School lunch programs across the world get setup and perpetuated for a variety of reasons. They also have a variety of funding models.
For the US specifically, major federal programs began during the Great Depression as a two for one combo. It solved the direct problem of... people being poor and their kids not having food/lunch, and it also provided a reasonable supply sink for the government to buy out supply from farmers to help keep things going.
Anyhow, since then for a variety of reasons, subsidized/free lunches have stuck around. Primarily because the underlying problem (food insecurity) has not been adequately solved. School lunches also tends to be amongst the more politically palatable/defensible forms of welfare in the United States, since its very structure and beneficiaries make it harder to criticize.
So while expansion of SNAP or other programs that might help tackle general food insecurity might run into headwinds, most of those arguments tend to falter when it comes to feeding children directly at school. For example, it's hard to argue that getting free lunches at school would encourage "abuse and malaise" amongst students. Similarly, since the composition of lunches tend to be under control of the supplying organization, there's reduced concern of people spending their assistance on "luxuries".
And a 1971 PDF from the US Department of Agriculture (Dept. Ed. hadn't yet been created), "History of the National School Lunch Program" <https://www.fns.usda.gov/nslp/program-history> [PDF]
icegreentea2's summary is brief but accurate. There was some earlier Progressive Era (~1890--1915) work largely at the city level (Boston and Phladelphia), and through volunteers and charities.
The Great Depression emphasized the scope of the problem, and WWII raised it to a level of national security (under-fed, malnourished, and poorly-educated children cannot grow to defend the country).
The period also parallels growth of secondary (high-school) education from a small fraction of children (~6% of 18-year olds claimed a high school diploma in 1900, that grew to roughly 95% by 1950, where it's largely held since: graduation rates and graduate test scores tend to balance off one another, as one rises the other falls, both are fodder for much political jawboning). Education statistics are presented in "120 Years of American Education: A Statistical Portrai" published by the US Department of Education (1993) <hhttps://www.google.com/books/edition/120_Years_of_American_E...>
There isn't a single Republican budget yet - the house and senate have their own versions of the budget they need to reconcile. That said, the house budget (which just passed yesterday) I believe hews more closely to the Whitehouses' proposal.
But as a summary, you can probably look at Table 1. The values given are over 10 years, so divide every by 10 to get a sense of per year. As written it looks like:
* Overall decrease 170 billion per year in spending (overall Federal spending is about 7 trillion per year). There are cuts across the board except in DoD, DHS, and DoJ.
* Tax cuts decreasing revenue by ~450 billion per year. There is a section in the report identifying all of the different tax cuts. This decrease in tax revenue includes the effect of locking in Trump's first term tax cuts which are currently set to expire.
I mean, there's certainly some of that happening right now (and has probably always happened to some degree even in America).
That being said, I think these specific cuts have a real possibility of being genuine. I believe this because:
* They actually do align with long-term thinking. In general, the DoD (and the federal government... and really all North American government as a whole) has been on a multi-decade slide of out sourcing more and more capabilities to consultancies. This HAS made us all worse at governing. Hegseth (for better and worse) has the cover to make this type of cut while riding out whatever bumps might come out of this.
* Hegseth also needs to create cover. He's probably about to get a giant budget increase (~900billion to an even trillion). Actions like this allow him to backup his claim that yes - America is spending more on defense, but we're doing so better.
That said, who knows how this specific case will end up.
I -think- the $100 billion is a typo. I -think- it's suppose to be ~$100 million.
Anyhow, I don't think its wrong to say (as the article does) that iRobot failed to focus on its core market, but it's also really unfair to iRobot to say should not have attempted to compete in the new product categories (...you just need to look at the product websites for the competitors cited in the article to see that iRobot isn't alone in trying).
Fundamentally, iRobot is competing in a commodity market. That's what home automation/electronics will be. I think you hit it right on the head - this is just another form of appliance.
So the article says that Agoura Road (which is not the highway) will be closed, but the project FAQ still says that it won't be? And the government pre-notices don't seem to mention anticipating closing the road either...
EU is definitely behind. It's at least an entire generation (perhaps 1.5) behind.
ESA does have grants for funding reusable rocket development (ArianeGroup and Isar both got funding for that). Uhh... who knows how successful those programs will be.
To be fair to both Isar and RFA (which are both much more in the 2010s New Space mold), the equivalent rockets (Falcon 1, Electron, etc) weren't reusable either. EU firms are playing catch up, I think its fair that they take some amount of incremental steps through.
As people have generally noted, the market for stuff that Isar and RFA are building (1-2 ton to LEO) is actually really small. I think both companies are banking on building expertise and confidence and then trying to iterate relatively quickly to something Falcon 9 class with re-use.
The American competitors like Relativity and Stoke get to bootstrap off of all the work that SpaceX (especially) and Blue Origin (less so) have done to give a more credible path to immediate re-use.
Alright. But even if I concede that (that Americans startups are benefiting unfairly from SpaceX), at least two Chinese startups are on schedule for booster-recovery launches this year,
In the case of Deep Blue, they're attempting recovery on their very first orbital launch (they're been hover-testing that booster up to 1 km already). Newspace startups don't have the luxury of competing against 2006-era Falcon 1; they're competing against 2025-era startups like Deep Blue—a dozen very aggressive competitors, all speedrunning towards the same goal. I don't feel the EU is even in the running.
