The House passed their version of a joint budget resolution. The Senate already passed something different. Reconciliation requires that the two chambers agree on a resolution. The next step is presumably a conference committee that attempts to iron out the differences, and then both chambers have to approve. Although it is possible, as you say, that the Senate Republicans will cave. Once there's an agreed-upon resolution, both chambers start writing an actual budget.
All of this is FY2026 stuff. I suspect Johnson got the last few votes he needed by pointing out that this isn't the budget, there's lots of time to resolve things for FY2026, but they need to settle this temporarily so they can start figuring out how to avoid a FY2025 mid-March shutdown.
The federal government owns 6.8 million square feet of building space in Colorado. It also leases another 4.1 million square feet. Here in Fort Collins, the feds own about 50,000 ft2 and lease almost 850,000 ft2. The leases are almost all buildings on the Colorado State University campuses.
They're going to make your life miserable. The Simonyi Survey Telescope is due to come online this year. The primary mirror is 8.4 meters, the camera is 3.2 gigapixels, and one of the main missions is looking for near-Earth rocks like YR4. They expect to find lots of them.
This sounds like something I said many years ago, when I was asked what I would do with a billion-ops-per-second processor.
Never, ever write in a compiled language again. Everything I write will run on an interpreter that many smart people have worked on so I don't have memory leaks, or buffer overflows, or naked error messages like "Seg fault, core dumped".
The funnier thing is that back in the mid-1970s I did a bunch of work in APL, where the interpreter avoided memory leaks, and buffer overflows, and any sort of run-time fault put me in a full symbolic debugger.
There might be one week a year where I don't get anything done.
During the course of my technical career, there were numerous weeks where an accurate answer to that question would be along the lines of, "I thought about ways to transform your question into something that might be solvable. None of them look at all promising." That did, in a couple of the worst cases, go on for months.
I don't know if Musk ever bothered learning about the math that makes the Falcon 9 booster "make it to the landing zone" possible. My understanding is that there was a long period where the handful of people involved got nowhere. Then someone put together a new dissertation by someone at Stanford, restructured the guidance problem, and came up with a solution.
Clearly his script kiddies don't think along those lines, or they never would have fired a bunch of critical people from NNSA.
Re the first footnote... Justice Sotomayor has regularly remarked in public that the primary reason for the rapid drop in SCOTUS's public approval polling is the number of precedents the conservative block is overturning. I figure the Impoundment Control Act is toast.
That was my thought. For example, the President can say that Massachusetts v. EPA was wrongly decided, that carbon dioxide isn't a pollutant under the Clean Air Act, so the EPA can't regulate carbon dioxide.
This is the usual behavior. At least implicit in Michael's video -- I don't remember if he goes through the details or not -- the typical scenario is for the probability to steadily increase to around 5%, then fairly abruptly go to something near zero. Wake me up when we go past 5%, because then things might be going to get interesting :^)
Most state legislatures have some really dumb bills introduced every session. This one is more interesting than many because it actually passed a committee vote. Also too, it banned mRNA for vaccines against infectious diseases, but allowed the tech for use against cancer or to correct gene-based problems.
The Supreme Court has announced it expects to release one or more opinions on Friday, Feb 21. As is customary, they did not give any indication about which cases.
And if that happens, it opens the possibility that the conflict expands to NATO countries which in turn forces us to decide whether mutual defense is real or a bluff.
Some days, I'm inclined to the position that the EU has 5x the population of Russia and 10x the GDP, so why does the EU need us for military assistance at all? (Note that the EU treaties include mutual military defense. If NATO were dissolved today, France and Germany and Poland and Italy would still have a mutual defense agreement.) My answer on some of those days is they regard the US nuclear umbrella, the US military-industrial manufacturing complex, and the US Navy's ability to keep the Atlantic open for a massive one-way military logistics flow, as a public good. Trump's position is fundamentally that they are not a public good, and the EU ought to be paying a bunch for those services.
Technically, so long as Ukraine claims sovereignty over the Donbas (or Crimea), but doesn't control those areas, Ukraine is not eligible for NATO membership. Basically, you can't join if you're already in a situation where you could make an Article V claim. No one should be surprised the treaty was written that way.
