Also we’re looking at periods that involve dramatically different monetary policy (gold standard before WWII, Bretton Woods from 1944-1976, then the current regime).
One could argue that the defining aspect of each of those shifts in monetary policy has been to devalue the dollar further. I have a relatively basic understanding of economics though, and do understand the arguments that even if that's the outcome it's not an inherently bad one as an american, though a notable effect appears to have been massively widening inequality.
It’s not just “us” who built cities to maximize car travel. Everyone did it. Walkable european cities are surrounded by car-dependent suburbs.
The problem with your analysis is that your concept of “useful” is based on a set of priorities in your head that’s almost certainly not shared by the people who prefer to live in car-optimized areas. Cars let you travel in private, on your own schedule, without having to interact with other people. You might not value those things. Lots of people do.
> We can just ban private equity companies from doing this you know.
From doing what exactly? Do you think small businesses are any better about cutting corners for profit? They're often worse because they have worse economies of scale and face more cost pressure.
The other other fundamental problem is that dealing with elderly people often is difficult and unpleasant and what can you really expect from people who aren't related to them? Daycares and preschools are often very loving places because babies are cute and trigger people's nurturing instincts but that's not true of the elderly.
In some parts of the facility, workers are recognized by older folks who are aging with poise. That connection looks mutual.
In other parts, memory care, you are never recognized by the patients. Prepare for combative, confused ill people; your job depends on not treating them like animals.
I see adult children visiting their parent, who doesn't recognize them, and wouldn’t understand that $115,000/year isn’t entirely paid by the state.
Yet daycare costs are also exploding. In both cases it’s not primarily about wages going to the direct care workers—-though steep minimum wage increases are a factor in some jurisdictions.
Reservations are a profoundly evil concept. You’re basically committing to keep around pockets of the pre-industrial societies that existed before America was built. There is no timeline where the reservations in California develop governments and institutions as sophisticated and competent as the State of California. So the best case scenario for these reservations is that they’ll be perpetual dependents on the federal government. But the reality is that you’re condemning the kids born in these places to quasi third world conditions. If they had been forcibly assimilated into the United States back in the 1800s, their descendants would be like the descendants of Spanish settlers who were living in the west when the U.S. annexed that land (i.e. more or less indistinguishable in terms of material prosperity from other Americans).
Reservations have no federal restrictions against development. In fact, they are exempt from regulations that restrict nearby land, which is why casinos are such a common usage.
People born on reservations are US citizens, with full rights and privileges to live and work anywhere in the US they choose, as well as access to capital to start businesses within the reservation (subject to regulations from within the tribal government).
The dependency on federal funds is true in many cases, but some tribes operate such profitable casinos or other businesses that being born a descendant of the tribe is akin to being born a descendant of a Rockefeller or Kennedy.
Sadly, the environmental lobby in California would never allow a substantial amount of land to be fully returned to the tribes. From the article,
> Access and collaborative agreements — and sometimes even land return agreements — come with requirements specifying what tribes can and cannot do with the land. Many require navigating sometimes tricky relationships with land managers who may have different priorities. It’s a ways off from tribes outright holding their homelands as sovereign nations, with the freedom to take care of the land as they see fit; however, these agreements can also help support tribes that do not yet have the capacity to single-handedly manage hundreds or thousands of acres.
When push comes to shove, too many (arguably most) on the left will choose to recapitulate the methods of the "white supremacists" they claim to abhor. Of course, in their mind its because their predecessors had evil intentions, while theirs are pure. But that generally wasn't true--for the most part, albeit with plenty of exceptions, people have always screwed over Native Americans with what they believed were good intentions. The fundamental problem has been substituting their own judgement about what's best for Native Americans, and that judgement will inescapably be self-serving, reflecting their own priorities and expectations.
If people really wanted to right the wrongs of the past, just transfer the land. If the tribe wants to turn it into a nuclear waste dump, or pave it over with asphalt, so be it. Anything else is just the same old oppression, updated to reflect modern mores of the majority. Once upon a time it was about "helping" them integrate with schooling and work programs, whether they wanted to or not; now it's "helping" them steward the land, whether they want to or not. Of course, today plenty of Native American activists do want to steward the land for the cause of environmentalism; but 100+ years ago plenty of Native Americans activists wanted to pursue integration. But when there's no real choice in the matter, it's not really an exercise in granting liberty and autonomy, and history will not look any more kindly on today's flavor of imposed progressivism then it does on yesterday's imposed progressivism.
