> an actual war against China, as if that were a reasonable scenario.
Most modern military planning considers it a foregone conclusion. Whether that's accurate or not is arguable, but approaching discussions of military spending from a perspective grounded in current planning is certainly reasonable.
So .. ICBM nuclear exchange? Or are we suddenly expecting a large conventional war between nuclear powers in which both sides decide not to bother with them?
Military planners may believe it to be inevitable, the interesting question to chase is why they think that and who the aggressor would be and in response to what.
That aside, it would likely be unconvential and ground breaking in several respects, eg: likely the first conflict with a large initial space based element, each country wanting to blind the other, with each having large constellations of satellites.
Killing farout geostationary spy sats wouldn't be visible .. but fragging the entire LEO space with "sufficient shrapnel" to initiate a cascading sat failure should(?) make for an interesting global skyshow.
I'm really frustrated by inflation numbers because there doesn't seem to be a metric that makes sense.
CPI ignores the reality people feel (and swaps in cheaper items that aren't necessarily on par with the original to keep the number lower), gold isn't really a 1:1 with purchasing power...there must be some sort of useful composite metric that merges multiple data points over time like rental/house prices, CPI market basket, dollar vs hard assets like gold to come up with a more accurate number.
The CPI doesn’t arbitrarily “swap in” items. It changes based on consumer behavior. That’s why it now tracks streaming services but not VCRs. Similarly, if the price of Gala apples triples and everyone switches to Fuji, a fixed index would overstate the actual cost of living.
Insofar as gold impacts the cost of things people buy, it’s already included. Adding it directly to the CPI makes no more sense than adding Bitcoin or soybean futures.
The cost of housing is already is a massive component of the CPI.
But if you used to be able to afford steak and now all you can afford is ground turkey, readjusting the basket of goods for that shift in "preference" is just hiding the fact that nobody can afford steak anymore.
And similarly, the hedonic adjustments to smartphones sort of implicitly claim that the $100 cheap smartphone you can buy today is worth $8000 back in 2009 because of how much better processors and memory have gotten. But you can't buy an iPhone 1.0 for $1 to satisfy the need to have a phone that you can install apps onto (and the upgrade cost every few years as cheap phones can no longer run an O/S version that your banking app requires).
The assertion that the CPI simultaneously overlooks downward product substitution and prices in product improvements in order to paint an overly-rosy picture is belied by the fact that most stuff is cheaper than it’s ever been.
Thirty years ago, internet service was $2.95/hour (in 1996 dollars!), long-distance phone calls were 10 cents/minute, and a low-res 28” color TV with 5 channels cost a fortune.
I don't care about internet service, long distance phone calls, or TVs. I care about shelter, groceries, healthcare, and education. I can forego the former, I must buy the latter.
> a low-res 28” color TV with 5 channels cost a fortune.
Uh, back in 2000 (okay not quite 30 years ago, but getting close) I had a 36" Sony Wega which cost around $1500 with DirectTV and hundreds of channels. A 25" to 27" TV was more of a 1988 kind of thing (which is almost 40 years ago now). Being limited to 5 OTA channels was more of a 1980 thing.
But again you can't really buy that Sony Wega anymore, even though the CPI probably prices it at $20 these days.
Back 50 years ago, average household spend on the Internet was also $0, so it was very cheap, we weirdly didn't spend anything on it when I was growing up. Now I spend $80/month on it, and have trouble finding anything cheaper around here.
If you want to consider "communications spend", back in 1988, you might have spent $50/month on your landline, cable tv and newspaper subscription. Today households tend to spend $280/month on internet, wireless and streaming/cable services. That is actually double the CPI. They get lots more for that, but the cost of being an average middle class household has grown at double the CPI. And these days you need the internet in order to keep up with Joneses, it isn't really a choice.
US households faced much higher costs than you recall. According to the BLS, mean monthly expenditures were $44.75 on landline service, $13.50 on cable TV, and $12.33 on newspapers. That’s $70.33 in 1996 USD, or ~$193 in 2026 USD.
