Sports guys are not elites. They are well paid slaves. Think roman gladiators.

Anyone that cannot quit their job and move to another company is not an elite.

Any profession where drugs that interfere with your professional performance are prevalent, is not elite.

Any profession where the only real contract negotiation is about money is not elite.

In addition, their managers etc. tend to put their own needs above their players. They COULD have negotiated the right to things besides money but the agents only get a portion of the money - not the things besides money.

Musicians are in a similar situation. Low level actors as well, but high paid actors have gotten out of that trap.

If you read the article carefully, they are talking about lenses THINNER than a hair. I see several of the posts here thinking the width/radius of the lenses is this small, a reasonable mistake given the way this was written. Having a radius that small would severely reduce their light gathering ability, requiring very bright light or very dim images or very long exposure times.

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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?

This would not surprise me if the entire setup is designed to give people cellphone service without having to pay somebody.

All the things they talked about being 'possible', seem to me like you could do similar things by hacking, for a lot less money and effort.

Wait, it is possible to receive management content that has substance in it? Why didn't anyone tell me this?

Which companies have management that does not provide slop?

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.

Everything else has been shrunk down to microscopic levels.

While we have had significant progress in batteries, battery improvements have been linear, while most of the rest of the components have had exponential improvements.

So the battery grows while everything else shrinks. Now the battery is the largest component. Likely to stay that way, too.

I disagree. Just say:

No AI citations allowed at all.

Any legal AI should be programmed to replace citations with:

"Insert full 1992 Citation here.". Then the lawyer can go through looking for all 1992 citations to find one that fits.

The purpose of legal paperwork is not to make it easy, but to make it accurate. Given AI's total failure to make it accurate, they should be banned from giving a full citation and the real lawyers should do that work.

There are two kinds of innovation - revolutionary and incremental.

You cannot gain an insurmountable advantage in revolutionary tech. You can only do so in incremental tech. Because nobody sees the revolutionary innovation coming.

The main topics they have discussed (solar, wind, batteries) have had consistent incremental advancement for decades.

They talked about the 'failure is our goal' strategy that China uses - and it is very successful. The US uses a similar system, though not to the same scale - in part because we have 1/3 the population.

Many people focus on the US's manufacturing problems - which generally consist of high safety regulations and high salaries demanded by workers. Those exist for GOOD reasons and they are not worth giving away to gain manufacturing jobs.

We do not want the bad jobs that poisons the workers and evey one that lives near the factory. We want better than what they strive for in China, and for the most part we have succeeded. We export a lot of things, including computers, oil, vehicles, etc.

Part of the issue is that the export categories are large and often we export one thing but import another in the same category (We export a lot of oil, but also import a lot for example).

The US's biggest exports are aircraft (including spacecraft) and fuels. A lot of that is military aircraft. It also agricultural and meat.

The largest non-export industry however is finance. Lots of foreigners use American banking services. While some of that is investing in American corporations and property, (many consider it a safer investment than their own country - particularly Chinese investors), it also includes US companies doing the financial services for other countries.