The last century is littered with examples of nations with "truly self sufficient" economic policies and explicitly anti/deglobalization - they used to call it anti-imperialism but it was the same goals, same tools. Many were successful on those goals - drastically reducing imports, moving industry production into the country, etc. None succeed in keeping a competitive economy or sustaining (much less improving) quality of life.

To be fair, the old social-democrat experiments did not try the "lets change the tariff every week" approach. Usually they defined a plan and policies stable enough for that local manufacturer to plan, build or upgrade the white-chocolate industry to supply the local demand. The scarcity and empty shelves came at the end of the five-year plan failure, not at the beginning.

Factories do not have to be the main source of employment today - like agriculture did not have to be the main source of employment after the 19th century.

I'll take the "embrace open source" more seriously when they release Surfshark (which they also own) so someone can fix their memory leaks and random "lets show an eternal floating toolbar window... sometimes" bugs.

Congressional staffers alarmed at the impact of AI on congressional staff asks ChatGPT to do their research and extrapolates impact on staff reduction to the general population. Yep, checks out.

No one really knows the skills accenture consultants will need to prove added value on the age of AI. Or if there is any value to add when the LLMMs commoditize the market of generated pabulum.

So they're not really wrong...

There is an inertia to these things - not as many people have planned vacations to Afghanistan as NY or whichever Disneyland.

There is also a ton of business travel in the US, which necessarily translates in direct and indirect tourism spending. That takes an even longer time to migrate if the country is not peripheral to your industry.

If tourism had still been slightly declining or flat since the pandemic this would be bad news. If you account for growth trends it is dire news.

There are only three ways to fund a government: extracting cash from foreign nations (war / tributes), extorting taxes from citizens (income / tariffs / VAT) and debt engineering (monetary / fiscal policies and platinum coins for some reason)

Modern societies are reluctant to pay the cost of blood and threatened violence to reliably extract money from foreign nations.

Democracies are reluctant to pay the political cost of reminding their citizens they are being extorted for taxes.

So elected governments tend to fall back on the monetary games, which conveniently depends only on credibility and sleight of hands and while its subtle enough has little political cost

Unfortunately by the time being subtle is not enough, the political class may not know how to use any other tool. And if you burn all credibility with shenanigans you lose the legitimacy to any of the three toolsets.

This may be a joke but its absolutely correct - 90% of the value of Harvard and most ivy league institutions is in the exclusivity of admission (resume signals), and networking contacts.

Split the value of that however you like but if you drop out after sophomore year to launch a failed startup you're probably getting the most value and ahead of your peers in both costs and long term career opportunity.

I suspect this is a big reason ivy league will be naturally reluctant to drop legacy admissions - its not just the alumni donations, without the implication of old-boys-network-access, newer institutions can be more competitive in value for non-legacy (paying) applicants.

I mean what do you mean there was no material change of circumstances? There was a statue made of gold and corning glass - those are *two* materials

Exempt employees are not paid by hour - they don't get overtime but also you cannot substract for undertime. The whole point is they are hired for the role/job not for hourly output, and as long as they do the job its fine.

You can fire the person for not doing the job, but this is true whether you took 4 small jobs and stretched too thin or you took 1 big job and underperformed.

If he did not lie and did not share confidential data (e.g. outsourcing his job) this not a problem of fraud, this is a problem of lack of accountability for HR / Recruiting (checking references) and managers (supervising the output). Either that or the guy is effective enough to do the work compared to his peers, and then the question is whether they are offering the right job for that skill level.

Employment contracts sometimes specifically outline restrictions on "moonlighting", noncompetes, exclusivity of employment or intellectual property ownership *precisely* because they are not implicit assumptions of "exempt" employees.

Many exempt employees have second and third sources of income - whether thats a side gig, hobbies, volunteer work, consultancy or business ownerships... or for the C-suits being a member of other corporate boards is actually a plus.

If there is some implicit legal obligation on exempt employees to not take second, third or fourth jobs - someone needs to tell Elon Musk.

As a helpful AI assistant, I cannot do NP complete tasks. I can only confidently pretend to do so.

I was going to complain about your typo, but just realized in the context of the US tax spending bill passing the house today it was a clever reference to economic (like health) policy from misused LLMMs.

Bravo. I applaud your subtlety

I don't think it was always intentional,.but computer games are also a great channel for prototyping and UX R&D that pays for itself.

I read this post in the voice of philomena cunk as a "My mate Paul..." quote all the way to the end before I realized you did not intend it that way