I see what you are getting at but I have to disagree with alot of what you are saying.
> the US will find itself in the same position the UK is in now
The US and UK are totally different animals at the height of their "empire". The UK currently has little land and alot of it is devoid of minerals(sans coal). They achieved most of their might subjecting other countries and extracting resources from their colonies. Once the colonies and the rest of the world objected the British empire began to crumble as the colonies broke off from the UK.
Contrast that with the US which if it were to jettison its "colonies" (Puerto Rico, Samoa etc) you would see very little drop in GDP. The US has vast swaths of land which is excellent for farming, energy extraction and contains valuable minerals. It has widespread and diverse populations with wildly different ecologies and climates. In addition to a huge amount of resources it has a kings ransom of some of the best universities in the world(stanford, harvard, MIT, etc) and a highly educated society with living standards just below some small asian and european countries. The US also has a peerless military (we need hypersonic weapons however) and many aircraft carriers and nukes as well as world renown special forces groups. And lastly of the top largest 100 companies in the world, 65% are US based and this despite the US only having 4.2% of the worlds population, looking at GDP per country is almost comical as the US has 30T compared to the next largest economy China(19.5T), 3rd place is Germany at 4.9T.
Lets say a nike shoe costs $120 or so today(searching air jordans in google lists a huge number of shoes at that price point), in my mind this is quite cheap as I wanted a pair of Air Jordans in 1990 and they were the same price, $120 for kids shoes roughly 35 years ago. Adjusted for inflation thats roughly $303 USD in 2025 dollars. So basically through outsourcing manufacturing to China and supply chain efficiencies Nike has brought down their product price by roughly 1/3.
Another thing to think about is the insane amount of money offered to athletes in sponsorship deals, I believe Jordan was one of the first athletes to command big money from a company(they made a movie about it a few years ago). This cost paying hundreds of athletes millions a year is a huge cost on Nikes bottom line.
In addition to the sponsorships some athletes have profit sharing (Jordan for sure) so a percentage of sales go to said athlete. Throw in marketing and you have another huge cost.
Would I rather see manufacturing jobs come back to the US and Nike curtail sponsorship money and profit sharing, hell yes. This is easy money to get back and would bring tens of thousands of jobs back to this country, if people were snapping up air jordans for the equivalent of $300 a pair back in the 90's they will do the same in this day and age. And if don't want to cut back sponsorship money, just raise the shoe prices, things are really really cheap compared to what they cost 30 years ago and Nike would still make a hefty profit.
Fun fact - I always buy new balance shoes that are made in usa, they sell both outsourced and domestic production and would rather have my money go to a US worker. At the very least I hope to see other companies do this so I have a choice, most give no choice and force consumers to buy Chinese made products.
> The things that dominate middle class budgets: food, housing, medicine, education, are surprisingly local, and have become increasingly unaffordable in recent decades even as economic numbers have gone up.
Really you have to split goods into two categories, stuff that has no geographic ties(alot of these goods manufacture has been outsourced to asian countries and low wage countries) and stuff that is tied to a location, think Mexican tequila or Swiss watches.
The first category is more tied to the middle class and I could alot of the manufacturing coming back to the US due to cost. The second category cannot be made in the US and buyers will bear the brunt of the cost runups.
The stuff in the first category that is going to be hit hard with tariffs is by and large big ticket items like cars and electronics, and conversely the really cheap plastic junk that is ubiquitous at dollar stores. I think the days of 50 inch flat screens for a few hundred dollars are gone. In addition cars sold in the US(US made brands and not foreign companies) have alot of their supply chain in either mexico and canada but the middle class is not buying alot of newer cars - average age of a car is reaching the longest ever due to cars jumping in cost the past few years.
I see this really hurting high income americans alot more, new cars especially European luxury are going to be quite expensive, alot of expensive wines and liquor will jump in price, jewelry and luxury handbags will also be alot more expensive.
