I'm not American, and I'm aware of many of the authoritarian leanings of the current US administration. We're currently living through a test of democratic institutions across the west. Those institutions are holding to various degrees, but barely. But to compare western democracies to Chinese autocracy as if they're equivalent is bonkers. You have to recognize it's a matter of degree.

From the government and military's point of view, this is exactly the reason they want a flourishing free market economy, so that there's lots of infrastructure to call on when they need it. The demand for ships was real, and the market adapted and supplied them. When the demand went away, the market adapted and turned to building other things.

That take is just so far from reality it's bonkers. People with high credit scores tend to a) not take on as much debt, and b) get significantly better interest rates when they do. The last time we switched mortgage providers, our mortgage broker said our credit scores were probably the highest he'd seen in over a decade of doing this, and he went back to the lender and negotiated an extra half percent lower interest rate than what they offered, which was already below prime. Credit score is a measure of risk, that's all. If you're high risk of default, they charge a premium. People with high credit scores tend to borrow money for things that improve their financial situation in the long run: student loans, mortgages, and a car loan for a modest car to get them to work. Maybe a loan to start a low risk business, like an electrician. People with low credit scores borrow money to buy smartphones, TVs, decked out pickup trucks, and even doordash orders. i.e. stuff that has no payback.

It's only this outdated industrial revolution notion that we need to do everything at the same time every day that leads to ridiculous solutions like changing the clocks. Just have different hours for activities at different times of the year. That's all you're doing anyway with shifting the clocks. School doesn't have to start at the same time every day throughout the year.

As an engineer who spends most of my time designing systems that involve both automation and humans working in tandem, you're absolutely right. Any design constraint like, "the operators will just have to do this when such-and-such happens" are doomed to fail if you really need them to do it every time. A good design takes incentives into account. A human will do something if they get something for it. You can't rely on a person to push a button when a bin is full, but you can if they need to push that button to get a label to put on the bin so they can send it down the conveyor. Likewise, it's a good idea to put the "bad part" reject bin at least 3 steps away from where they stand, so they get annoyed if the machine is making bad parts, and that'll get them to call maintenance to fix it. If it's too convenient they'll happily make bad parts all day. Society has the same problem: even though most people want to be good, there are enough people who will just throw trash out their window or dump toxic waste in the river, or just refuse to work and demand a handout, that you need to build a system with incentives and deterrents that reward the people who are contributing, and catch/punish the people who are abusing the commons. While capitalism does a good job of the first, regulations are needed for the second. That's why communism doesn't work. It achieves the second but doesn't achieve the first.

Chinese people aren't stupid. But whenever you try to run your country from a top-down authoritarian style, and especially a one-man show, then you can never be as efficient as the free market. Over in the west we do interfere in the market in order to protect a national security interest or to punish a country that isn't playing by the rules-based world order, but the level of market interference in China is at least an order of magnitude more. They have solar farms built in places with nowhere near enough local industry to use it, and no grid capacity to get it to a market that needs it. Private industry doesn't build stuff like that without some guarantees that they can sell the product. But if you give them government incentives, they're happy to build it and let it sit idle. When my boss was in China visiting a tool & die place, the government literally dropped off half a dozen brand new milling machines for them to use at no charge. That's wild. If you're just trying to grow to catch up, this stuff works, but once you reach market saturation you can't tolerate inefficiencies like that anymore. You need the market to do its thing and find the optimum allocation of resources to meet market demand.

DNF is Dandified YUM. You can still use most yum commands.

Standard time is based on the sun being overhead at noon (or close to it, depending on where you are in the time zone). It's symmetric. There's about as much light before noon as after noon. Nobody says we all have to get up at the same time every day. We increasingly work remotely and have to meet with people around the world. We can figure it out. We've created these stupid anomalies where a user says "show me the events from midnight to 2 am local time" and once a year there's an extra hour of events sprinkled in. Or an extra hour of production on that day, if you work in a factory that runs 24 hours. It's absolutely bonkers.

As a Canadian, I absolutely hate DST. Keep it on standard time. If you want your workers to get up an hour earlier in the summer, change the hours you're officially open! That's all you're really doing anyway.

This page claims over 400,000 recordings but links to a listing of only 187,034 audio files. I'm guessing the discrepancy is the girth of the suit: IA agreed to take down the files that the plaintiffs could prove were theirs and no money changed hands.

Hmm. Lost the end of my sentence there somehow:

And, of course, the companies that are going out of business are also the ones who are least likely to spend time filing out a survey

The BLS monthly numbers are always off when the underlying economy is changing rapidly, because of the "birth death problem", meaning that when large numbers of companies are being created or closed (born or died), the surveys that provide the quick data are guaranteed to be quite far off because the surveys go to companies that are already establish, i.e. those that weren't just born and didn't just die. So when there's a lot of market change, they're sampling the part of the market that is changing less. This means the estimates are off, and the faster the economy is changing the further off they are.

A related issue is that the survey results are only a sample, but BLS needs to extrapolate to the entire population of businesses -- but they don't actually know how many businesses there are in the country, much less how many fit into each of the size / revenue / industry buckets. So their extrapolation necessarily involves some systematic guesswork. In normal, stable economic times good guesses are easy because it's not going to be that much different from the prior year and will likely have followed a consistent trend. But when the economy is changing rapidly, that's not true, so the guesses end up being further off the mark.

Second, it's worse when things are turning for the worse, because of something kind of like "survey fatigue", but not. The problem is that when lots of the surveyed companies are struggling, they're focused on fighting for their existence and don't have time to bother filling out voluntary government reporting forms. It's not that they're tired of surveys, but that they just don't have the time and energy to spare. And, of course, the companies that are going out of business are also the ones w

The phone thing is a red herring, because these BLS surveys are not conducted over the phone.

A new issue compounding the above is that the BLS was hit hard by DOGE cuts and early retirements. They've lost over 20% of their staff, and the loss in experience and institutional knowledge is far larger than that, because the people who were fired and the people who took the buyouts tended to be very senior. So a lot of the experience that would be used to improve the estimates has walked out the door.

Anyway, the core problem is that the economy is going into the toilet, really fast. The BLS didn't break out how much of the 911,000 fewer new jobs were added 2024 vs 2025, but I'll bet a big percentage were after Trump started bludgeoning American businesses with tariffs. Most of that pain won't really be known until the 12-month report next year, because the monthly reports are going to continue underestimating the rate of change. Well, assuming the BLS staff isn't forced to cook the books, in which case we'll just never know.

I'm willing to suffer through the transition, but so help me God, if they come out with a USB-D port right after we finish transitioning to USB-C, then that's it! I'm never doing this again!

No, you just don't understand externalities and the necessary role of government in internalizing them.

Absolutely. We should just apply carbon taxes (and tariffs) to internalize the externality, so the playing field is level, and let the market work.