When I was working for the state legislature, Presidents Day was an official holiday. One session, on the Friday before, one of the committee members said to me on the way out of the building, "Anything special planned for the Monday off, Mike?" To which I replied, "Y'all didn't cancel any of the committee meetings for Tuesday, so I'll be here all day Monday getting everything ready for them. But since the office will be officially closed, I can wear jeans."
If we have enough time, maybe we can have it hit the moon and throw it out of orbit...
Run the relative masses, the velocities, the kinetic energy, the moon's elasticity, etc. Maybe we get some interesting meteor showers. Maybe not. Lunar escape velocity is 2.4 km/sec.
Worth adding is that state/local tax revenue is, in practice, 9-12% of state/local GDP. Rich states run at the top end of that, poor states at the low end. Treating that as a constraint, what we see at the state level is state funding for K-12 education and Medicaid are steadily displacing spending in other major areas. (Baumol's Cost Disease is relevant.) This trend has been clear in state general fund budgets since the mid-1990s. Speaking broadly, higher education has taken the biggest hit, followed by transportation.
I'm more interested in the angle the rock comes in at. Does it look like it comes straight in, or is it inclined at a significant angle? If the latter, from east-to-west or west-to-east? We had a bit of this discussion on a different post fairly recently. I argued that all of the drawings of the dinosaur-killer that showed it streaking across the sky were wrong; that the evidence suggested it came from the southeast but effectively straight in. At the velocities involved, the time from when the rock starts significantly interacting with the atmosphere and striking the ground (or air burst) is measured in seconds. Eg, 300 km at 17 km/sec is 17 sec and if you're looking the wrong way you might miss it.
I read this week that the people who worry about such things have decided the prior opinion that the big crater at the Moon's south pole was a glancing strike is wrong, that it was basically straight in.
I was thinking more inside than that (and more local, to be honest), like all the material science labs at NREL, or assorted labs at NIST in Boulder. Or the big supercomputers at multiple national labs.
Trump played mostly by the rules in 2017. This time they're playing a completely different game. The resistance looks much better when they sue, get an injunction, and the administration follows it. This time Trump's saying publicly that they're just not going to conform when the courts rule against them.
Next month we get to see what they do with the in-house science in the next continuing resolution...
Last Friday Boeing called an all-hands meeting for everyone working on the Space Launch System (SLS). The meeting was called on short notice -- hours, not days -- and lasted six minutes. The top manager told everyone there was a risk that the SLS would be canceled, some contracts as early as next month. NASA contractors have started stacking the SLS for the Artemis II mission, scheduled to launch no earlier than April 2026.
February along Colorado's Front Range is random. I remember sub-zero blizzards. I remember a week where I took three afternoons off from work to go play golf in shirt sleeves. My favorite recurring thing, actually, is when it's 10 °F when you go to bed and 50 °F when you wake up because the Chinook blew in.
Everything I read suggests everyone in the sport who has met Andy Reid likes him. I suspect that he's sort of "America's coach" ever since he did the State Farm commercials where he's stealing fast food from Mahomes and Jake. IIRC, after he coached his last game at Philly, where the owner said nothing bad about him, he went to the airport where other owners' private jets were lined for interviews.
One of my friends in college -- Larry -- had a gorgeous sister. Gorgeous as in when she was dolled up, she could walk into a room and conversations stopped. My 15 minutes of fame while I was living in the men's dorm was when she walked into the dining hall we shared with the girl's dorm where she lived, came right up to the table where I was sitting in an all-male group, and asked, "Mike, do you know where Larry is supposed to be tonight?" I did, and told her, and she smiled at me and said "Thank you." After she left, the first bit of conversation at the table was when someone whispered, "She spoke to you."
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/24/2025”
The House passed their version of a joint budget resolution. The Senate already passed something different. Reconciliation requires that the two chambers agree on a resolution. The next step is presumably a conference committee that attempts to iron out the differences, and then both chambers have to approve. Although it is possible, as you say, that the Senate Republicans will cave. Once there's an agreed-upon resolution, both chambers start writing an actual budget.
All of this is FY2026 stuff. I suspect Johnson got the last few votes he needed by pointing out that this isn't the budget, there's lots of time to resolve things for FY2026, but they need to settle this temporarily so they can start figuring out how to avoid a FY2025 mid-March shutdown.