This is a fantastic comment, I wholeheartedly agree with your assessment on Angela Ahrendts. What was once a magical experience going to a apple store has devolved into a nightmare. A few reasons why:
- The complete removal of spontaneity of the shopping experience. You wander over to look at a laptop and decide you want to buy it. Asking a employee is disagreeable as most have a ear bud in their ear receiving instructions or messages from who knows what, they hurriedly ask if you made an appointment or placed the order online and then rush away and sometimes return.
- Such a heavy emphasis on online booking for every conceivable issue. If you want a genius bar appointment you are angrily told you need an appointment and such an appointment is only available days or weeks away and at a inconvenient time for someone with a 9-5 schedule(Tuesday at 2pm work?).
- Last years accessories are gone. Try finding a iphone case that was made for a phone you bough 7 months ago and an employee looks at you like you are trying to buy a model T - (Wait you are looking for a iphone 15 case, wow thats a really old model, I don't think we have anything for that anymore).
- Insane levels of crowds, I can't think of the last time I saw a apple store open in the past 6-7 years that didn't have crowds inside the store like disneyland with service dogs, screaming kids and grumpy boomers yelling about how to transfer their grandkids photos from a phone to computer, just a terrible experience to deal with.
I bought the first iphone in 2007 and have had a model for almost every two years and have been going to the apple stores since then, and the past few years have seen a huge drop in customer experience due to alot of the issuses I listed above.
agree, firing ion beams to make the mirror perfect one molecule at a time(they are declared the most precise mirrors on earth). This stuff is beyond wild. Not that I believe this stuff came from alien technology but if anything could be said to have not originated on earth this would be a strong candidate. And barely a hundred years ago we just figuring out flight at kitty hawk and now you have technology like this, its really amazing.
I'm fine with news outlets having paywalls to keep the lights on and provide great journalism. Where I wish things would change is having paywalls on articles years old that are no longer relevant to todays news.
Also during that heyday Cisco planned a sprawling south bay campus that was going to cost a fortune and house tens of thousands of new employees.(I lived between cisco's HQ and the proposed new campus during that time. The dotcom bubble burst and the campus never saw the light of day.
A similar more recent parallel is Google's San Jose village, it was going to be constructed in 2020 and after and also house thousands of google employees along with mixed use commercial, I lived in Willow Glen at the time and people were buzzing around this new campus and all the new economic activity it would provide. In the back of my mind I remember Cisco's endeavor and felt like this new village would meet a similar fate of implosion. And sure enough the pandemic hit and the village project hit the breaks, most likely never to return. Having big office projects in San Jose with the leading market tech companies is something akin to invading Russia, you always fail. /s
I contributed to one company(intuitive machines) by buying their stock a few weeks back, they are public - ticker is LUNR. They have a moon mission going on as this is written and plan to touch down on the moon 3/6/25 and drill for water(look for IM-2 mission). Last year they were the first private company to send a lander to moon and made headlines due to the missions success. So for me its profitable and I get to contribute to interesting science.
I don't think you understand my issue with this persons pay(and not theirs but alot of city workers). I am fine with a private company paying out of their profits any amount they deem reasonable to a retired leader. Where I have the issue with this is his retirement is bankrupting the entire state/county/city(this is in California) and depriving working productive citizens vital amenities. Having a $300k per year pension is beyond extravagant and is not needed to sustain a healthy lifestyle. I mean looking at tax returns and income brackets that would put his retirement salary(not including 401k and social security) well into the top 5% of all earners and he is not even working.
My Dad's friend is a retired fire chief, my Dad told me he makes $300K a year in retirement! That is beyond insane as it ends up costing (with a retirement at say 55) about 30 or so years of payments which adds up to $9M for the reminder of his life. This is clearly not sustainable and when you add up social security and 401k it ends up with a kings ransom for a public servant.
