Posts by MachDiamond

Re: Charitable lot

"But the shareholders have to assume that the company will pay a dividend in the future or the company has no value."

Not necessarily. If you see a company that has lots of growth potential, you can invest in the stock expecting it to rise so you can sell it at a good profit later. What our family trust does is look for solid companies that make very boring products that are at the bottom of the production tree (nuts and bolts sort of stuff). Those companies are in a mature industry and there isn't likely going to be huge amounts of rise in their stock price. The ones we pick (or my mom picks since she's in charge) pay a reasonable and consistent dividend. Since the product or industry is typically very boring, there often isn't other companies raising a bunch of vulture capital to muscle in so the risk of our boring old company being pushed aside is low.

Re: Fuck that!

"If anything, this is a time when the board and shareholders should be delivering an ultimatum: Divest yourself from all your other business interests, so your sole focus is on Tesla, or we'll divest you from Tesla"

The judge that rescinded Elon's bonus package commented on how beholden the people on the Tesla board are to Elon. Elon is the one that buttered their bread and they owe him. So many "news" articles are also incorrectly saying the judge thought the amount was too much and that's why she cancelled it when the problem, that can be read for oneself in the decision, is serious problems with the information that was given to shareholders to vote on and how some of the first milestones that triggered stock payouts would have happened if they brought Ham the chimp back to life and put him in the corner office. The company was already well on track to hit those numbers.

What I was thinking when all of this kicked off was that the rewards were based on stock price, not profits, not tangible value. Plenty of executives have played games with stock price pumps over the ages to the detriment of the company they were supposed to be managing for the stockholders (owners). To set up a series of very serious rewards for that behavior should be criminal. It's also Elon that wrote the compensation proposal, not the board who are said to have rubber-stamped it without pushing back at all.

Re: An example of a cognitive misfire :o

"I thought Xitler fired the Tesla PR department."

He did and took on the role personally. The problem is that he isn't at the company that often and doesn't take calls.

Re: Perhaps adding a Flux Capacitor...

"and a complete pain in the arse to live with."

That's until you find out that it's not a vehicle but a mobile food prep machine. I was watching a review where it was demonstrated that the motorized hood can chop through 4-5 carrots quite handily and that's after you use the edge of the door to give them a good peel. If you are a musician, you might find inspiration for new compositions within all of the squeaks and rattles you hear while driving along. Addressing these issues is why it can take other manufacturers years to release a wholly new model. Perhaps having software updates that can just be broadcast is giving them too much leeway when they decide to release something. In days past, car companies made sure that everything worked so there wouldn't be requirements that people had to take their cars to the dealer for updates and fixes.

Re: Charitable lot

"Allowing the board to stuff their pockets mean less potential dividend for shareholders?"

Tesla does not pay a dividend and their prospectus states that they don't have any plans to pay a dividend in the future. It's more of a concern that money is flowing into the pockets of Elon's friends and family when announced products that have been pending for years aren't being completed. The company will not even accept reservation payments on the Semi anymore and has only delivered test articles to one outside company. I can imagine that Pepsi/Frito-Lay was pressuring Tesla to deliver or give them back the millions in deposits they put down years ago. The Roadster 2.0 hasn't moved forward in years. The Cybertruck is a novelty rather than a competitor at any level in the pickup market. The Model 2, which may or may not be cancelled, didn't have the appearance of being more than competition for the 3/Y rather than something that would draw in new buyers if the posted concept art was official and not fan-fiction.

Re: Not interested

"What they care about instead is how many ads they can show, and how much money those make for them."

Even more profitable is their PII business. Ads are just the sprinkles on the icing on the cake.

Re: Gee that's strange...

"And of course Kagi also lets you mark individual sites as spam, never show me anything from this domain ever again."

I've done that by using my local host file to 127.0.0.1 a bunch of the more abusive domains, but they've been finding ways around that. It just managed to bite my backside when a training seminar being offered through the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) needed doubleclick to pass the video. Yeah, I'm not going to bother changing my hostfile to watch the seminar and then put it back. When I couldn't get the video to go, I tried to find the source by doing into the developer tools with Firefox and that's how I spotted the doubleclick pass through. The player was a clone of YouTube's UI, but I didn't find the video on YT via the YT web site. I never have high expectations for the US government doing anything in a same way as everyFreakinBody else on the planet.

