helloworld11

>The US did impose rationing and did impose strong government control of production.

This is certainly true. Comparatively though, rationing in the U.S was nowhere near as bad as it was even in Britain, never mind the Reich, any other European country or much less the Soviet Union and Japan. These latter two placed millions of their people on near starvation rations and imposed extreme cutbacks in even the most basic civilian "luxury" goods. The Nazis were remarkably consistent about feeding their own people well (though with steadily decreasing food quality) but they pulled this off by literally starving vast other areas of Europe.

One of the books I recommend in a reply further down "The taste of war" goes into deep, carefully referenced detail on the food rationing by country, and even with their cutbacks, Americans had it incredibly better than any other country involved in the war, by far. It truly was quite impressive.

Worth noting here quickly, after all the (fully deserved by the way) vitriol against paypal and its decades of institutionalized, legally protected crooked practices: The world of web3 and crypto may be full of scams and scammers, but the much older world of normal finance and fintech is fundamentally little different at its core. It's only more stable, better protected legally and has covered its ass under certain laws and regulatory capture with superior lobbying for politicians to look the other way at things that are obviously crooked but legally grey enough that they can be ignored most of the time.

By late 1944, U.S war production was so absurdly huge that Hitler (admittedly, hardly a man known by that point for a realistic worldview or an open mind) was flatly unable to believe it when told that the best estimates of U.S military aircraft production were somewhere in the neighborhood of 100,000 planes of all types for the year.

Also, I strongly recommend a couple books here: First: "The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy" by Adam Tooze

Second (truly a unique book that looks at the world's biggest war with a focus entirely on how people in different parts of the fighting countries ate and avoided starvation) "The Taste of War: World War Two and the Battle for Food " by Lizzie Collingham.

Germany and Russia were already immensely increasing their war production and military preparedness before 1940, throughout the 1930s. These amounts need to be taken into account when comparing to the UK, which really only started to take war production seriously as the war was pretty much starting. The lead time of the former was larger, and the dates above paint a skewed picture.

As for the USA, yes, holy shit, but it was also a country almost uniquely capable of achieving such a feat. Even more incredible is that it did that without even severely affecting the standard of living of its citizens, unlike the other countries, which all introduced very intense civil production rationing to pull off their more modest increases.

In the case of the USSR, fighting for its life and already an economy that barely focused on civil well-being, the doubling of war production and associated war expenses caused a gigantic famine in the immediate post-war years, while also causing massive suffering during the war years, and this aside from the brutalities introduced by the German invasion.

The stupidity is in insisting that Bitcoin is a ponzi scheme, like some sort of parrot that only knows how to repeat words heard from others without thinking of context or mechanics. Many people have used BTC for their own ponzi schemes (just as many have used dollars for the same) and many much newer crypto tokens and projects have indeed been ponzi schemes, but Bitcoin itself, no. It's a mathamatical protocol that can be used for bad or good or anything in between. Since it's not owned by any one person or group and doesn't even at all fit the literal definition of a ponzi scheme (look it up, it takes just a few seconds, most definitions mutually agree), saying that it is a ponzi scheme demonstrates, ignorance,, stupidity at basic definitions, emotionally hateful dishonesty or a mix of all three.

No, they don't use guns, but if you spend any time watching our closest primate cousins, the chimps, they sure do love their displays of domineering force and tribal violence, with throwing weapons like sticks and rocks even. So yes, the phrase makes perfect sense unless you're completely literal-minded about it.

A surface speed of 9 knots and a submerged speed of 4 knots? This thing is hilariously slow. At 4 Knots, you could almost walk faster to any comparably distant terrestrial destination. The impracticality is obvious: taking the yacht away from any one sea or port to another (something you'd presumably want to do after spending tens of millions on a superyacht), would mean traveling for an absurdly, abnormally long time inside a sealed, limited space with no easy way to leave mid-journey.

At least normal surface yachts have reasonably decent top speeds of 20+ knots.

I think you have an extraordinarily skewed idea of how wealth is usually created, how productivity works and how legal redress should handle these things in a functional society. All this aside from your very emotional, contextually ignorant claims about me being racist and other people being guilty of exploiting African Americans because those other people happen to have been successful in some way.

An immigrant from India (or anywhere really), who arrives to the US and then works hard to exchange some sort of value for voluntary compensation from others is most definitely not making themselves better off by sharing in "stolen wealth" from some previous century. They're doing what all of us (of any color or creed) do every day to stay mutually economically solvent. By your logic, even modern African Americans would be guilty of the same thing because their increased standard of living is a part of the same economic participation in exchange of "stolen" wealth.