I like his spartan review but really don't like the Fremen mirage article. With Bret Devereaux he uses the classic ideal of - if all you have is a hammer then all your problems are nails. In this instance he is using the Roman history "hammer" to subdue all issues he disagrees with the Fremen mythology.
I don't think his fremen analogy of tying fremen to contemporary Roman era barbarian tribes works well at all. If you read Dune and know alot about it(I do) fremen would not be a good analogy for alot of the barbarian tribes Rome encountered during its empire formation. For one the whole timeline on the encounter is quite wrong. With Rome you have a very large and technologically superior civilization that encounters and conquerors tribes relatively quickly. After the tribe is subdued they are now part of the empire and must pay tribute through taxes and military service. They do get the added benefits of Roman protection and those that defy the empire and put down quickly and brutally. Aside from this you have religion and technology. The tribes do not have a unified religion and after conquest stuck to their beliefs for the most part but slowly took on the occupiers beliefs. As for technology you have a vastly superior technology(iron age) in Rome meeting bronze age technology which was defeated by iron age Roman technology.
As for the Fremen they are a society apart from the empire and house Atreides and Harkonnen. They live on the world Arrakis in great numbers but do not need to pay any tribute or taxes and are viewed with suspicion by the leaders of both houses(brutally by the Harkonnens). The houses and the empire just want the spice melange and do not really care about integrating the fremen peoples into the empire and using them in other worlds for various jobs. The houses controlled Arrakis for at least 1 thousand years(unsure exactly how long) and there is a quite distinct culture between the occupiers and occupied. With religion you have a unified religion that the Fremen adhere too(discretley influenced by the Bene Gesserit), and fremen technology it is not all about knives and fists. The Fremen control sandworms using hooks and ropes(no other people in the universe know or can do this) and also Paul Atreides introduces the fighters to the sound weapons his house has developed.
I think the more apt comparison of the Fremen is the peoples of Afghanistan. Here you have a people that have never really been conquered, they all tried: (Alexander the great, Soviets, USA) that have a unified religion(Islam) and use contemporary technology(ak-47, missile launchers etc) to achieve stunning military victories against a much larger more powerful foes and occupiers. So the Fremen ideal is not a mirage you are just looking at the wrong cultural comparisons.
I have the forerunner watch as well, and also the inReach personal gps. Both are quite rugged and the forerunner's metrics collection is great if you want to see your health progress ie. VO2 max and other key metrics. The inReach is for me a life insurance policy in case I twist an ankle out in the middle of nowhere and can flag an emergency responder. I would not part with either device and pay the monthly subscription to the inReach device for years now.
Unsure what planet you live on but I would love to visit. Here on earth in the US it has been absolute hell incarnate the past 4 years with non-stop tech layoffs since 2022, soaring prices on everything(housing, food, insurance etc), crime/lawlessness on orders I have never seen and huge wars that have spawned in the middle east and Russia/Europe. Lets list all of the things that have happened since Biden/Harris and then tell me why people are flocking to Trump:
- Forced vaccine mandates that have workers fired from their jobs if they do not comply even though it was obvious at the time that getting a covid vaccine does not prevent the spread of the virus(9/2021).
- Huge payouts to illegal immigrants on the order of $450k per family(11/2021)
- Homelessness at record high (12% increase from 2022 to 2023).
- Botched rollout from Afghanistan that humiliated the US and led to 13 US service members deaths and lasting shame for the country on the world stage. (8/2021)
- Housing affordability hits record low in 2023 - 98.2 (only 15% of homes for sale are affordable to the average household. (2023)
- Biden shocks the nation and viewers and says behind a blood red facade that republicans are a threat to democracy (9/2022)
- Colorado and a few other Dem states try to get Trump taken off the ballot in what is deemed a affront to any reasonable democracy and is swatted down 9-0 by a united supreme court (12/2023)
- Legal warfare with anyone who disagrees with the sitting administration see Eric Adams Dem NYC mayor who complains about immigrants "will destroy NYC"(9/2023) and then the FBI then launches a full scale investigation into his administration(9/2024). Also see a myriad of accusations against Trump by Alvin Bragg who when running for office is running on the platform of "getting Trump"(12/2021). This is stuff that is typically seen in a totalitarian regime and it has shocked Americans from both political spectrums.