"The original site owner loses clicks, which means they will probably go out of business and stop posting articles that are of actual interest. Eventually we'll end up with AI copying AI to the point where you can't get good writing, and interesting viewpoints."

What I see a lot is along the same lines as answers to questions received by politicians. They substitute a proper answer with something completely unrelated. For example: I will get a call from a number I don't know and look it up online. A raft of hits on DDG will be for businesses that have nothing to do with the telephone number. I seem to always get a bunch of specialist medical offices or ambulance chasers that specialize in going after rouge debt collectors. I suppose a lot of unknown numbers are debt collectors trying to get people to answer but the attorney's web page won't have any of the numbers listed that I've tried via DDG when I filter a search just to that firm's web site.

With AI, I expect companies can analyze common search terms and create traps so a search for "wedding photograph city" will include a link to whatever they are selling regardless. If fact, the more popular the search parameters, the greater the chance that the first several pages will be complete spam. Just hope you aren't trying to find an "urgent care" office when you are injured or a plumber when the loo gets blocked. Unless you are really good with regular expressions, you may never find either. I remember when we used to post those number next to the phone. Where do we put that printed list now?

"No one you know is sending you an attachment you should open. If someone you know does send you an attachment without you expecting it, contact the person and make sure it was meant for you. In every other case, trash the mail. It's a weapon."

The scary thing is even companies that should know better will still send real emails with links to their customers. Before I dropped Paypal, I can't count how many times I tapped them on the shoulder to tell them that their official email looks no different than spam and a better approach would be to not include any links. Did they really want people that were so clueless that they couldn't type the company URL into a web browser and click the tab for the latest news? If all companies that legitimately wanted a customer to log into their account to verify something just sent an email asking them to do that with no links and no dynamic content, scammers would lose a lot of hooks.

As far as people I know sending me links, they've pretty much learned that if they don't tell me they are sending me something in advance, it just ends up in the trash. Anything I send is always in follow up to something we've talked about. Files I send to customers come from my domain and I point that out to them so if they see something claiming to be from me and the URL isn't my domain, they shouldn't open it without talking to me first. The probability is 99.999999999999% that it's a phishing attempt as I don't send things via any outside service. That might change in the future, but I'd work really hard so it didn't.

Re: Honorable Senator Warren mis-spoke

"Just one of those 'fines' would have paid for a decade of tax prep service."

It's often the case where a good paid preparation service will know the tax code better than the drone working for the IRS. When I had a manufacturing company, I could have used the payroll section of my accounting program to calculate withholding and cut checks, but just one mistake, one tax submission a day late would pay for two years of having a proper payroll company do it for me with an accuracy guarantee. Even if there were something that I owed for, the legal and accounting representation that I'd get would be worth it. In 17 years, I never had an issues or audits. The state learned that they get their backside handed to them with that payroll company. Even if the state wound up winning one, it wouldn't be worth being made to look like fools for not knowing their own regulations nearly as well the rest of the time.

Re: A solution?

"If an eBay seller in China sells something to someone in the UK, eBay is required to deduct the tax from the sale proceeds and pay it over to HMRC."

eBay does that in the US now for sales tax, not income tax a seller might owe based on any profits they might make.

Re: A solution?

"4. A few week later I get the money they owe me* directly into my bank account"

In the US it can be a bad idea to give the government access to your bank account. By doing so, you also give permission for them to extract funds without any process and that has lead to some issues for people. Best to calculate what it due so when you file, you are pretty close so waiting from a check in the mail or sending in a small payment isn't a big thing. If you want to push some of your salary forward, open a "Christmas savings account" at the bank. You don't make much in interest, but it's there if you desperately need it rather than being held by the government.

Re: A solution?

"And of course as a house gets older, cost of building is amortised over many years while the value of the property typically increases significantly over any timespan."

Values also get reset from time to time during economic downturns when somebody losses a bunch of money vs. what it cost to build the home. A bank that has to foreclose on a mortgage when an owner defaults and has no other choice but to walk away needs to sell that property to get back at least some of their loss. In the US, it's also a bad idea for banks to just sit on an unoccupied home as those will attract squatters that will wreck the home to the point where a city might require it be demolished reducing the value to a negative.

Re: A solution?

"they've mostly got their own houses and many of them are NIMBYing to block new development that would reduce the value of their homes."