Too much to unpack here in further argument, but i'd suggest more carefully considering these positions.

Truly, what the hell? First, the guy in question is from India and isn't an Anglo/European white man who "benefited" from centuries of exploitation of blacks in the United States. Secondly, many white people in the United States today also managed to build a life for themselves without having done so. Your notion of historical guilt really is more like the absurd religious idea of original sin than a realistic or genuinely fair minded concept of justice and blame.

Furthermore, nothing I said is about continuing to exploit black people or advocating racism. It's specifically about redressing past wrongs against African Americans and other minorities without creating new ones against other arbitrarily assigned groups, particularly if they're immigrants who have also had to suffer for their forward movement and have no personal fault in the past racial tensions and injustices of a country they're not originally from.

Why would you completely misinterpret a fairly straightforward argument in the most emotionally charged, simplistic and negative way possible?

>Making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year doesn’t make you rich

Speaking of HN people living in bubbles.... Yes, it does explicitly make you rich, at least in terms of earnings replenishment. A person making hundreds of thousands of dollars per year is literally in the top 1% of the top 1% of the world's population. Regardless of how well they manage that money, they're making more of it than virtually all other human beings on the planet.

Also, unless you live in one ridiculously expensive place (and do nearly everything possible to maximize your expenses while living there), or you are absolutely clueless, or mulishly stubborn about your spending habits, (or possibly have incurred truly catastrophic medical bills in a place without decent public healthcare), then there's no way you COULDN'T manage to live below your means on earnings like these. Even in very pricey places like San Francisco, London, NYC, Paris etc, there are many, many people living right in their core areas on modest salaries and..... getting by without nearly bankrupting themselves! What a wonder.

>What truth is there to this? Suppose this asteroid was on a collision course with earth, would we have any recourse other than praying it lands in Siberia and not NYC.

If your asteroid is only 20 to maybe 400 meters across, having it land somewhere absurdly remote on land or far off into the deep oceans would minimize harm, but for asteroids much bigger than that (and even 400 meters is really stretching the bounds of acceptable size), it doesn't really matter where the impact happens, millions or more people will almost certainly die.

If you scale up to a size of, say, 900 meters or larger, then you're talking global multi-year catastrophe no matter where the impact is.

If you then scale up to over a mile or two in diameter, then you're talking global multi-decade cataclysm no matter where the impact site is.

So yeah, even with Siberia, the Canadian North, Antarctica, the Sahara or the central pacific ocean. Any size beyond a few hundred meters makes specifics not so important in terms of death toll and major climate effects.

>That's a great story, how you came up, after immigrating to America from India. However, very important points that you have glossed over is the history of slavery, redlining, Jim Crow (and other laws), voting suppression, etc... of Black Americans who are the descendants of slaves. They (and other ethnic groups) were being shut out of opportunities, and the courts were attempting to alleviate this in some way. The original purpose of affirmative action, was to help those that were being actively and consistently discriminated against.

And not one of those things is in the least bit his fault or responsibility, least of all the fault or responsibility of his son or many other kids in the same situation. It's a pernicious, grotesque notion that people with no personal or ancestral fault in a specific historical context should be punished for its existence as a compensation to others. The idea is in fact little better than the implicit punishment-through-bias accorded to other minorities because they or their ancestors were at one time considered inferior. A society can alleviate past wrongs without creating new ones of a similar if softer flavor against yet other collectively defined groups.

>As a more recent immigrant, you are benefiting from laws and polices, which are the result of historical issues, court battles, and actual battles in America. Many Americans fought, died, and were jailed to get laws changed.

And so what? Does he somehow owe a personal debt to a country because it, for reasons of its own, decided to fix and fight against internal historical wrongs that its own people had created in the first place? Another idiotic and ugly idea: that a country makes itself better and then is right to foist part of the cost onto people who later come to it specifically because it's supposedly become a better and more just place, as if they'd had a part in its previous wrongs.

That you make such absurd arguments shows how much the ideological aspect of affirmative action (vs. its practical, carefully balanced merits) has contaminated much progressive thinking.

You're using bad analogy to promote a bullshit idea of speech control for the sake of the "common good". The problem with your idea is that unlike environmental pollution in which real, physical spaces are damaged or destroyed by measurable physical contaminants, intellectual "pollution" is extremely subjective.

