I think the key to understanding the context is that GDP is a flow, not any kind of accumulation.

If Person A earns $100,000 this year, gets a 4% raise every year, will they be richer or poorer than Person B who earns $120,000 and gets a 5% raise every year, after 10 years? We have no idea, because we don’t know from the question what their starting wealth was, how much they save or spend, whether the stuff they buy retains its value or appreciates or depreciates, etc.

So Russia can have growing GDP, but can still be running its economy into the ground if the stuff they’re producing is getting destroyed, or has no lasting value.

About 40% of that generation was in the military. 8% were drafted, but a lot of the 32% who voluntarily joined did so in order to exercise some control over where they ended up. Even those who didn’t serve, often had to deal with the overall risk hanging over their head, or were actively committing crimes to avoid the draft. The draft might have only directly affected 8%, but the threat of the draft, and people’s decisions around that issue, was a huge part of that generation’s lived experience.

Cars were somewhat cheaper back then, but they were also a lot shittier. Most odometers only had 5 digits because getting it to 100,000 miles was unusual.

Advances in body materials made it so that they no longer disintegrated into rust by the 1980’s, and advances in machine tolerances and factory procedures made it so that cars were routinely hitting 100,000 miles or more by the 1990’s.

A 1969 Plymouth Roadrunner MSRPed for $2,945, in an era when minimum wage was $1.60/hour. That’s 1840 hours worked at minimum wage (46 weeks of full time work), for a car that could probably drive about 100,000 miles, and required a lot more active maintenance.

Now that cars last longer, too, the used car market exists in a way that the 1960s didn’t have. That makes it possible to buy a used car more easily, and for the new cars being purchased to retain a bit more value when they’re sold a few years later.

And that’s to say nothing of fuel economy, where a Roadrunner was getting something like 11 miles per gallon, or safety, back when even medium speed crashes were deadly.

The basic effect, in the end, is that the typical household in 2025 is spending a lower percentage of their budget on transportation, compared to the typical household in 1970.

The golden age for being able to buy and use cheap cars was probably around 2015-2020, before the used car market went nuts.

Page 45 of this PDF has a good chart. It shows that about 26.8 million men were draft eligible in that generation, and about 8.7 million enlisted, 2.2 million were drafted, and 16.0 million never served, including about 570,000 apparent draft dodgers.

About 2.1 million actually went to Vietnam, and about 1.55 million were in combat roles in Vietnam. 51,000 were killed.

So roughly:

• 41% of that generation of men were in the military
• 8% of that generation went to Vietnam
• 6% of that generation fought in Vietnam
• About 0.2% of that generation died in Vietnam

Seriously. The rhetorical shift:

Study of American men’s self-reported political affiliation shows that “moderate” aligns pretty closely with “conservative.”

Headline assigns “moderate” political affiliation to Joe Biden, to suggest that Joe Biden’s policies align closely with “conservative.”

Biden campaigned on being the most progressive president in U.S. history. Did he deliver? Not on all metrics, but whatever it is he did, he wasn’t a secret conservative pretending to be moderate. The most you can accuse him of is being a moderate pretending to be progressive.

“Simping for” is fundamentally different from being interested in the history of. In some cases, quite the opposite.

I spent some time researching the legal frameworks of American slavery, and a ton of time on racist laws between Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, in large part because I think that it is under reported just how racist the origins of a lot of our day to day lives are. So when I’m deep in the weeds on racist history, it’s often because I can see the parallels today and don’t want to reinvent the wheel on stamping out the pockets of racism I actually have the power to change.

That’s the joke. It’s why the price keeps getting marked down.

It’s complicated, and people can have different philosophical approaches to the goals and purposes of criminal punishment. But my argument is that people should be internally consistent in their views. If people believe that the consequences of a crime should be considered when sentencing for that crime, then emotional consequences should count, too, because emotional harm is real harm.

I didn’t think I’d ever agree with Hawley

Hawley represents the future of the Republican party, in my opinion: populist conservatism that is willing to bend on party orthodoxy on how taxes and regulations shouldn’t be captured by big corporate interests, but is just completely abhorrent on cultural issues (and whether the government should be involved in those issues).

In an earlier political era, there would be opportunities for cross-party dialogue on the issues that the parties have deemed non-partisan (where divisions don’t fall within party lines and party leadership doesn’t care that their members hold a diversity of views on), but the number of issues that fall within that category have plummeted in the last 20 years.

Why do we punish based on consequences caused by the crime, then?

A drunk driver is punished much more severely if they hit and kill a person, than if they hit and hurt a person, than if they hit a tree, than if they don’t crash at all.

As long as we’re punishing people based on the actual impact of their crimes, then emotional impact should count.

why evidence rules exist in court.

