mostly because it's a nasty process that creates a lot of toxic waste.

I would say for starting a first robotics lego league is going to be easier to access because they build a smaller robot out of legos, plus the "season" starts in the Fall vs. January for First robotics league.

I've coached a First team that has qualified to go to worlds the last four years and been on the Einstein field once in that time. I think you'd learn a few things - robots are built to solve problems and the most technically complex and advanced robots don't always solve problem better than simple elegant designs. - Robots involve multiple skills and usually get built by teams where members are specialists in specific fields. Some people will understand all of the robot sub systems but

We don't have as problematic a deficit problem so long as reasonable sane people are running tr4e system and willing to turn on the printers when required so as not to generate excess inflation.

Your understanding about OIL is very out of date. The US is the worlds largest oil producer and a net exporter of oil and oil based products.

The US does import some low quality cheaper crudes (heavy, sour) to be processed by US refineries that have much higher complexity and capital investment than other regions. Effectively people send their OIL to the US to be refined and that is where most of our imports come from.

Republicans only hold the house by two seats so to pass something they need to have everyone on board. Any single republican member of congress that wants to hold the whole thing hostage for demands pretty much can.

The private equity fund who makes the decisions about what to do is buying the company with other people's money. They get a % of the other peoples money they manage as revenue and slice of the profits on success.

Also they often engineer things so the money the fund put into the deal comes back very fast. In this case they sold the companies real estate which got a big chunk of their initial investment back ASAP.

the simplified view - red lobster they bought it for $2.1b - they sold off the real estate for $1.5b and 25% of the equity for $575m - so the PE fund has $25m of their original investment in the deal. They borrowed a bunch of money and then paid out dividends on that $25m that were multiples times that amount.

Audiobook natation isn't that expensive - the same narrators being used by publishing houses can do it for $200 an hour with it being 10-12k words per hour. Audiobook production is a few thousand for most books under the current system.

Every one of those top 100 is a medical officer and most I'd guess are doctors, they could all work in private sector healthcare and make a lot more money. I notice that not a SINGLE CTO or technology lead in government made the top 100 list.

Yes banks offer this through a network with others banks,and they have reciprocity so if I puts $250k in another members bank they put $250k in my bank so the members banks don't really "lose" deposits. Net, the deposits can be used by the bank in the same way they usually are.

A sweep account is a very common business account and most banks offer this, if you don't pick it based on your balances they'll call you up and try and sell you this service. SVB strangely did not have this product for some reason.

No - higher octane fuels come from the refinery as higher octane - usually because the mix of blending stocks are different and you have to add in some elements to the mix that could have been used to take more lower cost product into "regular" spec.

What happens in pipelines is a lot of the same stuff goes into the pipeline aka "one big slug" at the same time. In between slugs stuff gets mixed and that becomes transmix which gets bought and sold (at a discount) and usually reprocessed and reused. Pipeline scheduling is done to reduce transmix - if high grade gasoline is next to low grade gasoline the transmix could potentially be sold as low grade gasoline.

Overnight in Texas it often is free in the wholesale markets.

The federal reserve is a backstop for banks, if they need cash to pay depositors they are there with unlimited cash. Part of why they are there is because they know every banks assets exceed their deposits. Tether doesn't have that backstop.