> Reservations have no federal restrictions against development.
The barrier isn’t restrictions on development. The barrier is being excluded from the developmental trajectory of the United States. Imagine if the treaties had been respected and the reservations had remained as quasi-sovereign nations. They’d be among the poorest countries in the world. Maybe a few with natural resources would be able to export them, but they’d probably be like the African countries that have natural resources which suffer from resource curse.
As it is with the trajectory of semi-integration, we just created a bunch of pockets of poverty for no reason. Think of it in unromanticized economic terms. Imagine Mark Zuckerberg takes over your company and then later builds it into Facebook. If he gave you the option to keep 2% of the company, would you rather have that in pre-IPO Facebook stock, or cash out and go your own way?
If we had privatized whatever land we were willing to allocate to reservations, and fully integrated it into US jurisdiction, then at least the Indians would have gotten some shares of USA Inc. Instead what happened is that, by creating the reservations and encouraging them to maintain their traditional lifestyles, we took the same amount of land, but gave it to them in shares of Native American Inc. Whatever land we gave them was vastly less valuable because it was excluded from the U.S.
>Instead what happened is that, by creating the reservations and encouraging them to maintain their traditional lifestyles
Aside from simply not forcing them to integrate into mainsteam society,
how did mainstream American society over the last 102 years encourage them to maintain traditional lifestyles?
Since the "Indian" Citizenship Act of 1924, every native American born in the US (on a reservation or not) has held US citizenship, free to move anywhere they want in the US just like any US citizen or lawful resident (who is not on probation after having been convicted of a crime). I am tempted to conclude that the main effect of the existence of reservations after 1924 has been to give native Americans the choice between integrating into American society with all the advantages any other immigrant would have (by moving off the reservation) and continuing to live in a jurisdiction administered by members of his or her own tribe (by chosing to stay on the reservation).
Actually the situation is a little more nuanced than that because Washington has disbursed money to the tribes every year, and some of that money goes to benefits (e.g., housing assistance, healthcare (via Indian Health Service), or per capita payments) that tribe members get only if they continue to live on or near the tribe's reservation.
But still, do you stand by your assertion that "you’re condemning the kids born in these places to quasi third world conditions"? Because being able to just move whenever you want to the US legally without even a requirement to inform any authority of the move doesn't strike me as "third world conditions", the essence of which IMHO is the difficulty of becoming a lawful resident of a more competently-run jurisdiction.
The top Mac Studio has six thunderbolt 5 ports, each of which is a PCIe 4.0 x4 link. Each is a 8GB/sec link in each direction, which is a lot. Going from x16 down to x4 has less than a 10% hit on games: https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/sbegpb/gpu_in_pci...
“In the more common situations of reducing PCI-e bandwidth to PCI-e 4.0 x8 from 4.0 x16, there was little change in content creation performance: There was only an average decrease in scores of 3% for Video Editing and motion graphics. In more extreme situations (such as running at 4.0 x4 / 3.0 x8), this changed to an average performance reduction of 10%.”
Oculink is generally faster than TB5 despite them both using PCIe 4.0, because Oculink provides direct PCIe access whereas Thunderbolt has to route all PCIe traffic through its controller. The benchmarks show that the overhead introduced by the TB5 controller slows down GPU performance.
It's not just the controllers; the Thunderbolt protocol itself imposes different speed limits. The bit rates used by Thunderbolt aren't the same as PCIe, and PCIe traffic gets encapsulated in Thunderbolt packets.
Maybe; I'm unable to find any benchmarks that specifically compare PCs with TB to Macs to test this. But there is certainly still overhead with TB no matter what, and therefore it'll never be as fast as Oculink.
Sure, but how big of a difference is there? Even inside a desktop PC, you typically have PCIe ports directly off the CPU and ones off the chipset, and the latency for the latter is double. But the difference is immaterial in practice.