Sure, but not for victim impact statements. Hearsay, speculation, etc. have always been fair game for victim impact statements, and victim statements aren’t even under oath. Plus the other side isn’t allowed to cross examine them. It’s not evidence, and it’s not “testimony” in a formal sense (because it’s not under oath or under penalty of perjury).

I’d argue that emotions are a legitimate factor to consider in sentencing.

It’s a bit more obvious with living victims of non-homicide crimes, but the emotional impact of crime is itself a cost borne by society. A victim of a romance scam having trouble trusting again, a victim of a shooting having PTSD with episodes triggered by loud noises, a victim of sexual assault dealing with anxiety or depression after, etc.

It’s a legitimate position to say that punishment shouldn’t be a goal of criminal sentencing (focusing instead of deterrence and rehabilitation), or that punishment should be some sort of goal based entirely on the criminal’s state of mind and not the factors out of their own control, but I’d disagree. The emotional aftermath of a crime is part of the crime, and although there’s some unpredictable variance involved, we already tolerate that in other contexts, like punishing a successful murder more than an attempted murder.

Along the same lines, from the same writer/creator, Armando Iannucci, there’s The Death of Stalin. The absurdity of how the inner circle navigated the politics around Stalin, including after his death, is hilarious but also a good look at how these power dynamics work in an authoritarian, despotic government.

Or also from Iannucci, Avenue 5, which basically is set in the future where all of this political nonsense continues, and is in the background of a comedy about a space cruise ship.

Everyone has their own reasons. If you disagree with their management, then you should celebrate other people choosing to leave, even if for different reasons than your own.

How you gonna keep them down on the farm factory (after they’ve seen Paris a school library stocked with books)?

Republicans killed a COVID era $3600/year child tax credit, letting it lapse in 2023 back to the 2018 amount of $2000, which was increased from $1000 as a replacement for the $5050 tax exemption parents used to be able to get before the 2017 Trump tax reforms. For a married couple whose combined income was between $75k and $150k, that $5k tax exemption was worth about $1250, so it was a bad trade for them (or anyone making more).

If Republicans were serious about financially incentivizing having children, they’ll need to support the kids throughout the entire life cycle: healthcare for pregnant women, including through labor and deliver and post partum, support for families with young children (including parental leave mandates), subsidized daycare, good schools, parks and libraries, and economic stability (including in housing costs).

But they’re not, so here we are.

I don’t brush anything under the rug. I actively shared the Tweet that started this hole BS.

I get that. But my point is that you can’t claim that Proton’s CEO is acting independently of the Proton corporation itself when Proton’s official corporate accounts chimed in on his side on this.

Both of the American parties are a shitshow

Not on antitrust. The Biden administration was one of the strongest advocates for consumers on antitrust issues we’ve seen since Robert Bork convinced Reagan to tear it all down.

Anyone who says otherwise is trying to lie to the American public about it, and should be called out for actively advocating for false MAGA propaganda. Andy Yen did it, and Proton agreed with it.

Proton didn’t decide anything, Andy Yen posted ONE tweet and then doubled down on it with the Proton Reddit account which was deleted.

How are you going to say that Proton didn’t say anything and then acknowledge that the official Proton social media accounts were making statements like this:

Until corporate Dems are thrown out, the reality is that Republicans remain more likely to tackle Big Tech abuses

That’s the context you keep brushing under the rug. The official Proton position is not just that Trump made a good choice, on this one thing, it’s that you should vote for Republicans over Democrats.

Yes, it was official corporate Proton position to delete that comment. But it was the official Proton position to make that comment in the first place.

OpenAI’s commercial entity

They should never be allowed to call this a “non-profit”

They never did. The nonprofit parent owned shares in a for-profit subsidiary, which was structured in a way that investors in the for-profit subsidiary could never control the company (the nonprofit would own a controlling share) and had their gains capped at 100x.

Andy Yen went out of his way to criticize Democrats on antitrust, which is how you can tell it’s actually a pro-Trump position unsupported by the actual facts.

I like Gail Slater. She’s possibly the best choice among people who Trump likes, to head DOJ’s Antitrust Division. She has bipartisan bona fides.

But to say that Democrats, after 4 years of Lina Khan leading the FTC, and a bunch of the reforms that the Biden FTC and DOJ made to merger standards and their willingness to sue/seek big penalties for antitrust violations, aren’t more serious than Republicans about reining in big tech consolidation and about stronger enforcement of antitrust principles, completely flips around the history and is a bad faith argument.

Andy Yen could’ve praised Gail Slater, and that would be that. Instead, he took a post by Trump that didn’t even mention Democrats, and made it about how the Democrats are bad on taking on big tech. That’s the problem everyone had with it.