I see what you are getting at but I have to disagree with alot of what you are saying.

> the US will find itself in the same position the UK is in now

The US and UK are totally different animals at the height of their "empire". The UK currently has little land and alot of it is devoid of minerals(sans coal). They achieved most of their might subjecting other countries and extracting resources from their colonies. Once the colonies and the rest of the world objected the British empire began to crumble as the colonies broke off from the UK.

Contrast that with the US which if it were to jettison its "colonies" (Puerto Rico, Samoa etc) you would see very little drop in GDP. The US has vast swaths of land which is excellent for farming, energy extraction and contains valuable minerals. It has widespread and diverse populations with wildly different ecologies and climates. In addition to a huge amount of resources it has a kings ransom of some of the best universities in the world(stanford, harvard, MIT, etc) and a highly educated society with living standards just below some small asian and european countries. The US also has a peerless military (we need hypersonic weapons however) and many aircraft carriers and nukes as well as world renown special forces groups. And lastly of the top largest 100 companies in the world, 65% are US based and this despite the US only having 4.2% of the worlds population, looking at GDP per country is almost comical as the US has 30T compared to the next largest economy China(19.5T), 3rd place is Germany at 4.9T.

USA has three advantages that no place else in the world has. First we have the biggest oil deposit in the history of mankind with the Permian basin. Second we have more inland waterways in the Mississippi River system than the whole rest of the world combined and third this abuts the best farmland on the planet.

I would say that the USA also has an advantage of open immigration for intellectuals to keep our universities strong but the anti-intellectual Trump administration is destroying this advantage as fast as it can!

The greatest advantage that we ever had was to lead the free world in ideals. A friend of mine was telling me yesterday that every child in India when they reach the age of six wants to go to Harvard and settle in the USA. They want to stand up for freedom and for democracy and for putting down all the evil dictators in the world. We are losing this image very very quickly it could be gone in a matter of months!

Don't brag about our aircraft carriers it would take us 25 years to build 11 more. We are nowhere in ship building we destroyed our domestic shipbuilding in the 1980s when we reoriented it for military shipbuilding and then the Berlin Wall fell down and we drastically cut the military shipbuilding budget and that caused our shipbuilding to go to almost zero overnight (3 heavy ships per year nationwide whereas China's largest ship builder does THIRTY!).

The USA has also been greatly advantaged by being host to the world's reserve currency (also known as having a massive trade deficit). It has been able to buy, buy, buy without needing to sell in kind; essentially getting stuff for free.

But it wants to throw that out the window now too, for some reason. Crazy.

A few things to unpack here:

Lets say a nike shoe costs $120 or so today(searching air jordans in google lists a huge number of shoes at that price point), in my mind this is quite cheap as I wanted a pair of Air Jordans in 1990 and they were the same price, $120 for kids shoes roughly 35 years ago. Adjusted for inflation thats roughly $303 USD in 2025 dollars. So basically through outsourcing manufacturing to China and supply chain efficiencies Nike has brought down their product price by roughly 1/3.

Another thing to think about is the insane amount of money offered to athletes in sponsorship deals, I believe Jordan was one of the first athletes to command big money from a company(they made a movie about it a few years ago). This cost paying hundreds of athletes millions a year is a huge cost on Nikes bottom line.

In addition to the sponsorships some athletes have profit sharing (Jordan for sure) so a percentage of sales go to said athlete. Throw in marketing and you have another huge cost.

Would I rather see manufacturing jobs come back to the US and Nike curtail sponsorship money and profit sharing, hell yes. This is easy money to get back and would bring tens of thousands of jobs back to this country, if people were snapping up air jordans for the equivalent of $300 a pair back in the 90's they will do the same in this day and age. And if don't want to cut back sponsorship money, just raise the shoe prices, things are really really cheap compared to what they cost 30 years ago and Nike would still make a hefty profit.

Fun fact - I always buy new balance shoes that are made in usa, they sell both outsourced and domestic production and would rather have my money go to a US worker. At the very least I hope to see other companies do this so I have a choice, most give no choice and force consumers to buy Chinese made products.

