Fun bit of historical perspective. Back when I was a lad, I had an internship at Raytheon. We were putting together a proposal for the Mode Select Beacon System, one of those transponder things which would allow controllers to see which planes were where. The back end was to be of the art. We were going to build a custom system based on mirrored 68020 processors (we got a few pre-release samples to play with) and a butterfly processor-to-processor interconnect and a purpose built OS.

I don't think Raytheon's bid won because I never heard of the project ever again. Too bad, it would have been cool.

Hopefully the flying public, who will get a safer, more robust, and more predictable flights. We seem to always look at costs and never at benefits to the end consumer.

Alternatively, we could privatize ATC like like Canada and Europe, the bastions of state provision, and get an even cheaper and more robust system.

And you have to ask yourself, "which is more plausible? That the Air Force made up stories to cover for a program we know they were running? Or that aliens traveled an unimaginable distance using unimaginable technology, only to let themselves be captured?"

Remember when four on the floor was normal and a five-speed was new and cool?

And remembering the other direction, a friend of my brother let me drive his car with three on the tree. That was and experience.

I'm glad I know how to drive a standard transmission. I personally don't miss it. My daughter asked me a while ago to teach her how but maybe that window has closed.

I'd be curious to see some metrics after a few years. How many devices were actually repaired? What was repaired on them?

My prediction: 80% of repairs were screens. 15% were batteries. 4% were random parts damaged by water. 1% was everything else. And those last two, the repair was "replace the motherboard", not "fix the motherboard".

I'd also like to see metrics on the age of repaired devices. My prediction: 80% of repaired devices were three or fewer years old with a rapidly declining tail.

If I'm right, Washington could pass a much more limited bill, mandating manufacturers make it possible to replace screens and batteries for five years from introducing the product. That would be 90% of the benefit at a much more limited cost.

More like the end of the end for VGA on laptops. There can't be many other models which still have VGA. As others have mentioned, there have been at least three generations of video outputs since then.

In other news, the ThinkPad my company just bought me finally got rid of the in-keyboard joystick and went with a large, buttonless trackpad.

There's another perspective Klitgaard also didn't address. Foreigners sell us stuff and take dollars in return. They now have to choose what to do with those dollars.

They could buy products from us. That's what Trump and tariff proponents want. I can't see why, all things being equal I'd prefer to keep those products here for our use.

They could loan them to our government. That's what you're talking about. For any number of reasons I'd prefer US governments spent less and honestly, trade imbalances are the least of my concerns.

They could just hang on to them. That's what happens if US dollars are the global reserve currency. That's also a great deal for us, we got valuable goods and didn't give up anything in return. US for the win!

Finally, and Klitgaard didn't mention this as far as I saw, foreigners could invest in the US. They could, say, build the largest BMW assembly plant in the world in South Carolina. And those dollars returning as investment don't show up as exports so they don't make the reported trade deficit smaller. But they're also absolutely great for Americans and something even Trump encourages.

In summary, international trade accounting and economics is complicated. It's not nearly as simple as "trade deficits mean the US is getting poorer". That's a refrain I've been hearing since the '70s and it's absolutely false. We have lots of problems and a trade deficit is not one of them.

That's one aspect of it, one which Klitgaard doesn't address. But you should also ask whether we actually want to do that and why?

Think this through. Being a reserve currency means foreigners want to hold dollars. To get those, they give us valuable goods and services and we give them pieces of paper we print for almost nothing. And that's the end of it. It's a great deal for us.

The alternative is they give us those pieces of paper back and we have to give them valuable goods. Personally, I'd rather keep those valuable goods here for our use rather than shipping them away.

I'm curious. Why is GC versus manually managed memory an issue during startup? I wouldn't think allocating memory would be noticeably faster for either approach, the difference would be behavior when freeing. With GC, freeing is instantaneous until the GC runs. With managed memory, freeing takes some time. Depending on what's going on, it's not obvious to me which will launch a JS engine faster. Do lots of objects get freed when starting up a JS runtime?

This is ignoring the obvious question: if milliseconds matter, why are you using Lambdas? Perhaps a persistent server is a better choice. Architectures and algorithms often beat microoptimizations.

Quite. And what is the risk level associated with that concentration? If it's lower than my lifetime risk of being struck by lightning or bitten by a shark, we can file this under "u" for "unimportant".

I can run Linux on a Raspberry Pi. It's got one main chip and maybe a dozen smaller ones.

Even a modern laptop probably doesn't have hundreds of chips. A processor, I/O bridge, memory, and a handful of add-ons. I'd be surprised if it hit 100.

So Germany harms its citizens by charging them an extra 30% to buy a F-150. America is going to respond by charging Americans 30% to buy a Mercedes? "You're beating up your citizens so I'm going to be up my citizens until you stop!"

That story ignores two factors. First, while I believe the evidence says the buyer winds up paying most of the tariffs in most cases, that's not always true. Depending on a bunch of factors, others might bear the burden. Second, even if the buyer pays the tax, the seller is hurt because sales will decrease. That's why American exporters (e.g. farmers) are upset that China is raising tariffs even though the American farmer might not directly pay it.

I believe you're correct about US wealth patterns. Does anyone have any data on European wealth? I'd be pretty surprised if the Rothschilds and Habsburgs were still in the top tiers of wealth and influence. But maybe it takes longer than I expect to dilute 500 years of wealth accumulation.

My guess, based on no data, is the wealthiest people in Europe are also new money. The older fortunes probably still exist but are not the scale of the newcomers. But then again, I believe fewer industry titans are founded in Europe versus the US so the results of entrepreneurship might be much smaller.

Is that the latest thinking? IIRC nutrition researchers were backing off a bit. Specifically, the "green zones" were turning out to be more about incomplete recordkeeping than actual life expectancy.

Which is weird because my impression is people smoke a lot more in Europe than the US. I don't have any numbers handy to back up that impression. Same with alcohol. My impression is American probably drink more beer and distilled liquor (on TV, every executive meeting starts by pouring a glass of scotch and TV wouldn't like to me, would it?) while Europeans drink more wine.

We've been talking about the differences between American and European lifestyles for as long as I can remember. Surely we have good data on hand, don't we? No need for me to speculate.

I was just going to say something like that. Capitalism is an idea, a pattern of human behavior, not a thing. The existing companies may fail, investments may shift, but the idea will remain.

Even after a climate disaster, I'm quite sure all the surviving humans will continue to specialize, trade, save, and invest and that's what capitalism is.