I don't see a problem with that. I'd hate to see the land next to me bought up and bribes paid to the city to allow a 4-story block of flats rather than the single home/lot that it's zoned for. The blocks of flats not that far way are a source of work for the police department all of the time and it's not unusual to hear a whole lot of loud and nasty arguments coming from that direction. (The residents are on the lower end of the socioeconomic scale). Due to the nature of where the city is, there isn't much of a chance that a new block of flats is going to be built that caters to young professionals with jobs.

If you've made a substantial investment in a home and part of your decision was based on how the area around you had been zoned, changing that zoning is likely going to be for the worse and your home's value can drop quite a lot in the process which could put you underwater with respect to any loans you might have or make you re-calculate your financial plans for the future.

Most cities have a master plan for what goes where. Lots of developers love to cheat by buying up a bunch of parcels of what is classed as agricultural (least cost per hectare/acre) and then petition to have it rezoned so they can build blocks of flats or an industrial estate rather than buy more expensive land with that zoning already in place. That just throws out what was probably a well reasoned division of property uses.

Re: A solution?

"The boomer generation made sure that no one else will be able to afford to buy a house."

If you want to buy a house where everybody else is buying a house, better have a big stack of cash. I would never be able to afford a house in the area where I lived when I was younger. Where I am now is not glamorous, but I bought a house and it's completely paid off. When I see the cost of living figures for big cities, I have to shake my head at all of the people that live there but are spending their whole paycheck and then some just to survive. I get it that people have a certain skill set and job in mind, but if that job requires living in a major city and not being paid the big bucks, find something else. I've done loads of different things and all of them I've enjoyed. They are also very different.

Re: A solution?

"A better solution is to stop making individuals fill out these stupid forms just to tell the IRS and state tax boards, what they already have on file. There's absolutely no reason why the IRS couldn't just send everyone like a postcard saying, "Here's the info we have on file regarding your income. Is this correct?" "

There's still loads of carp that has to be put in especially as they want to place tiny lower limits on selling stuff on places such as eBay. Currently, you don't have to do all of the accounting for that if you are under $20k in sales and so many transactions, but they'd like to reduce it to $600 which means everybody is going to have to file a Schedule C (business p/l) so they can deduct for expenses, cost of goods sold and so forth. Yes, the IRS knows what is submitted via W-2 wage reports and 1099 income statements, but not much else. They have no idea what your deductible expenses are which is obvious when they completely miss how bad inflation is getting.

I think part of the problem is that the IRS and states would be liable for their software being broken, inaccurate or just down right confusing. BTW, they will hold you responsible for fines and penalties if they give you bad advice or incorrect instructions so you are better off talking with an accountant that has a guarantee.

I file on paper, Forkum. I used to get TurboTax since it was very handy and worth the coin to have it walk me through the process. When they went to strictly online, Yeah-no. I'm not disclosing my personal financial matters to Intuit to put in the "cloud". The IRS is bad enough at securing information.

"science fiction stories from the 50s to the 90s imagined we would have hulking mannequins marching around the house pushing around a regular old vacuum cleaner?"

This is why I scoff at attempts to make a burger flipper that's based on how a human would flip a burger on a grill. McD's decided to create a grill that cooked both sides at the same time. Many built to purpose flame broilers use conveyors that will flip a burger over so the other side gets cooked before finally dispensing the cooked patty at the end of the machine. Industrial robots come with an assortment of joints and lengths of limb sections. Looking to nature for ideas can be fine, but what's natural about spot welding steel bits together in car manufacturing?

Re: Coming in Hot

" If this was indicative of the rest of the ablative surfaces then its a testament that the craft lasted as long as it did within the plasma cloud."

The engines and aft end were used a lot in the descent, but the craft didn't slow down very much for all of that.

The visible plasma is an indicator of temperature, not heat. When there was sufficient heat load to really do damage, that was the end of the signal. I am wondering if the control surfaces were adequate to get the craft lined up properly to enter the atmosphere. Perhaps if it were coming in at the correct AOA, the flappy paddles would have been able to keep it passively stable when they weren't good enough to get it into correct alignment beforehand.

Re: Capabilities.

" Yep, if there was no intention to reuse it, it would be able to put 1,000 metric tons into orbit.

