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Drug offenders never accounted for a particularly large fraction of the U.S. prison population, peaking at about 22 percent of state prisoners in 1990.
And I think radios are really, really key to the whole story because there is no denser radio network anywhere in the world, including the United States, than Germany in 1939.
And so, one of the reasons why you have this narrative that Britain was a bit rubbish and hanging on the shirttails of the Americans and all the blood was spilt in eastern front and Germany had the best army in the world and was only defeated because Hitler was mad and blah, blah, blah, that kind of traditional narrative, that narrative emerges through the prism of what was going on in the 1970s and what was going on in the 1980s and the changing world, rather than looking at it through the prism of the late 1930s or early 1940s.
And while it is still seen as a predominantly American show, all three service commanders are British. Two-thirds of the aircraft are British. Two-thirds of the men landed are British and Dominion.
Nor do I do many promotional emails (this is the first in nearly a year), but if you want to provide some indirect support, and get what I sincerely think to be a very good book while you’re at it
this story tells us how an increase in foreign demand to save in the US rather than at home will push up the dollar, and cause the trade deficit, which is in effect how foreigners send us factories which they would rather build here than in their own countries.
In sum, spurred on by the federal government (in many ways), the US borrowed a huge amount from foreigners at very low rates, and went on a consumption binge. Sooner or later we have to pay it back, or we go though the wrenching adjustment of a debt crisis.
Persistent U.S. trade deficits are an epiphenomenal mirror to our persistent capital account surpluses, which are in turn downstream of the beggar-thy-neighbor industrial policies of countries like China and Germany.
That’s because America has an amazing consumer supply chain, one of the best, if not the best in the world, but this is totally different from having an industrial supply chain.
The old relationship we had with the United States based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation is over.
A unique lens on work in the late 90s that still resonated when I read it in 2018. It's a soulful exploration of how to maintain your humanity, creativity and inner fire in environments that often prioritize conformity and efficiency.
The longevity of that consensus is itself remarkable: in 79 years of data, Republican presidents spent an average of $34 billion a year on aid, while Democrats spent $40 billion.
Even as GDP has grown tenfold, US aid budgets have remained basically flat in real terms—the result (one might guess) of a delicate balancing act between bipartisan consensus among elites and a wariness of attracting too much negative attention.
Interesting thing is certain regions of the US transmitting power cost more than actually generating it because the grid is so slow to build. And the demand for power, and the ability to build power, and re-ramping on a natural gas plant or even a coal plant is easy enough to do, but transmitting the power's really hard.
One is ByteDance, arguably is the largest smuggler of GPUs for China. China's not supposed to have GPUs. ByteDance has over 500,000 GPUs. Why? Because they're all rented from companies around the world.
And so going back, can the US build it here? Yes, but it's going to take a ton of money. I truly think to revolutionize and completely in-source semiconductors would take a decade and a trillion dollars.
FLOP is the vector that the government has cared about historically, but the other two vectors are arguably just as important. And especially when we come to this new paradigm, which the world is only just learning about over the last six months: reasoning.
We know that a lot of the American companies are very invested in safety, and that is the central culture of a place like Anthropic. And I think Anthropic sounds like a wonderful place to work, but if safety is your number one goal, it takes way longer to get artifacts out.
until there are feedback loops of open source AI, it seems like mostly an ideological mission. People like Mark Zuckerberg, which is like America needs this and I agree with him, but in the time where the motivation ideologically is high, we need to capitalize and build this ecosystem around, what benefits do you get from seeing the language model data?
AI competition needs to be tempered with a recognition that China isn’t going away as a player in AI, and that coexistence must also be a part of America’s strategy.
After years and years of illegal and unconstitutional federal efforts to restrict free expression, I also will sign an executive order to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America.
America will be a manufacturing nation once again, and we have something that no other manufacturing nation will ever have — the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on earth — and we are going to use it.
I think it's always going to be hard to pull off because I think Americans and their elected representatives don't want to provide a universal benefit. They want to provide a targeted benefit because they believe there's a moral component here.
Stabilizing factors such as the global demand for U.S. dollars and debt denominated in its own currency suggest an era of fiscal dominance in the U.S. that's less dramatic than alarmists predict but more persistent and intractable than optimists hope.
For one thing, typical deposit accounts in the U.S. are actually credit products. It's baked in and can't be baked out without making them unfit for purpose.