More households subscribe to services today, which inflates the "average expenditures" data cited below: 93% of 1988 households had a landline, 53% cable TV, and 63% newspaper. Compare with today's household services penetration: 98% mobile phone, 94% broadband, and 74% streaming media.
You’re right that this is less than the cost of internet + cell + streaming services today — these are ~50% higher than the 1988 bundle — but consider the differences: you can access almost any kind of content from almost anywhere. And you can consume it on a smart phone or TV that costs 75% less in real terms than that TV from 2000.
Meanwhile, real median household income grew from ~$65,130 in 1988 to $83,730 in 2024 — and furthermore, the tax burden on the middle class fell during this period.
You're only going to hear from people who think that the CPI underestimates inflation. If the CPI overestimates inflation for an given individual, they have no reason to comment on it.
> so the Democrats are interested in addressing it
They're not any more interested in addressing it than the existing administration - it's just a talking point like everything else. Ammunition to get elected and then put away in a dark closet.
> If I'm writing an email or a chat message, I will typically have to use a pronoun.
It's not that hard to just avoid it. I send emails to a lot of people I haven't spoken to and don't know their gender, so I write gender-neutral emails.
It's only "out of your way" if you never learned to write gender neutral from the ground up.
In the 1970s and 1980s it was the default in many Commonwealth locales to not assume that (say) Rob Owens writing mathematics and engineering papers was male (as it turns out, she isn't, the Rob is short for Robyn).
So much correspondence was with people who had Initial Surname or abstract handles that didn't broadcast gender.
But if someone has the ability to broadcast their preferred pronouns and we built that in, and it costs nothing, then what's the problem?
I guess I'm just not really understanding people getting upset at what I perceive to be completely made up problems. We have technology, we no longer have to assume gender neutral pronouns for everyone. They can just tell us the pronouns they want.
I cannot see the harm in using a different pronoun or opening up the ability for that - it feels like a fake or imaginary problem that we are creating such that we have something to complain about to make ourselves feel better. If we want to feel better, we should just smoke or something.
How are you going to know the appropriate pronoun on your first email to "jsmith@company.com" or "ppatel@company.com"? Are you going to send an email to ask their pronouns before you send the actual email?
No, I'll probably just use gender neutral pronouns.
But if they reply back and their email footer has "he/him", I'm probably just gonna use he/him and not think twice about it, because I'm a well-adjusted adult.
My argument is that the H1Bs meet the bar to be hired at their respective companies. Neither pool is inherently better but availability matters.
There are only so many American engineers that meet said bar, they are all either employed or choosing not to be employed.
The ones that don't meet the bar are either employed by smaller employers with lower bars that don't use H1B anyway or yes, maybe unemployed or transitioning to a new industry because they couldn't hack it.
The mythical group I am saying doesn't exist is engineers that are somehow perfectly capable of meeting FAANG bar but are somehow being displaced by H1B. That group doesn't exist.
3D printing is probably the easiest entry point in today's world. You can assemble already designed components into a structure and learn about how they work, tweak them for customization, design your own parts to produce, and "graduate" into designing custom printers and printer parts. The Voron and Annex communities have a ton of folks in this space designing everything from cosmetic accessories to novel mechanical components that bring meaningful improvements to functionality (Monolith, for example).
From there you can explore automation like pick n place machines, engraving, CNC plasma/routers, CNC subtractive machines (lathes/mills/etc). Or you can come back towards programming with PCB design and custom firmware.
If none of that sounds interesting, you can pick up an old project car from an MG to a Jeep XJ and everything in between.
The world is huge and getting your hands dirty is a really nice balance to time on the keyboard. The only downside is there's no ctrl+z or ^[u but sometimes that's where you learn the most.
Most modern military planning considers it a foregone conclusion. Whether that's accurate or not is arguable, but approaching discussions of military spending from a perspective grounded in current planning is certainly reasonable.
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