I don't get what you're saying. Let's say I made $300k per year for 10 years, and I knew that's the most I'll be able to make. I could just put 2/3 of that away, which would be $2 million, which could then compound over my entire working life, until I'm 65, and easily be worth the 4 to 10 million you're talking about. That would still leave me $100k/year to live on, which is a comfortable life, and after I retire from football I could still do other jobs to put money in the bank. In no case would I be broke. You're just excusing bad decision-making as if it's oppression. NFL players have every opportunity to live a very comfortable existence. If they don't because their failed high school math, that's only on them. And even if you failed math, financial advice isn't that expensive. Neither is a basic book on personal finance.

It's actually surprising the number of people who get drafted into sports teams who get a signing bonus, and actually take the cheque to a check-cashing place, because they don't have a bank account. And whether or not it's a plutocracy, western nations, and in particular the US, have the most social mobility of any society in history. So while I agree that having money gives you a big head start, ignoring the fact that there are countless examples of self-made millionaires in every generation means you're being disingenuous. Homes are not as affordable as in the past, but even if you have to rent, anyone who can set aside 15 to 20% of their income into a tax sheltered retirement fund will definitely be a millionaire by the time they retire. I just did the math... if you work from age 20 to 65 and only make $40k per year, you live with a room mate so you can afford it, and you put away 16% and get the standard market return of 5%, you'll have a million dollars when you retire. Most people who are dedicated can put a lot more away than this ($40k is a pretty meagre salary now). And that's ignoring that anyone with ambition could stop and start their own small business with the 100k they'd already saved 10 years in, and potentially make much better than a 5% rate of return. This is why underachievers hate the US... their underachievement is staring them straight in their face.

Your point is basically disproven by example after example in the sports world. There's no end to the list of retired ball players who are flat broke 10 years after retiring.

Or more likely this one.

Ok, yes, it appears to be something like this. Interesting.

Does anyone have experience with the devices in the pictures? They kind of look like rack mount switches, but they have all these antennae sticking out. I've never seen a device like that. Is it an off-the-shelf piece of equipment? What are they typically used for?

Can't they all just get a job picking vegetables? Apparently we need lots of those.

This misses the main point. Nobody wants to invest money in the US right now for new capital projects because the tariff situation has everyone on hold. Look at the auto manufacturers... they're not investing in building out new lines or launching new models. They're refurbishing existing lines and maintaining their existing tooling instead. The meta is "keep doing what you're doing until this blows over." That's what's driving the "no hire, no fire" logic. Now with USMCA under renegotiation, this will just take longer and longer to resolve. Expect this to last for years.

There isn't this massive change where suddenly we went from fairies and unicorns to Mordor. Trump himself is far more authoritarian than the US as a whole. We're currently witnessing that tension between Trump (and his supporters) and the existing US democratic institutions. Certain institutions appear to be breaking, others are holding, and most are under significant strain. But compare that to China where Xi runs a cult of personality, shoots any messengers who bring him bad news, and nobody makes decisions themselves at any level without explicit direction from Xi. The US isn't at that point yet. It's *slowly* and *incrementally* moving in that direction. The way to fight it isn't to use emotions and shouting. Nobody listens to that, and everyone tunes out. The way to do it is to 1) acknowledge the people who voted for Trump for practical everyday reasons, and acknowledge their problems, 2) stop being so ideologically captured by academic ideas that the vast majority of people think is weird or doesn't apply to them (mostly identity politics) and then 3) put together a platform that sells a vision of hope for the future instead of the current vision of the end of the world that the left is so intent on selling. Their vision gets lots of clicks, but it doesn't get votes from the mainstream.

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.