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Trump is being pulled in too many different directions to the point where nothing coherent is going to emerge from his strategies (or lack of). You can't promise Wall Street/Corporate America the moon and keep the economy running along nicely while rounding up and deporting immigrants, cutting federal spending, and implementing regressive taxes via tariffs. If he would have just limited himself to the goal of balancing trade while maintaining reserve currency status, I think that he would have had a shot to pull it off. But there is the very real risk that the rest of the world just starts routing around the US so even that is not a given. But when you combine this with all the other things he is trying to do, I think he is seriously risking sending the U.S. economy off a very tall cliff. That is also why he probably is so obsessed with lower interest rates. It is an attempt to try and jolt the economy before all the head winds from his policies start to have an impact.

Because how could the Democrats be certain that the Republicans wouldn't just use the same accounting trick again the next time that they wanted to pass tax cuts via reconciliation (which would effectively let them double count the "savings"). The Republicans have shown very little good faith in bipartisan efforts over the last decade and a half (as just one example, all the R's who voted against the IRA only to then campaign on the achievements of the bill later in the year).

So while it is great that the Republicans fixed this one thing (that they themselves broke), asking why the Democrats didn't fix it kinda feels like you have been living under a rock for these last few years. If they break something, and they regret breaking something, let them expend the political capital to get it fixed. There is no free lunch in politics. If you spend your time on something like this, it means some other priority is getting ignored. And doubly so if your counter party has been operating on such bad faith as of late.

Perhaps OP can clarify, because I too read that as a snarky dig. Perhaps that wasn't their intention, but it felt off. The only place I saw a "subtle suggestion" for a donation was by clicking the "Support" link all the way at the bottom of the page. The site has probably the least intrusive monetization scheme one could implement without forgoing it entirely.

We are at the tail end of a 50 year bull run powered by declining interest rates. Maybe ZIRP is the new normal and private industry R&D investment stays high, but I don't think we should gamble our status as an economic, scientific, and technological powerhouse on that and gut our government financed R&D programs.

Further more, my wife works in biotech so I have seen first hand the compromises one has to make to secure private funding. They care about things like market size and revenue potential when making these investments, which means you end up with most of the money flowing towards diseases that largely affect rich people and solutions that are either expensive or recurring. And lets also not forget that almost all of these companies are working off of or spinning out from research programs that were funded by the government. I have yet to meet a single company where that wasn't the case.

> Is that not what we have already. Do you really think your vote matters?

At least in the current setup, they are required to maintain and fund a vast propaganda apparatus, lobbying efforts, and political organizations in order to secure their power. And even with all that effort, they still only have a tenuous control over our institutions. Your proposal would literally just hand the keys over to them.

> I don’t think my tenants ever thought I was greedy

As a lifelong renter, who has for the most part had relatively good relationships with my landlords over the years, I can assure you that they do. At the very least, they probably don't have a very positive opinion of you, even if they are nice to you in person. After decades of financialization of our housing market, we now have an entire swath of our population locked out of the housing market. And if you think these folks like handing over a significant chunk of their income each month to a bunch of rent-seekers, I think you are solely mistaken.

> I’m all for fairness. For example I think we should weight votes, where everyone gets one vote for each dollar of taxes they pay.

You are joking right? Honest, question, what life experiences have you had that make you think that this would be a good idea. It would effectively mean a handful of billionaires would control the country.

> I also want to see all landlords structure rental contracts so that the renter pays the property taxes

It is a free market. Outside of a handful of places with rent control, nothing is stopping them from doing that. And if you think splitting out property taxes as a separate line item will somehow make tenants think that landlords, the vast majority of whom increase their rents to the absolute maximum that the market will bear, are somehow not greedy, I think you have a pretty bad handle on what it is like to be in the renter class.

These organizations consist of political appointees and civil servants. It is customary to replace all of the political appointees. Civil servants however have a lot of job protections and can only be fired for a limited set of reasons. Typically, a new administration would appoint new political appointees to the various departments (many of whom need to be confirmed by the Senate) and those appointees would then exert their influence on the department by shifting priorities around and they could even alter the hiring process to target more "aligned" individuals for the open civil servant roles. But they cannot just do a wholesale house cleaning. The high level purpose and the budget/size of the organization is determined by Congress and the political appointees are constrained by that.