It's subject to the biases of those who decide what is and isn't disinformation and its subject to changes in these biases over time. The damage it does is also hard to measure, especially when weighed against the damage caused by giving anyone or group of people the authority to decide what others can say and believe. It's easy to apply such ideas to obviously stupid conspiracy theories and fringe claims, but it's also very easy to start spreading the scope of what gets claimed as disinformation over time.

We could look at the entire pandemic as just one very evident example of these tendencies happening. We can also look at a number of authoritarian countries that have taken advantage of the western media obsession with "misinformation/disinformation" of the last few years and used it as a cover for passing their own clearly authoritarian speech-repressing laws in the name of "fighting misinformation". Freer countries are also never immune to going down the same road, their governments DO NOT need more tools for making it easier.

Truly bad information and grossly ignorant opinions are not only not anything new in all of human history, they are if anything today less extreme and less common than they've ever been. The proliferation of better thinking has moved best in exactly those countries where free speech has been best protected. It's in places where it has been repressed that the opposite tends to happen more easily.

It's sad to me that educated, intelligent people can use sophistry to try building moats around their personal biases in defense of speech controls and then claim that they're working towards the protection of people's minds, or any sort of common good. History has shown that such attempts at controlling speech almost invariably produce the opposite and that giving power over speech to any authority does so especially. Grotesque.

Just remove that burden from your neck and enjoy your life as you might like to. Whether you do or don't minimize your carbon footprint will not make an iota of practical difference in how much or how little the world warms up.

One of the biggest PR tricks of modern times has been how the truly huge polluters such as major state resource companies, huge private/corporate resource companies and the lobbyists/media outlets/ politicians who tacitly support them have managed to flip the burden of guilt for climate change onto ordinary people about their personal life choices. This has happened to the ridiculous point that people such as yourself actually feel guilty about basic life choices due to a thing that's hardly their fault in any meaningful or measurable way. What an absurd way to live a life of unhappiness..

Two of these are flat wrong. First, the waste isn't basically forever. Part of it can be reprocessed and part of it does indeed decay down to very low or nearly null radioactivity sooner rather than later.

Secondly, (it's such an absurd myth that keeps being repeated), there are plenty of effective, perfectly functional, usable, right-now-being-used plans for storing nuclear waste. It's not even much overall: The total amount so far produced by humanity to-date is just over 400,000 metric tons (this is very little physical volume on any industrial scale of things) and of that only about 4% is highly radioactive. The rest is low-radiation and one third of that total is suitable for reprocessing..

Bottom line, there is NO major problem with storing it if even minimal intelligent effort is applied to the task.

Somewhat unrelated but where does this bizarre tendency on this site to call famous tech people by just their first names even if one doesn't know them personally come from? "Elon", "Jeff", "Mark" and etc... Normally, unless you personally know some famous person, it sounds downright odd to refer to them as if they were a beer buddy, neighbor or colleague. (assuming here that you and many others who comment here don't actually know Elon Musk personally).

TLDR: "All this democracy stuff would work so much better if I could just circumvent all those backwoods idiots who don't vote and think similarly to my clearly superior urban, progressive sensibilities"

Thank you. You said it wonderfully. It becomes absurd to see privileged people with all sorts of opportunities and economic support hectoring others because they (for some reason that obviously has nothing at all whatsoever to do with not being so cushioned) just pick up a job that's less than perfect, but do it for decades because they need to find a way to make a living, pay the bills, support family and in the lapses between tedious work, still find some way to generate a bit of personal happiness in some detail or another of their less than perfect lives.

For those of you living in your bubbles of trouble-free personal fulfillment, welcome to the real world for a vast majority of the world's population. The people that handle your menial needs don't always do so out of pure love of the job, but yes, they still find some imperfect avenues for happiness in life. There's nothing innately wrong with that either.

Really? HN comments are full of tangents that only partly relate to an original post's topic, and it makes them all the more interesting in general. The comment above is talking about COVID vaccines with interesting links and a decent argument, in a post about long covid and its effects. There's plenty of conversation-worthy correlation between the two.

As I said in my own post, he and his wife should absolutely talk to a fertility doctor or even several specialists for their specific context. My point was that in general, most women can have children well into their 30s and even 40s, and that much of the claims to the contrary are based on absurdly old information. The link was for a general dose of optimism in case general worries about age itself are the main problem.