I think latency is the wrong focal point (more important for gaming, plus Macs don't support eGPUs anymore). There aren't a lot of general workloads that require high sustained throughput, but the ones that do can benefit from TB5 scaling.
For instance, if you cluster Mac Studios over TB5 with RDMA, the performance can be pretty stellar. It may not be more cost effective than renting compute for the same tasks, but if you've got (up to) four M3 Ultras with a ton of RAM, you'll be hard pressed to find something similar.
That's still not more ideal than having native alternatives like OCuLink or something that can be networked like QSFP, but it's a fair way to highlight the current design's strengths.
That's just blatantly wrong, the performance loss of GPUs is very well documented and gets worse as you go towards higher end models. We're talking 30%+ loss of performance here.
Sure. And lots of people need all that I/O. But my point is that it’s not like the Mac Studio has no I/O. The outgoing Mac Pro only has 24 total lanes of PCIe 4.0 going to the switch chip that’s connected to all the PCI slots. The advent of externally route PCIe is a development in the last few years that may have factored into the change in form factor.
As weird as this sounds, militarily and strategically, Iraq was a relative "success". I mean not to the thousands or millions harmed or killed by US actions and all the damage done along the way, but Iraq now does a US-friendly regime and it exports oil to the US and a bunch of allies. Should we have done it? No. Was it worth the price? No. But was it a complete failure? Also, no.
Unlike Iraq, there's no way to invade Iran. it's surrounded by mountains on 3 sides and ocean on the third. It's a country is ~93 million people with a regime and a military specifically designed to resist US bombardment and interference. The chokehold it has on the Strait of Hormuz is currently being demonstrated. And there's nothing the US can do about that.
If the leaked terms of the 15 point plan are true (and that's a big IF) and any end to hostilities looks remotely like that, Iran is going to end up in a substantially better position than they had under the JCPOA and sanctions will also likely end. That's now the price of peace.
And in doing that the US has worsened and likely will redefine its relationship to every country from Spain to Japan.
1. Send Marines to seize Kharg island via long range air assault from 2 ARGs + land bases
2. Flood Kharg-adjacent mainland with tactical aviation to eliminate short range artillery and rocket systems
3. Fortify position on Kharg island and declare all oil revenue will be placed in US-controlled holding account, with release to Iran contingent on cooperation (re: Why occupy Kharg? Because then you have actual money in an account as leverage, while calming international oil prices and consumers, not just a blockade, which antagonizes international oil consumers)
4. Declare a buffer demilitarized zone around the Strait of Hormuz
5. Land Marines in buffer zone if necessary to monitor
~50% of the revenue to pay the Iranian military comes from oil exports. Therefore, the Iranian regime doesn't survive without oil export revenue. 90% of Iranian oil is exported through Kharg.
It's an aggressive plan, but it's feasible.
Especially because Iran has no ability to repel an invasion of the island or retake it once it's occupied.
Their only possible reaction would be to bombard troops there, destroying their own export infrastructure in the process.
Which would depend on how close to the mat the current regime wants to take this, as that would also seal their eventual downfall.
"Their only possible reaction would be to bombard troops there, destroying their own export infrastructure in the process."
Right, so if that's their only possible reaction, isn't that a bad thing for everyone? It looks like they've made it clear they're not going down without bringing everyone else with them, and why would they? What options do they have?
I mean they seem to have made it clear by their actions. They're in an existential situation, so its not like there is any reason to hold anything back.
If your opponent is trying to turn you into Libya, then whatever you do just has to not fail as badly as that for it to be the right move. You basically become a cornered animal.
The thing about disintegrating regimes is there is no "they".
There's people with power, looking out for their own self interests. You think after a few more weeks all of the newly promoted Iranian military leadership is going to weigh a few million dollars in personal benefit against the glory of the cause and decide on the latter?
OK, so take this back to your boots on kharg island plan, where this "no they" only has the option of bombarding our troops. Are you saying they also have the option of ... Getting a few million dollars in personal benefit somehow?
The only option they have on offer is death, either fighting the us and Israel, or fighting in whatever civil war crops up after. Why would they believe in any negotiations after the last two times?
> The only option they have on offer is death, either fighting the us and Israel, or fighting in whatever civil war crops up after. Why would they believe in any negotiations after the last two times?