I mean Nike didn't work to lower the price, the demand for Jordans is just different and most people buying Jordans today also bought them in the 90s and are comfortable at $120. If Nike could move them at $300 they would. Jordans remain popular but the reasoning is partially their price points, they don't at all have the power they did in the 90s when every kid wanted "to be like Mike".

I think this is mostly accurate:

> The things that dominate middle class budgets: food, housing, medicine, education, are surprisingly local, and have become increasingly unaffordable in recent decades even as economic numbers have gone up.

Really you have to split goods into two categories, stuff that has no geographic ties(alot of these goods manufacture has been outsourced to asian countries and low wage countries) and stuff that is tied to a location, think Mexican tequila or Swiss watches.

The first category is more tied to the middle class and I could alot of the manufacturing coming back to the US due to cost. The second category cannot be made in the US and buyers will bear the brunt of the cost runups.

The stuff in the first category that is going to be hit hard with tariffs is by and large big ticket items like cars and electronics, and conversely the really cheap plastic junk that is ubiquitous at dollar stores. I think the days of 50 inch flat screens for a few hundred dollars are gone. In addition cars sold in the US(US made brands and not foreign companies) have alot of their supply chain in either mexico and canada but the middle class is not buying alot of newer cars - average age of a car is reaching the longest ever due to cars jumping in cost the past few years.

I see this really hurting high income americans alot more, new cars especially European luxury are going to be quite expensive, alot of expensive wines and liquor will jump in price, jewelry and luxury handbags will also be alot more expensive.

This is a fantastic comment, I wholeheartedly agree with your assessment on Angela Ahrendts. What was once a magical experience going to a apple store has devolved into a nightmare. A few reasons why:

- The complete removal of spontaneity of the shopping experience. You wander over to look at a laptop and decide you want to buy it. Asking a employee is disagreeable as most have a ear bud in their ear receiving instructions or messages from who knows what, they hurriedly ask if you made an appointment or placed the order online and then rush away and sometimes return.

- Such a heavy emphasis on online booking for every conceivable issue. If you want a genius bar appointment you are angrily told you need an appointment and such an appointment is only available days or weeks away and at a inconvenient time for someone with a 9-5 schedule(Tuesday at 2pm work?).

- Last years accessories are gone. Try finding a iphone case that was made for a phone you bough 7 months ago and an employee looks at you like you are trying to buy a model T - (Wait you are looking for a iphone 15 case, wow thats a really old model, I don't think we have anything for that anymore).

- Insane levels of crowds, I can't think of the last time I saw a apple store open in the past 6-7 years that didn't have crowds inside the store like disneyland with service dogs, screaming kids and grumpy boomers yelling about how to transfer their grandkids photos from a phone to computer, just a terrible experience to deal with.

I bought the first iphone in 2007 and have had a model for almost every two years and have been going to the apple stores since then, and the past few years have seen a huge drop in customer experience due to alot of the issuses I listed above.

It does not bother me I’m hundreds of miles from an Apple Store because every time I look into one it is so crowded. Shopping online feels like a luxury experience in comparison (so blown away my M4 mini came in a tiny box!)

agree, firing ion beams to make the mirror perfect one molecule at a time(they are declared the most precise mirrors on earth). This stuff is beyond wild. Not that I believe this stuff came from alien technology but if anything could be said to have not originated on earth this would be a strong candidate. And barely a hundred years ago we just figuring out flight at kitty hawk and now you have technology like this, its really amazing.

Everyone loves the electron beam etching. But no one asks how they know where to etch, which is what the most expensive machines do, I.e. mirror surface metrology. It's surprisingly hard to "just measure" the shape and roughness of these things

I'm fine with news outlets having paywalls to keep the lights on and provide great journalism. Where I wish things would change is having paywalls on articles years old that are no longer relevant to todays news.

Also during that heyday Cisco planned a sprawling south bay campus that was going to cost a fortune and house tens of thousands of new employees.(I lived between cisco's HQ and the proposed new campus during that time. The dotcom bubble burst and the campus never saw the light of day.