The estimated expendable payload to LEO is 250-300t"

If you look at the propellant gauges with no payload, how the heck is it going to be able to take 250t to LEO. It can't even make orbital velocity stripped bare.

Re: Capabilities.

"Seemed like it almost got it's Starlink+ dispenser working which they'll need to complete Starlink."

It took them over 4 minutes to get the door to open, a bit. It then looked like when they commanded it to close, it fell out of the tracks to keep it aligned. There was no dispenser installed on this flight, only a door so that's a non-starter. No in-space engine relight. The Booster exploded 1/2 km up. The Starship couldn't align itself for proper reentry and melted/disintegrated going at nearly its top speed when signal was lost. From the propellant gauge readouts, it's hard to see how there's enough capability for the system to carry a payload, much less 100t to LEO.

Re: "best in the US"

"I flew into Washington DC many years back and wondered why there was no light rail /metro connection to the city. "

When was that? I went to DC in 2009 and took the light rail from the airport into town and out to College Park, MD to visit a friend. I had a friend pick me up for a trip to see the Goddard Space Flight Center where she worked and wondered why there wasn't an extension/stop there. Of all the places where there could be a good public transportation system, Washington, DC should be a very good candidate. I do see the point of the hotels not wanting to grant criminals a fast and easy way to get around. A large portion of the city of Washington, DC is a hellhole and needs a bulldozer school to hold lessons there for a month or so. The sorts that would use a rail system to broaden where they operate aren't paying the fares so there's that problem as well. The cops just make them exit the trains at the next stop when caught. They wait for the next train and continue on.

Re: "best in the US"

"Then there;s check-in times ans "security" at the airport(s) to take into account."

For me, it's a 2 hour drive to an airport with good connections. I need to arrive 2 hours in advance of the flight to park, get a shuttle to the terminal, get past security with my virginity intact and arrive at the gate for "random additional screening" before getting on the plane. I think it takes ~15 to get from the terminal complex to the runway worst case and wait there if there's a line up as is the case in the morning. On the other end, it's a mission to find where the luggage will be dispensed and then finding the carousel that it's changed to at the last minute due to technical issues. Off to the car hire counter and then wait for the shuttle to get to the car assigned with fingers crossed that it's there and correct. Now time to drive to the destination. It's all freakin' day! Unless you live near a useful airport and you are going someplace that's also close to a useful airport, flying might not be the best option. I didn't mention having to fly in the wrong direction to get the airline's hub to catch another plane that takes you to your destination airport. Direct flights these days can be rare. I've also run into the problem of traveling for work and having two bags to check yet the most convenient feeder flights use aircraft too small to allow two full size bags plus carry on. Did I mention that driving can be a really good option?

Re: "best in the US"

"it takes 2 or 3 days and the only passengers are tourists and those who refuse to travel by air (mainly Amish and similar). "

I'd see a lot of Mennonite on the trains.

500 mile journey? I'd prefer to take a train, but driving isn't that much slower than flying if you take into account all of the "not-in-the-air" carp one has to go through these days. I can get close to 500 miles on one tank of petrol if I'm careful and the wind is behind me (not THAT wind!). Mostly it's a matter of the number and frequency of "comfort" breaks and whether I want to eat in the car or not. It's about a 6 hour drive if mostly on interstate highways. 10 hours on small highways and if travel includes streets and lanes, you'd likely not find a passenger airport too close by. I really like the ability to take as much luggage/stuff as I want, not have it "searched" and change my schedule at will. I ended up scrubbing my eclipse journey based on poor weather forecasts (1,200 trip) and flying would have been a poor option anyway. It was two days of driving each way, but I built in some visits to cool places along the way rather than just trying to get a glimpse of same from 35,000' up. I also had options to spend more time on the trip if I wanted. Cancelling didn't cost me much although one campground didn't want to give me any money back even after giving notice 3 days in advance so I'm glad I used my credit card and disputes are dead simple to do online. Had I been flying, I would have been out all of the money as they DO have official policies and without a car to camp in, I would have had to book lodgings a year in advance so there would be no way to get refunds on that.

Re: "best in the US"

"How else can you explain walking 50m behind someone and *still* almost choking on their perfume/deordorant/aftershave?"

I had a girlfriend that poured it on. How do you tell a SO that you don't care for their smell and not spend nights alone? She'd smelled much better fresh out of the shower and I tried to emphasize that with compliments before she got into her morning routine.