The writing is on the wall that the US wants to end the war (and Israel won't have a choice but to follow). Which means anyone with military command authority in Iran has leverage to extract concessions from the US.
Do either of us think the current US admin is above causing a few million to appear in a bank account somewhere, in exchange for secret cooperation?
Especially when the calculus is between stick (Israeli assassination) and carrot (money), and that substantial personal wealth means power in any post-war Iranian order. Or living as a wealthy expat as plan B.
The point of regime decapitation, to give the Israeli assassinations (especially of internal security force leaders) their most strategically foresighted interpretation (instead of the more likely opportunistic one), is to shuffle people into power that haven't already made a resist vs cooperate decision.
At some point, everyone cares about their own skin and their future most.
> Do either of us think the current US admin is above causing a few million to appear in a bank account somewhere, in exchange for secret cooperation?
> Especially when the calculus is between stick (Israeli assassination) and carrot (money), and that substantial personal wealth means power in any post-war Iranian order. Or living as a wealthy expat as plan B.
No, of course we wouldn't (and I'd say shouldn't) be above that. The question is how that comes to pass.
Imagine you're some sort of Iranian official that actually has some sway in the country.
1) why on earth would you even entertain negotiations, when your enemy repeatedly uses them as cover for sneak attacks?
2) assuming you get past 1), and the us offers you money. If you take it and leave, you don't have any influence in your country anymore anyway, so what have we gained? If you take it and stay, do the people still follow you if you capitulate? And what's to stop Israel from assassinating you anyway, or launching another war 6 months from now?
The only rational move seems to be to establish deterrence by making this thing as painful as possible for everyone involved, and us invading plays right into that.
there is no way the USMC would be able to hold Kharg and the buffer zone without extensive casualties. the buffer zone would be a full-fledged combat zone, non-stop. you'd see Ukraine-at-its-worst levels of drone strikes, and the US military is not equipped to deal with that, not yet.
the Iranian missile stockpile may be drained thin, but their army and conventional equipment surpluses could absolutely maintain a consistent and aggressive pushback.
> Their only possible reaction would be to bombard troops there, destroying their own export infrastructure in the process.
it's already destroyed mate. and keeping it up and running would be a tall order when the Iranians are right there.
> ~50% of the revenue to pay the Iranian military comes from oil exports.
this is a country that convinced children to charge through minefields during Iran-Iraq; you think pay is going to stop them? or that China and Russia wouldn't give them ample weapons?
> could absolutely maintain a consistent and aggressive pushback
With 30+ km systems launchedu from flat terrain, right onshore of US air power? That's the limit of 155mm conventional, and Iran isn't launching gold-plated Excalibur rounds.
That means rocket artillery, either in unguided mode (see next point) or SRBM (of which they don't have an unlimited supply).
Enabling drone strikes at 30+ km over water against US EW looks very different than terrestrial Ukraine too.
> it's already destroyed mate
Citation-needed that the oil infrastructure on Kharg was destroyed.
> this is a country that convinced children to charge through minefields during Iran-Iraq
I expect the zeal of modern Iranian youth for the revolution is dimmed from 1980.
I don’t disagree with any of your assessments, but I don’t know if it’s a bigger mistake than Iraq…yet. That war was a 10 year (longer if you bc point ISIS) debacle that cost trillions.
Let’s wait a few years before saying this mistake is bigger first.
However, one point that I agree with that might lead to this war being worse: the Gulf are showing some serious buyers remorse with sticking in the US orbit. Both the uselessness of America’s strategy and the almost clear prejudice Trump shows towards the Arabs vs Israel in the decision tree of this conflict is unsettling for the Gulf states.
That’s a weird thing to say considering that the Iran hostage crisis helped swing an election almost half a century ago. It’s not like nobody thought about going to Iran until someone bribed Trump to do it.
The far more rational theory is that Trump did it to deflect from his failure to combat inflation domestically. They made an entire movie about his. (Wag the Dog.)
It’s hilarious that the greenies who live in dense urban areas have a harder time charging their EV than folks who live in the burbs. I’m thinking of putting in a second EV charger so I can charge two cars at once.
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