I think religion in South America began in the Amazon. I think there were people there, very old. Actually, the earliest pottery in all of the Americas, all these places that we have civilizations that grew up, you know where the oldest pottery is? The middle of the Amazon.
I think that the Spanish and the Portuguese get unfairly maligned in what’s been called the Black Legend, that they just marched into America and murdered everyone. That’s not the fact. It was the diseases that murdered everyone.
In fact, strangely, the majority of plants that are actually psychotropic, not just mood altering, are from here in the Americas. There are very few drugs that will make you hallucinate outside of the Americas.
but what they built were pyramids. They look like mounds now, and they didn’t build them out of stone. That’s kind of our just inherent western bias. Something that’s built out of stone is sophisticated, and something that’s built out of dirt is rudimentary.
One of the fascinating things that DNA is showing us, which actually blood types were showing us way before that, is that the oldest people in the Americas are in South America, the ones that got separated early and didn’t mix their DNA, like the people in the Amazon.
Shipbuilding is labor intensive, and we see a repeated pattern of it moving to countries with low-cost labor: from Britain to Japan, then to Korea, then to China.
Some audiobook recommendations: The Story of Civilization by Durant Iliad (Penguin Edition) The Road to Serfdom by Hayek American Caesar by Manchester Masters of Doom by Kushner The Wages of Destruction by Tooze The Storm of Steel by Junger The Guns of August by Tuchman
Some audiobook recommendations: The Story of Civilization by Durant Iliad (Penguin Edition) The Road to Serfdom by Hayek American Caesar by Manchester Masters of Doom by Kushner The Wages of Destruction by Tooze The Storm of Steel by Junger The Guns of August by Tuchman
Some audiobook recommendations: The Story of Civilization by Durant Iliad (Penguin Edition) The Road to Serfdom by Hayek American Caesar by Manchester Masters of Doom by Kushner The Wages of Destruction by Tooze The Storm of Steel by Junger The Guns of August by Tuchman
Some audiobook recommendations: The Story of Civilization by Durant Iliad (Penguin Edition) The Road to Serfdom by Hayek American Caesar by Manchester Masters of Doom by Kushner The Wages of Destruction by Tooze The Storm of Steel by Junger The Guns of August by Tuchman
Some audiobook recommendations: The Story of Civilization by Durant Iliad (Penguin Edition) The Road to Serfdom by Hayek American Caesar by Manchester Masters of Doom by Kushner The Wages of Destruction by Tooze The Storm of Steel by Junger The Guns of August by Tuchman
Mind candy fantasy for younger readers, in which Mr. and Mrs. Middle America's beloved adoptive daughter turns out to be from Somewhere Else, which comes calling. It's very fluffy, which I was in the mood for, and Wrede is always reliably enjoyable.
And so yes, the era when Europe bought its energy and fertilizers from Russia, had its goods manufactured in China, and delegated its security to the United States of America, is over.
Based on public commercial data that tells a lot about the military potential of these dual-use robotic spacecraft, we have shown that China can manufacture and deploy 200 such spacecraft as early as 2026, enough to cripple critical US satellites in geosynchronous, highly elliptical, and other orbits, and thus severely degrading space support to wartime operations.
So you don’t have wise decision makers. Long gone are the days where we had presidents who had advisors on both sides of the aisle. That’s really important, because you want to have differing opinions. But as things become more viperous, both here in the United States and in nuclear armed nations, all bets are off at whether your advisors are going to give you good advice.
there is an absolutely existential flaw in the system, which Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta confirmed with me, which is that our ICBMs do not have enough range. If we launch a counterattack against, say, North Korea, our ICBMs must fly over Russia. They must fly over Russia.
So, in addition to the Launch on Warning concept, there’s this other insane concept called Sole Presidential Authority. And you might think, in a democracy that’s impossible, right? You can’t just start a war. Well, you can just start a nuclear war if you are the commander in chief, the President of the United States. In fact, you’re the only one who can do that.
Because we have that policy, Launch on Warning, which is exactly like it says. It means the United States will not wait to absorb a nuclear attack. It will launch nuclear weapons in response before the bomb actually hits.
Nelson Villoria estimates that for every 1% gain in Total Factor Productivity (inputs required per unit of output) in the US, croplands in the rest of the world shrink by 0.7%.