"
The federal government owns 6.8 million square feet of building space in Colorado. It also leases another 4.1 million square feet. Here in Fort Collins, the feds own about 50,000 ft2 and lease almost 850,000 ft2. The leases are almost all buildings on the Colorado State University campuses.
On “Thursday Throughput: Doomsday Rock Edition”
They're going to make your life miserable. The Simonyi Survey Telescope is due to come online this year. The primary mirror is 8.4 meters, the camera is 3.2 gigapixels, and one of the main missions is looking for near-Earth rocks like YR4. They expect to find lots of them.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/17/2025”
This sounds like something I said many years ago, when I was asked what I would do with a billion-ops-per-second processor.
Never, ever write in a compiled language again. Everything I write will run on an interpreter that many smart people have worked on so I don't have memory leaks, or buffer overflows, or naked error messages like "Seg fault, core dumped".
The funnier thing is that back in the mid-1970s I did a bunch of work in APL, where the interpreter avoided memory leaks, and buffer overflows, and any sort of run-time fault put me in a full symbolic debugger.
On “Thursday Throughput: Doomsday Rock Edition”
The new numbers from JPL based on the latest observations have the probability of an impact in 2032 at 1.7e-5. That is, 0.0017%. One in 59,000.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/17/2025”
There might be one week a year where I don't get anything done.
During the course of my technical career, there were numerous weeks where an accurate answer to that question would be along the lines of, "I thought about ways to transform your question into something that might be solvable. None of them look at all promising." That did, in a couple of the worst cases, go on for months.
I don't know if Musk ever bothered learning about the math that makes the Falcon 9 booster "make it to the landing zone" possible. My understanding is that there was a long period where the handful of people involved got nowhere. Then someone put together a new dissertation by someone at Stanford, restructured the guidance problem, and came up with a solution.
Clearly his script kiddies don't think along those lines, or they never would have fired a bunch of critical people from NNSA.
On “Musk vs Gore”
Re the first footnote... Justice Sotomayor has regularly remarked in public that the primary reason for the rapid drop in SCOTUS's public approval polling is the number of precedents the conservative block is overturning. I figure the Impoundment Control Act is toast.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/17/2025”
That was my thought. For example, the President can say that Massachusetts v. EPA was wrongly decided, that carbon dioxide isn't a pollutant under the Clean Air Act, so the EPA can't regulate carbon dioxide.
On “Thursday Throughput: Doomsday Rock Edition”
This is the usual behavior. At least implicit in Michael's video -- I don't remember if he goes through the details or not -- the typical scenario is for the probability to steadily increase to around 5%, then fairly abruptly go to something near zero. Wake me up when we go past 5%, because then things might be going to get interesting :^)
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/17/2025”
Most state legislatures have some really dumb bills introduced every session. This one is more interesting than many because it actually passed a committee vote. Also too, it banned mRNA for vaccines against infectious diseases, but allowed the tech for use against cancer or to correct gene-based problems.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/10/2025”
The Supreme Court has announced it expects to release one or more opinions on Friday, Feb 21. As is customary, they did not give any indication about which cases.
On “Beware: Promises Being Kept”
And if that happens, it opens the possibility that the conflict expands to NATO countries which in turn forces us to decide whether mutual defense is real or a bluff.
Some days, I'm inclined to the position that the EU has 5x the population of Russia and 10x the GDP, so why does the EU need us for military assistance at all? (Note that the EU treaties include mutual military defense. If NATO were dissolved today, France and Germany and Poland and Italy would still have a mutual defense agreement.) My answer on some of those days is they regard the US nuclear umbrella, the US military-industrial manufacturing complex, and the US Navy's ability to keep the Atlantic open for a massive one-way military logistics flow, as a public good. Trump's position is fundamentally that they are not a public good, and the EU ought to be paying a bunch for those services.
"
Technically, so long as Ukraine claims sovereignty over the Donbas (or Crimea), but doesn't control those areas, Ukraine is not eligible for NATO membership. Basically, you can't join if you're already in a situation where you could make an Article V claim. No one should be surprised the treaty was written that way.
On “Weekend Plans Post: The Tootsie Roll Pop Indian”
When I was working for the state legislature, Presidents Day was an official holiday. One session, on the Friday before, one of the committee members said to me on the way out of the building, "Anything special planned for the Monday off, Mike?" To which I replied, "Y'all didn't cancel any of the committee meetings for Tuesday, so I'll be here all day Monday getting everything ready for them. But since the office will be officially closed, I can wear jeans."
