The article seems deliberately misleading for example the "F-5s, which the U.S. Air Force retired out of service in 1990" is of course still in use in the Navy and Marine as well as in China, South Korea, Iran, Brazil and probably other countries.
Also the F-35 is an always was highly controversial in Switzerland from the very first day it was publicly considered that was around 2017.
In 2020 the people voted in favor of the F-35 with 50.1% support. So the reality is that any and all reasons to stop or delay the purchase of these jets will be uses by the parties that opposed the purchase, it has little to nothing to do with the so called "trade war".
This assumes that people involuntarily paid for the last 60 years or so but they didn't. USAID was paid for by money printing and more debt making not by taxes.
If you want volunteer to chip in they would first need to pay of the debt causes by USAID over the last 60+ years.
Also lets be real here, no one in their right mind would donate to USAID. There are near unlimited way to donate money for good causes and very specific ones, where you can see results. If your goal is to have your money be efficiently used to help people you would never give it to the government. Any other organization that isn't straight up a scam, will be more efficient than the gov.
This is pointless math instead of bad math. 0.1% isn't the issue, the issue is that it isn't actually paid by taxes, it is instead paid by money printing. It's not 0.1% of peoples taxable income going to USAID, it's billions in additional debt that is "funding" USAID.
The actual true cost to the people for the additional debt is hard to measure and likely hits a different generation that the people who created most of USAID.
Instead of saying people payed 0.1% to fund USAID you should say they made at least that much additional debt every year.
You could not spend 0.1% more than you earn over the course of like 60 years but USAID did that for everyone.
You can get one that's only visible under UV light, but given the topic here it might be relevant to know that these are much harder to remove and also if they age they may become visible under normal light and/or stop fluoresced under UV light.
> Instead, use a range negation, like [^%] if you know the % character won’t show up. It doesn’t hurt to be a little more explicit.
This is absolutely horrible, pattern are fairly readable if they follow the syntax logic. Matching "everything but that random character that will not appear" is absurd.
Also the idea that a . (dot) behaves arbitrary in different languages shows a sever lack up understanding about regex syntax. Ofc you can't write a proper pattern if you don't know which syntax is used. If anything you would force override the behavior of the . (dot) with the appropriate flag to ensure it works the same with different compatible regex engines.
Agreed, I wanted to write the whole article off after that suggestion. That is such a terrible anti pattern that would confuse everyone who looked at it, even people with decades of experience.
Have you asked the people who pay in the end (the taxpayer) if they want that?
The very last thing I want my taxes to go to is anything that has "no strings attached". Its by definition a gift and gifting taxes should be a crime.
Then taxes could be used to pay government employees whose job is to contribute on a specific project. That could apply to Linux, a browser, maybe AOSP. Sure it'd require funding, but spent on employees within said countries you get it back and it does give Europe as a whole the ability to contribute its vision, both positive and negative.
Whether the people are employed by the government directly or a different entity isn't relevant at all, the relevant part is taxes being used for something that has an undefined benefit for the people who are forced to pay for it. (And in case of "no string attacked" even has an undefined goal.)
>give Europe as a whole the ability to contribute its vision
Who's vision? The peoples vision? Or the vision of bureaucrats, politicians, lobbyists etc.
Why is the goal to get something "stable" in the first place?
Climate on earth never was and never will be stable, so this should not be our goal in the first place.
The goal should be to keep the change fairly slow because most living things have trouble with fast changes. That's it we don't need more than that.
"Fairly slow" on an evolutionary timescale and "stable" across human timescales are functionally the exact same thing.
The difference between the two is negligible compared to the difference between either of them and what we currently have, which is "unprecedented" on human timescales and euphemistically "radical" on evolutionary ones.
You might as well say "look I just don't understand why people say we need to stop the car, obviously slowing down to walking speed would be enough" while the car continues to accelerate at full throttle towards a cliff edge.
But no one knows what "fairly slow" is.
Also the climate collapse theories predict that once a certain tipping point is reached, its game over. If that is true then slow and stable increase still gets us to that point just a bit later.
In other words to make climate change stable do we need to reduce CO2 emissions, completely stop CO2 emission or remove CO2 and reduce the CO2 in the atmosphere?
We don't even know which of these 3 options would lead to the "fairly slow/stable" we want.
It seems like we just do all 3 with no evidence of any real world effect whatsoever.
Only if you ignore the who knows how many tons of CO2 was put into the atmosphere to create the thing.
In reality that thing probably need to run several years to break even.
Also the F-35 is an always was highly controversial in Switzerland from the very first day it was publicly considered that was around 2017. In 2020 the people voted in favor of the F-35 with 50.1% support. So the reality is that any and all reasons to stop or delay the purchase of these jets will be uses by the parties that opposed the purchase, it has little to nothing to do with the so called "trade war".