A similar more recent parallel is Google's San Jose village, it was going to be constructed in 2020 and after and also house thousands of google employees along with mixed use commercial, I lived in Willow Glen at the time and people were buzzing around this new campus and all the new economic activity it would provide. In the back of my mind I remember Cisco's endeavor and felt like this new village would meet a similar fate of implosion. And sure enough the pandemic hit and the village project hit the breaks, most likely never to return. Having big office projects in San Jose with the leading market tech companies is something akin to invading Russia, you always fail. /s

I contributed to one company(intuitive machines) by buying their stock a few weeks back, they are public - ticker is LUNR. They have a moon mission going on as this is written and plan to touch down on the moon 3/6/25 and drill for water(look for IM-2 mission). Last year they were the first private company to send a lander to moon and made headlines due to the missions success. So for me its profitable and I get to contribute to interesting science.

My Dad's friend is a retired fire chief, my Dad told me he makes $300K a year in retirement! That is beyond insane as it ends up costing (with a retirement at say 55) about 30 or so years of payments which adds up to $9M for the reminder of his life. This is clearly not sustainable and when you add up social security and 401k it ends up with a kings ransom for a public servant.

What about solidarity? Instead of criticizing another worker’s situation as “insane”, we should be asking: why can’t we also have this kind of retirement package? They’ve successfully pitted worker vs worker.

I don’t think that retired fire chief’s (or school teachers') retirement is what’s wrong: what’s wrong is that most of us will not have a retirement that good. Why is that? It is possible to answer that question without tearing down someone else’s situation.

It comes from crab bucket mentality and a pervasive fear that somebody somewhere might be getting something they don't "deserve".

Everyone who gives a company years of their life should be able to comfortably retire after decades of service, but companies have managed to convince workers that most of them should work until the day they die and only a small precious few deserve to retire and finally be allowed to spend time with their loved ones.

Exactly. "Look at that guy, who has it slightly better than you. He's really the problem!"

How does that work? That guy, pensioner, who has it slightly better than you, is a different way of saying that:

1) that guy gets your labor, for decades. 4 decades to be exact

2) for less than you'll get for that work

(that's what getting a higher pension actually means in the real world, with money being an abstraction and all that)

3) he (or she) doesn't get more because they worked harder or better, but because they were working when a random political vote needed to be made (paid for, really). And that, not only won't repeat, but there's absolutely nothing you can do to change the situation to your benefit, even just to equalize. That last part is of course what makes taking away their benefits attractive.

Sounds pretty unfair to me. At least with a CEO they did something to get what they got, and there is a way to get their position, even if most will never achieve that.

It's absolutely unfair. But the solution is to raise the rest of us up, not tear these people down. Why don't I have a retirement like that? Why don't you have a retirement like that? Those are the questions we should be asking. Not "He shouldn't make that much!" The people who earn literally 100X that pensioner are laughing at us as we fight each other

How would that work? Could you explain? Because the only way to do that is to lower the price of labor. To greatly increase the availability of labor. You can do this with a lot of births, and we're finding out you can't really do it with immigration even.

So how would that work? The children that would need to provide that labor for me when I'm 65 would have to have been born already (they start work at, say, 20 years old). This has already happened, therefore, and cannot be fixed.

... which is of course another argument to take the pension away ... after all that's the only way to make it fair. You can play games with money, but money is an abstraction. You cannot raise up the necessary amount of people, the amount of people politicians promised us in trade for votes. It's not a matter of priorities anymore either, we're past the point where using 100% of the labor force would work.

> How would that work? Could you explain? Because the only way to do that is to lower the price of labor.

why do you think the only way to improve things for workers is to lower the price of labor? Workers can get better benefits when others stop pocketing the money that should have gone to paying for those benefits. Maybe the CEO whose pay has gone up 940% while the typical worker's compensation has risen only 12% over the same amount of time can cut several hundred off that percentage, earn less but still obscene amounts of wealth, and provide better benefits for the workers they've been stealing from for decades.

And yet when I calculate the numbers that's exactly what I see: that workers cannot get significantly better benefits by taking away executive compensation, since at most that can bring worker pay up to the average. Whatever is the solution, promising people they'll earn (significantly) more by destroying management's compensation is just not going to happen, for the simple reason that it's impossible.

Hell, on hackernews that average would be below what the vast majority here earn.

And, of course, if we're going to redivide earnings, that's what would be maximally fair: that everyone makes the average ... countrywide ... or $65k per year (before tax). THAT is what can be achieved by making things fair, under the absolute optimal circumstances (so in practice, let's call it 5% less than that at best)

No, thanks.

