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

The real AI was the CEO... I mean, the friends we made along the way

That is probably part of the motivation - the inventory of original IP to frack-mine from comics is limited, and Marvel movies have not figured out the formula to *evolve* new IP beyond the derivative (besides "hire James Gunn for a movie" which only worked for so long).

Deadpool is peak derivative / self referential humor - which is not a bad thing if excellently executed, but it needs fresh material and new foils. I'm very optimistic about deadpool vs batman on a marvel movie for the same reasons batman is excellent harley quinn's foil - it'd probably be like deadpool2 and x-men.

I don't know what DC will do with this, though - they have not figured out the "derivative exploitation" part outside of parody yet, and on the parody side there isn't much original with this setup the harley brand doesn't cover already.

What are you talking about? The booming tech economy of today rests on the shoulders of giants educated in trade schools to "code" DHTML in Dreamweaver, Coldfusion and Flash during the early aughts. How would the US compete without entry level employees skilled at optimizing the PLT1 / PLT2 for an e-commerce shopping cart?

There is a semi-legitimate argument for CS being taught in highschool - its old enough to have a body of knowledge, and fundamentals that can be taught and transferred across languages / tools. Barely enough.

There is no "AI literacy" curriculum of core skills to teach that will be applicable in 10+ years for a kid in middle of K12 today - creating a required curriculum now would be of limited value and obsolete before it hit the pdf printer driver.

There is a tangential but highly transferrable set of old-but-new skills in math, logic reasoning and data science skills that are very useful on effectively delegating work to AI (or humans), but those are more effectively taught in classical STEM courses.

Moderate republicans and conservative democrats are *not* getting elected in droves. Not within mainstream parties, and not as independents - all the grass roots support is moving democrats further to "the left" and republicans further to "the right".

Conservative democrats and moderate republicans are *retiring* - even when they remain active in politics, because they care about their issues, they are not running tor re-election because they do not see near-future success as *elected representatives*.

There is no *flocking* of significant support for critical thinkers willing to put politics aside for results.

This is not a statement of party loyalty or inertia or whatever - it is an acknowledgement of facts. Party line voters are not the issue, the issue is the voters crossing across party lines or jumping out of the box are not voting for critical thinkers willing to work across the isle.

I wish that were the case, and hopefully that will be the case in the long term, but there is no electoral result or polling evidence anyone is "flocking" that way right now.

Who are these voters flocking to the "independent banner" voting for then? A banner with no leaders or agenda is no banner.

Whenever there is a coherent independent banner, we'd see both third party / independent candidates gaining electoral viability (Nader, Perot, TDR on his 'progressive period'), and establishment parties trying to hijack, or being hijacked by, the growing constituency (tea party, bernie bros).

Conservative democrats and moderate republicans are retiring from politics, not fighting on or starting third-party movements, because there is no active constituency to support them electorally.

The only coherent movements of voters "flocking away" from either party are towards more polarized flavors, which may have started independent but have been integrated into the mainstream and become the litmus test for each party.