I was going to say the same thing. There is nothing "deep" about this history, the article is a string of poorly connected events that still try to bring up the spectre of wrong ideas that came out in the 60's tying Samhaim to our modern Halloween which has been refuted many many times. I am sorry but bonfires are not really associated with modern Halloween and just because ancient persians used them does not meaningfully tie that in with trick or treating, ghouls and ghosts. Even this actual line sounds nothing like our modern halloween:
> A 12th-century Irish source records a week of feasting during this time, when “there would be nothing but meetings and games and amusements and
entertainments and eating and feasting" (sounds fun!).2 There is talk of
kindling sacred fires, and of spirits and ghosts wandering the earth. But very little detail.
This sounds more like Thanksgiving (or fall festivals Oktoberfest etc) than halloween.
yeah this is a classic "puff piece" not really about the engineers themselves but a subtle advert for google for being a place where geniuses work. They (and nytimes, wired etc) do the same thing with Geofrey Hinton and a few other key engineers. Matter of fact it happens at other companies as well and unsure if its something the company pays for or something else.
I am looking at the numbers from operation downfall that Truman and senior members of the administration looked at which had between 500,000 to 1,000,000 lives lost on the US side for a Japan invasion/defeat. 406k US soldiers lost their lives in WW2 so that would have more than tripled the deaths from its current numbers. And as for WWI and British casualties which I mentioned earlier, the British lost around 885k troops during WWI so US would have exceeded that number even on the low end of casualties.
> There was no nuclear weapons race; once it became clear that Germany had no chance of building atomic bombs, several scientists left the MP in protest
You are forgetting Japan in WWII and given casualty numbers from island hopping it was going to be a absolutely huge casualty count with US troops, probably something on the order of Englands losses during WW1. Which for them sent them on a downward trajectory due to essentially an entire generation dying or being extremely traumatized. If the US did not have Nagasaki and Hiroshima we would probably not have the space program and US technical prowess post WWII, so a totally different reality than where we are today.
Agree, Zuck has zero integrity and I think he sees the tea leaves in where things are headed in November and is trying to say he was bullied into making alot of disastrous decisions that he and he only ordered for an administration/party that he personally donated $400M+ to.
So is the 30% fatality rate for humans or horses? The article does not make this clear at all. On a side note for the past few years we have been spraying for mosquitos(using a pest control firm to handle this) from mid spring to late summer and have had zero issues with being outside in backyard. I think alot of people do not know about this option and think the only option for summer months is a hellscape of mosquitos and bites.
> the US will find itself in the same position the UK is in now
The US and UK are totally different animals at the height of their "empire". The UK currently has little land and alot of it is devoid of minerals(sans coal). They achieved most of their might subjecting other countries and extracting resources from their colonies. Once the colonies and the rest of the world objected the British empire began to crumble as the colonies broke off from the UK.
Contrast that with the US which if it were to jettison its "colonies" (Puerto Rico, Samoa etc) you would see very little drop in GDP. The US has vast swaths of land which is excellent for farming, energy extraction and contains valuable minerals. It has widespread and diverse populations with wildly different ecologies and climates. In addition to a huge amount of resources it has a kings ransom of some of the best universities in the world(stanford, harvard, MIT, etc) and a highly educated society with living standards just below some small asian and european countries. The US also has a peerless military (we need hypersonic weapons however) and many aircraft carriers and nukes as well as world renown special forces groups. And lastly of the top largest 100 companies in the world, 65% are US based and this despite the US only having 4.2% of the worlds population, looking at GDP per country is almost comical as the US has 30T compared to the next largest economy China(19.5T), 3rd place is Germany at 4.9T.