My understanding is there are Nazis in Ukraine and there are supporters of white supremacy theories, but also my understanding is that they are extremely marginal and they are more marginal than the same sort of groups are in Central Europe, maybe in the U.S. as well.
The United States of America didn’t want the Soviet Union to collapse and disintegrate. They didn’t want that at the start of the Cold War in 1948. We now have the strategic documents. They were concerned about that, they didn’t want to do that. And certainly they didn’t want to do that in the year 1991.
The problem is the defamation law in the US is so favorable to the publisher, to the media, and so unfavorable to the victim. And the incentives are all wrong.
A friend of mine sent me Christopher Rufo's book, America's Cultural Revolution, which is sort of a sociological study of the origins of the DEI movement and critical race theory. I found it actually one of the more important books I've read and also I found it quite concerning. Ultimately, DEI comes out of a kind of Marxist socialist way to look at the world.
China built half of the world’s ships (by gross tonnage) in 2022, while the US had 0.2 percent of capacity: in practice, this meant that while China builds hundreds of new ships a year, the US builds three to five.
So it feels to me that the US is treating its deficiencies — an inability to build stuff or create a functional system for admitting high-skilled migrants — as mysteries to be endured rather than problems to be solved.
According to my numbers, in the United States there will be a net of 3.24 million new low-skill jobs, but there will also be 4.7 million fewer people in the labor force.
A lot of people think that to make deterrence work, you have to be able to beat the Chinese and therefore, you need a much bigger military. And I don't think over time that's possible. I think it's probably not even possible now to beat the Chinese in a war over Taiwan or in a war in the South China Sea.
The Chinese are my kind of people. They're realists, right? They speak my language. It's the United States that is not very realist. American leaders have a very powerful liberal bent and tend not to see the world in realist terms.
So our argument is that the lobby is not doing anything that's illegal, or illicit, or immoral, or unethical. It's just a good old-fashioned American interest group. And it just happens to be extremely powerful.
Well, what's good for the goose is good for the gander. And if we don't like great powers coming into our neighborhood, it's hardly surprising that the Russians did not want NATO on their doorstep.
All the evidence is that Hispanics are integrating into the American mainstream more quickly and more effectively than the European immigrant groups that came starting around 1835.
Yet solar development is hopelessly snarled by dozens of different development regulations which begin with the assumption that it will permanently and severely harm the environment unless proven otherwise, at exhaustive length.
The terrorist attacks on 9/11 killed 2996 people in a day of singular horror. Our ongoing indifference to regulatory inefficiency, considering only the area of green energy development, kills more people every year – more than 10 people per day, and that’s only within the US.
After World War II, the US could have basically taken over the world in any country, we’ve got nukes, nobody else has got nukes. We don’t even have to lose soldiers. Which country do you want? And the United States could have taken over everything and it didn’t. And the United States actually helped rebuild countries.
Bryan Washington's novel Family Meal: Bryan is the great millennial fiction writer of food, among many other talents. His descriptions of cooking and meals are fantastically rich, as much for the food itself as for the social and emotional exchange involved.
You can’t change the United States from a country that builds subways for $2 billion/km in New York and $1 billion/km elsewhere to a country that does so for $200 million/km if all you ever do is talk to other Americans.
As I’ve argued before, the so-called “objective standard” can be very difficult to administer in this big diverse messy country where we often don’t share a common sense of reality and there is no uniform “reasonable person.”
It’s not exactly news that the American government’s support for biofuels increases food prices, intensifies global hunger and wastes taxpayer dollars.
This is not about precarity, because this is not a precarious project; this is about total ignorance and incuriosity about best practices, which emanate from a place that doesn’t natively speak English and doesn’t trade in American political references.
Absolutely. It is incredibly enjoyable and readable. The authors, in a way that is very rare for economists, find small stories that paint big pictures for the points they make.
In my opinion the root cause of this bug is that when a white american developer sees a terminal they immediately interpret it as this idealized cartesian plane where they can lay out any writing they want in neatly-spaced characters that behave in "predictable" ways (in other words, behave exactly like English).
This 1992 book changed everything about my life. It’s my Bible. Most of my beliefs come from it. I read it many times at a formative age, but re-read it now 30 years later, taking notes. It’s not a perfect book. It’s too verbose and full of expired American references. But its core messages are the wisest, most effective life philosophy I’ve ever encountered. You choose how you feel. Your emoti…
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one
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