In the case of Landspace, it's their 6th launch attempt (I think). This launch is competing against SpaceX and Blue Origin both, for the first recovered-booster, orbital methane launch. It's possible they might come in first—that's how rapidly certain technological gaps have narrowed.
(They already got the crown for the first orbital methane launch—Zhuque-2 in 2024. Meaning the first in history. No one in the West has heard of the word "Zhuque". That worries me. They beat even SpaceX to this milestone—our media ecosystem is completely sleeping on remarkably capable competition).
The Chinese ecosystem is very impressive. They both have tremendous cash and resources flowing into their government owned agencies, and specific funding and competition in their private new space companies. I understand there's tremendous talent and knowledge transfer sloshing around the Chinese ecosystem, say nothing about funding and resources.
But let's be real - EU new space is not competing against the Chinese launch market right now. There's time and room for them to mature.
One major reason why EU capabilities are lagging is because they hitched their geopolitical wagon to the US and assumed that the US launch providers would be sufficient for commercial purposes, and that ESA/Arianespace only had to preserve enough capability to meet truly strategic requirements.
Now the EU is scrambling because they realized that there are unsavoury downsides. Just deciding to cede all European launches to the Chinese is literally just putting themselves in the same shit soup.
And even practically, the EU-USA decoupling is going to take time. And until the EU gets enough strategic autonomy in space, I think the EU is largely going to play nice with the US rules against collaborating with China in space (that means almost no EU payloads are going to be launched by China).
> One major reason why EU capabilities are lagging is because they hitched their geopolitical wagon to the US and assumed that the US launch providers would be sufficient for commercial purposes, and that ESA/Arianespace only had to preserve enough capability to meet truly strategic requirements.
This is just not true.
Ariane Group was a market leader in space launch when SpaceX started launching rockets, and Ariane 6 was designed specifically to help Ariane Group maintain commercial competitiveness with Falcon 9. They just did a bad job of it[1].
The story line of Ariane 5/6 only being there to preserve independent access to space only appeared on the scene after SpaceX conclusively trounced them in the market.
---
1. The reasons why this happened are complicated by some of them are:
* For a long time Ariane Group leadership maintained a belief that SpaceX was selling F9 launches below cost and that the USG was subsidizing them with higher cost government launches.
* Ariane Group publicly claimed that reuse was not economically feasible and that that capability in F9 didn't matter.
* Ariane Group has long maintained (and continues to do so) a policy of "economic return" where countries get contracts for subcomponents in rough proportion to the amount of money they contribute to the program. This necessitates a "big design up front" approach, and makes iteration very slow and difficult.
* SpaceX was able to improve Falcon 9's performance far more than anyone probably expected through aggressive iteration, more than doubling its payload to LEO over its lifetime. This was, in large part, due to the Merlin 1D engine doubling the thrust of the Merlin 1C. For context, over 30 years, the Space Shuttle's RS-25 engines increased in thrust by only ~10%.
- "They both have tremendous cash and resources flowing into their government owned agencies, and specific funding and competition in their private new space companies."
Yeah, this gets to the heart of what I raised at the root comment: "What's failing in the EU?" Why aren't there torrents of cash and resources, talent and knowledge, flowing into European tech startups?
> that Americans startups are benefiting unfairly from SpaceX
Why is that unfair?
> Deep Blue, they're attempting recovery on their very first orbital launch
This shouldn't be a surprise. One would want to test as much as possible in each expensive launch. If the recovery failed, it would not impact(!) any other tests, so it is a very sensible idea to add it to the early tests.
Poor phrasing by me. "It's to be expected that European newspace will move slower than American startups, because their industry environment and institutional knowledge is poorer (than Americans')".
Thanks for sharing, I honestly wish this company the best electric planes are a hard problem to solve and it's good to see anyone making an honest effort.
However to poke just a little fun this line stands out as a hilarious marketing claim that cannot possibly be true
"Almost all (98%) of UAE coastal residents are interested in riding a seaglider, according to our global consumer survey."
It's also interesting to note that the CEO has appeared on no fewer than 13 different podcasts between mid-2022 and last week which is I suppose how one would go about getting a high value US defence contract these days.
For the US specifically, major federal programs began during the Great Depression as a two for one combo. It solved the direct problem of... people being poor and their kids not having food/lunch, and it also provided a reasonable supply sink for the government to buy out supply from farmers to help keep things going.
Anyhow, since then for a variety of reasons, subsidized/free lunches have stuck around. Primarily because the underlying problem (food insecurity) has not been adequately solved. School lunches also tends to be amongst the more politically palatable/defensible forms of welfare in the United States, since its very structure and beneficiaries make it harder to criticize.
So while expansion of SNAP or other programs that might help tackle general food insecurity might run into headwinds, most of those arguments tend to falter when it comes to feeding children directly at school. For example, it's hard to argue that getting free lunches at school would encourage "abuse and malaise" amongst students. Similarly, since the composition of lunches tend to be under control of the supplying organization, there's reduced concern of people spending their assistance on "luxuries".
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