Re: "best in the US"

"And so I carried on putting miles on the car, in which I could enjoy being on my own and listening to podcasts while I slowly crawled down the M4 with everyone else."

It would then be a good idea to leave the Land Rover at home and find some high mpg econobox to make the commute in and damn the aesthetics. Decades ago my dad did that. He needed a truck for the ranch, but his day job as a pharmacist was 60 miles each way. He ran the numbers and found that a cheap economy car saved enough in petrol, insurance and tires to pay for itself. A lesson he taught me about how to look at costs and solve problems. I think he still had that car when passed away and didn't get the chance to completely wear it out, but he did factor in some longer term thinking with an engine rebuild/swap when the odometer rolled over. As long as the rest of the car was in good nick, replacing the engine/transmission would have been a good option. Most of the miles were on the highway rather than city driving and there wasn't a lot of traffic where he lived.

Re: "best in the US"

"Outside of the Boston-Washington DC corridor, the population density for effective passenger rail just isn't there in the US."

I see it as a cart/horse problem. People don't look to rail for travel as there is very little. It also tends to 'feature' Chicago as a hub and there's a city that's not as popular as it once was. Scheduling is also a problem. For routes that do have stations in out of the way places, the only train might be planned to be there at 2am, but be hours late much of the time. I wanted to go to the Fully Charged Show in Austin, TX one year from California. To take the train, I'd have to arrive a day or two early and to be there for the whole event, I would have had to leave a day or two past. The added cost of hotel and meals made driving far less expensive. That particular train only visited California 2 (or 3) days each week and stopped service in Arizona or New Mexico the other days.

If Amtrak were given a useful budget, less than what the military can't account for annually, perhaps they could bring rail service into the 21st Century. That would mean more dedicated passenger tracks to minimize delays, cell coverage and trains that could go much faster (not HSR). Flying is an entire day almost regardless of the distance. If a train left in the AM and arrived the next morning, the effective time is nearly the same. A sleeper service is supposed to be offered between Los Angeles and San Francisco. The train will be traveling rather slow but it leaves in the evening and arrives the next morning so those that can sleep on a train like me aren't losing a work day to being strip searched and questioned about why we need to bring sunscreen with us. (I had a bottle that if full would have been too much, but there was only a bit left in the bottom. One TSA inspection didn't find an issue, yet on the return it was domestic terrorism to have a bottle that large on a plane regardless of how little was in it).

Re: Curious what the floppy replacement will be?

"I've never seen a floppy disk zapped by static for instance."

I used to have a ban of magnets in the office so data wouldn't go poof in the floppy era. My thumb drives don't have a problem with them.

Re: As usual, it's cover for taking advantage of old people

"One thing I learned from dealing with them is that paying extra for materials that are warranted for 20 or 30 years is pointless. As a home owner you need to be budgeting for 10 year replacement. "

I'm rather in a good place since I own my home outright. For a few years I didn't have insurance at all and now just have a high-deductible policy that's mainly limiting my risk due to fire or total demolition. I bought really cheap so I could pay off in a short period of time. A traditional 30 year mortgage means having to abide by the loan company's edicts for the whole of that time. I happen to need to put a new roof on, but it doesn't affect my insurance coverage one way or the other as far as I've been told. I own the lots around me so it's a fair distance to the closest neighbor. For my house to catch fire due to a neighbor's house going on fire and tossing embers onto my roof would be a stretch. I'm hoping to do a new roof later this fall and I'll be opting for a steel roof.

Re: A physical visit is a lot more reliable

"there is still a good chance that a solidly built British-style home would provide shelter for occupants."

Not all construction in Britain is equal. What I have noticed on Escape to the Country is that the homes that are centuries old are solidly built and worth updating and extending over time. They are still around because of how well they were built. Some very grand homes that are shown on Revival are actually not built all that well. The maintenance and repairs also might not have been kept up which led to things like the lime mortar getting washed out and exposing the underlying structure to wet/dry cycles and rotting away.

Re: A physical visit is a lot more reliable

"What I wonder is why you don't build more substantial houses? It's not as if your houses cost you a tenth of ours, so there appears to be little to no good reason for this."

