I've definitely been in situations where managers tell me to "spend X amount before the end of the year." They don't want higher ups to think they can cut our budget.
"The burn rate is unsustainable: The US fired 850+ Tomahawk cruise missiles in 30 days but purchased only 57 in the FY2026 budget. That is 14.9 years of production consumed in a single month."
Does the author think the US can only make 57 missiles a year?
> Do you think the US has idle capacity that can be activated at a moment's notice?
I'm sure some very smart MBA increased profits by eliminating spare capacity or making cuts that would make it much harder to spin up. That's American business culture: focus on this quarter or this year, nothing else matters.
Indeed, regular drinkers know what to expect as far as pour and price from any given bar. If I drop into a new bar and I feel ripped off then I don't go back. I do the same with burritos.
My understanding, which is to be taken with a grain of salt, is that there's an additional constraint, not stated in the Scientific American article, that the plane curve be irreducible. The example of x^4 is reducible, it's x^2 * x^2 among other thing. The actual conjecture is expressed in terms of genus, but this follows from the genus-degree formula.
The reason for the confusion is that a smooth, projective plane curve of degree d has genus (d-1)(d-2)/2, which is 2 or greater starting at d=4. Hence the phrasing in the article, which is missing the “smooth, projective” hypothesis. The equation y = x^4 doesn’t define a smooth curve when extended to the projective plane, because it has a singularity at infinity.