In fact, that leaves as the only real option making sure that $60k pays for a whole lot more. Which of course, if you want that to happen, requires the opposite from protecting labor: if anyone thinks they can do that, and succeeds, they should get a big reward for it ...

Because it isn't sustainable.

Only a select few can acquire that kind of retirement and it's borrowed from everyone else. It's selfish.

The pension generations over spent and borrowed heavily to fund their retirement and lifestyles. The subsequent generations pay for that. It's selfish and short sighted.

It's more sustainable than many other business practices. Nobody is worried about sustainability when CEOs are making hundreds of times more money than the average employee at the same company or when shareholders relentlessly enshitify everything so that they can keep getting more and more profit quarter after quarter.

pension plans were not only sustainable since they started in 1875, but the economy thrived and companies grew powerful while workers had them. Historically, some companies tried to screw over their workers and mismanaged their pension funds, resulting in problems down the line, but that was mostly greed.

Funny how, when they talk about executive compensation, platinum-plated perks, corporate parties with lobster stacks and vodka fountains for the top brass, and of course, dividends and stock buybacks--not a peep about how sustainable it is. But when you talk about pensions and employee salaries, all of a sudden, everyone's so concerned about it being sustainable...

I don't think you understand my issue with this persons pay(and not theirs but alot of city workers). I am fine with a private company paying out of their profits any amount they deem reasonable to a retired leader. Where I have the issue with this is his retirement is bankrupting the entire state/county/city(this is in California) and depriving working productive citizens vital amenities. Having a $300k per year pension is beyond extravagant and is not needed to sustain a healthy lifestyle. I mean looking at tax returns and income brackets that would put his retirement salary(not including 401k and social security) well into the top 5% of all earners and he is not even working.

DOGE needs to take a look at this. Government jobs are totally unfair.

Unless the fire department is federal, DOGE has nothing whatsoever to say about the matter. They don't get to give orders to state or local government, no matter how much they may want to.

I like his spartan review but really don't like the Fremen mirage article. With Bret Devereaux he uses the classic ideal of - if all you have is a hammer then all your problems are nails. In this instance he is using the Roman history "hammer" to subdue all issues he disagrees with the Fremen mythology.

I don't think his fremen analogy of tying fremen to contemporary Roman era barbarian tribes works well at all. If you read Dune and know alot about it(I do) fremen would not be a good analogy for alot of the barbarian tribes Rome encountered during its empire formation. For one the whole timeline on the encounter is quite wrong. With Rome you have a very large and technologically superior civilization that encounters and conquerors tribes relatively quickly. After the tribe is subdued they are now part of the empire and must pay tribute through taxes and military service. They do get the added benefits of Roman protection and those that defy the empire and put down quickly and brutally. Aside from this you have religion and technology. The tribes do not have a unified religion and after conquest stuck to their beliefs for the most part but slowly took on the occupiers beliefs. As for technology you have a vastly superior technology(iron age) in Rome meeting bronze age technology which was defeated by iron age Roman technology.

As for the Fremen they are a society apart from the empire and house Atreides and Harkonnen. They live on the world Arrakis in great numbers but do not need to pay any tribute or taxes and are viewed with suspicion by the leaders of both houses(brutally by the Harkonnens). The houses and the empire just want the spice melange and do not really care about integrating the fremen peoples into the empire and using them in other worlds for various jobs. The houses controlled Arrakis for at least 1 thousand years(unsure exactly how long) and there is a quite distinct culture between the occupiers and occupied. With religion you have a unified religion that the Fremen adhere too(discretley influenced by the Bene Gesserit), and fremen technology it is not all about knives and fists. The Fremen control sandworms using hooks and ropes(no other people in the universe know or can do this) and also Paul Atreides introduces the fighters to the sound weapons his house has developed.

I think the more apt comparison of the Fremen is the peoples of Afghanistan. Here you have a people that have never really been conquered, they all tried: (Alexander the great, Soviets, USA) that have a unified religion(Islam) and use contemporary technology(ak-47, missile launchers etc) to achieve stunning military victories against a much larger more powerful foes and occupiers. So the Fremen ideal is not a mirage you are just looking at the wrong cultural comparisons.