So this is in fact very different from how things normally work.

And a similar rule that at least one person will defend Russia, regardless of how truthful the accusations are. And in this particular case, NK troops fighting in a land war in Europe at Russia's side is a major geopolitical shift, whether you agree or not.

Have you tried making a "todo SPA" of your own with the help of these AI tools? I think it is useful for folks to take a step back and try working on something simpler/easier as an intro to these AI tools. And then ramp up the complexity/difficulty from there. When the tools don't work, it can be extremely frustrating. But when they do work, they really do enhance productivity. But it takes a little bit of time to figure out where that boundary is, and it also takes a little time to figure out how much effort to put into using the tool when you are near that boundary. i.e. sometimes I know the AI tools can help me, but the amount of effort I need to put into writing the prompt is not worth the help that I will get. And other times, I know that no amount of prompting is going to get me back something useful.

> Yes, sure, but this applies to UBI as well.

It does not. THE primary difference between UBI and unemployment is that UBI does not disappear once you are unemployed. So in my hypothetical scenario above, the person would be making Y+X. Assuming UBI is paid for via income taxes, and that those income taxes are applied progressively, at some point up the income ladder you will be paying more in taxes than you receive in UBI, but at the lower income scales it is all accretive making for a strong incentive to work.

> Then I think we should also guarantee a job for anybody who wants one, with a significant step up in income. (And right now that job should be capturing carbon.)

I think we should have a UBI and then combine that with eliminating the minimum wage. Maybe we limit that to just nonprofits, but the goal would be to make it easier to pay people to do work that is currently not incentivized in our current economy. For example, near me, I volunteer for beach cleanups and at the community garden. These groups are well funded, but they need to rely on volunteers because the minimum wage near me is over $17 and the operations are very labor intensive. If you have a UBI, the idea of paying people a few bucks an hour to clean the beach becomes much more palatable. Right now, we need to try to strong arm companies into paying livable wages, but there is only so much economic activity that is profitable at those levels. A UBI that provides very basic subsistence (we are talking squalor levels of assistance, FYI), combined with reducing barriers to employment would go a long way towards resolving some major ills in our current economy.

If UBI is revenue neutral, whether by increasing taxes or cutting other programs or some combination of both, then it would not increase inflation. You should brush up on your macroeconomics.

Look up welfare trap. Many benefit programs are implemented such that they go away the second you start working. This means if I am getting $X per week in welfare but I get an employment offer of $Y per week where Y<X, then I am incentivized to stay on welfare. Even if Y>X, it often makes sense to stay on welfare because you might have to start paying for child care, or buy a second car to get to work, etc...

> You have to get out of that borrow, hunt and forage to survive.

Modern society has put significant constraints on how I can pursue survival. I can't just go and fish in the ocean, because there are regulations on how and what I can catch. I can't just go and farm a little piece of land because almost all land is owned by someone or something. Of the many reasons I think UBI is a good idea, a major reason is that I consider it payment for the loss of "natural rights" that we give up in order to live in a modern society. I think fishing regulations are good thing, but they also curtail my ability to subsist, so I think UBI is a good compensation for that.

Maybe just hire a data engineer or two to start. They could potentially deal with the pain points and make life easier for your team. A lot of data engineering these days involves glueing various services together and managing the data flows between them. So an experienced data engineer should be able to do what you need.

Overtime, you could move away from the software in question as various functions are replaced with other services or internal code. Or if you realize that replicating the software in question would be too prohibitive, at least you have some folks that are adept at dealing with that type of stuff.

It is worth mentioning that when managing software projects, the complexity and frustrations tend to sneak up on you. The first prototypes tend to come together fast, and are nice and clean and crisp. But overtime, the feature set grows, the complexity grows, and the cost and time it takes to iterate grows. If you only need a very small slice of the features of the software in question, and you are paying an arm and a leg for said software, then it might make sense to roll your own. But it is easy to underestimate the complexity of what you need accomplished and rolling your own could end up being a very costly mistake.