On “Thursday Throughput: Doomsday Rock Edition”
If we have enough time, maybe we can have it hit the moon and throw it out of orbit...
Run the relative masses, the velocities, the kinetic energy, the moon's elasticity, etc. Maybe we get some interesting meteor showers. Maybe not. Lunar escape velocity is 2.4 km/sec.
On “Deficits, Debt, and DOGE”
Worth adding is that state/local tax revenue is, in practice, 9-12% of state/local GDP. Rich states run at the top end of that, poor states at the low end. Treating that as a constraint, what we see at the state level is state funding for K-12 education and Medicaid are steadily displacing spending in other major areas. (Baumol's Cost Disease is relevant.) This trend has been clear in state general fund budgets since the mid-1990s. Speaking broadly, higher education has taken the biggest hit, followed by transportation.
On “Thursday Throughput: Doomsday Rock Edition”
I'm more interested in the angle the rock comes in at. Does it look like it comes straight in, or is it inclined at a significant angle? If the latter, from east-to-west or west-to-east? We had a bit of this discussion on a different post fairly recently. I argued that all of the drawings of the dinosaur-killer that showed it streaking across the sky were wrong; that the evidence suggested it came from the southeast but effectively straight in. At the velocities involved, the time from when the rock starts significantly interacting with the atmosphere and striking the ground (or air burst) is measured in seconds. Eg, 300 km at 17 km/sec is 17 sec and if you're looking the wrong way you might miss it.
I read this week that the people who worry about such things have decided the prior opinion that the big crater at the Moon's south pole was a glancing strike is wrong, that it was basically straight in.
On “Off With Their (Over)heads: Trump Administration at War with Public Health”
I was thinking more inside than that (and more local, to be honest), like all the material science labs at NREL, or assorted labs at NIST in Boulder. Or the big supercomputers at multiple national labs.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/10/2025”
Trump played mostly by the rules in 2017. This time they're playing a completely different game. The resistance looks much better when they sue, get an injunction, and the administration follows it. This time Trump's saying publicly that they're just not going to conform when the courts rule against them.
On “Off With Their (Over)heads: Trump Administration at War with Public Health”
Next month we get to see what they do with the in-house science in the next continuing resolution...
Last Friday Boeing called an all-hands meeting for everyone working on the Space Launch System (SLS). The meeting was called on short notice -- hours, not days -- and lasted six minutes. The top manager told everyone there was a risk that the SLS would be canceled, some contracts as early as next month. NASA contractors have started stacking the SLS for the Artemis II mission, scheduled to launch no earlier than April 2026.
On “Weekend Plans Post: The Longest Month”
February along Colorado's Front Range is random. I remember sub-zero blizzards. I remember a week where I took three afternoons off from work to go play golf in shirt sleeves. My favorite recurring thing, actually, is when it's 10 °F when you go to bed and 50 °F when you wake up because the Chinook blew in.
On “Kansas City wants to Score the first Threepeat against the Philadelphia Eagles in New Orleans”
Everything I read suggests everyone in the sport who has met Andy Reid likes him. I suspect that he's sort of "America's coach" ever since he did the State Farm commercials where he's stealing fast food from Mahomes and Jake. IIRC, after he coached his last game at Philly, where the owner said nothing bad about him, he went to the airport where other owners' private jets were lined for interviews.
On “Valentine”
One of my friends in college -- Larry -- had a gorgeous sister. Gorgeous as in when she was dolled up, she could walk into a room and conversations stopped. My 15 minutes of fame while I was living in the men's dorm was when she walked into the dining hall we shared with the girl's dorm where she lived, came right up to the table where I was sitting in an all-male group, and asked, "Mike, do you know where Larry is supposed to be tonight?" I did, and told her, and she smiled at me and said "Thank you." After she left, the first bit of conversation at the table was when someone whispered, "She spoke to you."
On “Kansas City wants to Score the first Threepeat against the Philadelphia Eagles in New Orleans”
I'm obnoxious, so would propose secretly in advance, then tell Taylor to flash the giant diamond during the game.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/3/2025”
The big ask seems to be staffing levels.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.