There hasn't been a tradition of building those sorts of home in the US on much of a scale. That means that the trades needed just aren't there. For mass-produced homes being run up by a developer, every penny saved and every corner cut is more money in their pockets. The city I live in has had a bit of a building boom and when I look at how these houses are being put together, I'm sure they meet code without too much cash being handed to the inspectors, but not by much. They don't even pre-wire the homes for internet/cable. There's no more landline phone service, but adding cable/Sat TV means those companies will just staple cables to the outside of the house and drill holes through the walls to do the installs as quickly and cheaply as possible. The reason is money. Too many people suffer from the Walmart Effect and are clueless when it comes to quality. It's the price per square foot that rules rather than something that will only need some roof work after a tornado/hurricane.

Re: A physical visit is a lot more reliable

"Chasing money has also lead to the practice of paying your creditors as late as possible, while demanding immediate payment from your debtors. Once again it is the small companies and private individuals who get stung by this practice."

Practiced too freely can also bite the big companies. Lockheed Martin has a test cell that used a product my company made. They played that whole check stalling game with me on some replacement parts and the next time they called, I told them it would be COD or payment in advance. They claimed that they couldn't do either and I told them, "no parts for you, then". As it was a very unique product, I expect they had to completely redesign their test cell to perform the tests a different way since they never called again. Didn't bother me. That product never sold enough to be worth doing and also not worth redesigning to simply and be less expensive to make. I wasn't interested in putting somebody on building the replacement parts and getting paid for them 6 months later.

"Cambridge Analytica scandal"

And that was mainly data that FB normally sells being used without going through proper sales channels and paying the fees.

Re: Predatory pricing

"The author's mention of Verizon charging $5 for SMS messaging is business-as-usual for telcos where service charges have little in common with service costs."

The cost of providing voice services was highly regulated, but not the addons. As a way to improve their bottom line and, therefore, stock price, those addons were billed at all the market would accept.

Re: Land of the Free

"IMO, the FTC needs to add to their list forcing Apple and Amazon to spin off their content production arms."

If they aren't going to go after Live Nation/Ticketmaster for predatory practices to take over the live music industry, how can they go after Apple and Amazon? Apple and Amazon don't hold a monopoly although in specific niches such as audiobooks, the FTC should take a very close look. There used to be in the US limits on how many media outlets (radio, TV, newspapers) a company could control which was eroding over time and completely collapsed under FCC director Agit Pai(d). Cory Doctorow has pointed out that almost no anti-trust litigation/regulation has been done in the US for decades and the companies know it so are back to their old tricks. I'm wary of government singling out or making exceptions for particular companies when it would be more appropriate to work on laws that apply universally or enforce the laws that are already in place.

Re: USA Free Market

"Billionaires should certainly pay more in taxes than they currently do, but if we forced every U.S. billionaire to liquidate their assets and left them all penniless and begging in the streets, it would still only cover about one sixth of the national debt, or half of one year's government spending. Way too many people think taxing billionaires more would solve all of our problems, when it is spending that is the real issue."

There's a big difference between somebody having a billion dollars and somebody with a billion dollars of income. It can also depend on how you do the adding up. Elon Musk keeps getting characterized as the richest man in the world, yet he many actually be underwater given how far Tesla stock prices have dropped. Somebody that does have a billion in assets may not be all that liquid. The largest share of that wealth will be invested in numerous businesses, stock, funds and land. Their actual wealth is going to fluctuate hourly.

The thing that should scare people is government coming for assets and taxing owned things even further. Somebody owning land will be paying taxes on that land and any income it might generate. Why would it be reasonable for government to layer on another tax because that person happens to own much more land than many others? Where does the bar get set and once defined, chances are high it will keep getting lowered until it captures more and more people. It then gets into situations where a family might own a cattle ranch or a sheep farm and the assets might be a fair bit of money, but the income is a borderline loss and all it does is provide salaries. One more tax would mean the family needing to sell land, equipment and livestock to pay the taxes and anybody buying only a portion wouldn't be able to make a go of it since they wouldn't have enough scale. What happens then? Doesn't the government seize the property? What do they do with it as they have created a world where it isn't worth buying and selling it for $1 drives down the value of the surrounding property. The US government has demonstrated that it can't make a go of running a brothel.

Re: USA Free Market

"The thing to remember is that money isn't really real."

It is a means of keeping score. A country that is racking up trillions in debt at a faster and faster pace isn't playing the game very well. There are consequences.