Taking aside all of your emotional concerns, you should know right away that women absolutely can have healthy biological children at or past the age of 39. Obviously I can't speak for your wife and her specific health or reproductive situation but in general, the idea that "the window has closed" is more often than not totally false. Look into this in more detail with real medical professionals. One interesting observation comes from the article I link to below, which points out that many of the supposed female fertility window statistics are actually based on extremely old information from pre-modern times. Worth reading for a bit of optimism and perspective.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/07/how-lon...

noteworthy quote from the article:

"The widely cited statistic that one in three women ages 35 to 39 will not be pregnant after a year of trying, for instance, is based on an article published in 2004 in the journal Human Reproduction. Rarely mentioned is the source of the data: French birth records from 1670 to 1830. The chance of remaining childless—30 percent—was also calculated based on historical populations.

In other words, millions of women are being told when to get pregnant based on statistics from a time before electricity, antibiotics, or fertility treatment."

Where in the world did you get that number? The average 777 has a fuselage width of 20 ft, 4 in or 6.20 meters. Nearly twice as large. 3.7 meters is obviously wrong if you've ever so much as glanced at one of these planes in real life or even in a photo.

Considering the typical behavior of about 90% or more of all major tech companies that many people on this site work for or contract to, it's laughable that you'd snark at someone talking about a minor pseudo-theft of electricity form a dorm room several years ago. Hell, much of the shit being thrown by commentators on this site on cryptominers, who often use renewable energy sources for their mining, is itself laughable considering how much electricity and resources the mega tech corps they work for burn all the time. You could argue that said companies do so for "better" reasons, but that's debatable and a separate matter.

>Art is only a human endeavor if it's done for intrinsic value or to share an idea or an emotion. Once the main -- or indeed only -- reason for creating something becomes "how many dollar bills will people put in my bank account if I let them see this?", it ceases to be art, in my opinion, and becomes conditioned capitalistic greed.

Truly, go live in the real world of being an artist who's struggling to get by at even a basic level and doesn't have all the soft cushions in life that provoke absurdly rigid and privileged sentiments like the ones you wrote here.

Creativity and the desire to express it don't put a person outside the essential pressures of economic need and its emotional roller coasters. On the other hand, when those needs aren't really satisfied, it can quickly become damn hard to be creative even if you're sincerely emotionally passionate about your creative expression. It's nice to spout crap about how people shouldn't create art just for "capitalistic greed", but for someone straining just to pay monthly rent and basic expenses, there's nothing greedy about having their creative motivation lubricated along with some decent sales or financial sponsorship. What nonsense to assume otherwise.

Oh it's hilarious to see the race-baiting, woke-cult-promoting, mendacious, hysteria-producing, ideologically dishonest NY Times now arguing this.

>fragments about Hitler and Goebbels shielding themselves from gory reality on the ground are interesting in this context. This shows well how the leadership operates on the level of its own fantasies, and moves the "chess pieces" while clueless about what they're really doing.

For Goebbels, as a cripple who never fought in any war, maybe so, but not for Hitler, at least as far as combat violence was concerned. The man was a repeatedly wounded veteran of the first world war who had served right in the worst of front line duty, and knew exactly how brutal the carnage could be for every one of the millions of soldiers he later ordered out to battle through his generals. Cluelessness might apply to his ordering of the holocaust, because a thing like that pretty much had no precedent in human history, but not quite so much for his war-making.

Curiously, while, as far as anyone knows, Hitler himself never witnessed one of the mass killings his death camps were performing daily, Himmler did want to see what it was truly like, and nearly fainted at his first sight of all those regular people being gassed at once. Didn't stop him from continuing to approve the whole monstrous thing though...

Because war is so horrible, there's no reason why people who don't fight or unwillingly participate in them shouldn't be able to know just how horrible it can be. Implicitly rose-tinting awful realities by keeping silent about their nature is rarely a good thing for future generations. If anything, the world needs more people who have been in wars to make explicitly clear just how many grotesque reasons there are for avoiding them if at all possible.

Also, the whole world has benefited enormously from emissions and the economies of scale that they have allowed, not just the global north. The immense economic uplifts that have happened in the developing world during the 20th and 21st centuries were also bought with huge levels of resource use and industrialization.

First, don't make assumptions. I live in a tropical country, in the tropics.

Secondly, your emotional comment completely disregards the basic point of what I was saying, that humans in general will adapt and are actually very good at it in general.

Furthermore, even more fundamentally, my points about doom fetishism and apocalyptic exaggeration: Climate change is a problem for the vastly complex human society spread all across the globe and sustaining 8 billion people, but it is not on par with a true cataclysm for life on earth in the way something like a large asteroid impact or a "snowball earth" ice age would be. It is something that the earth, life on earth and much of human society in general will find ways to deal with. This isn't to sweep suffering under the rug, but it's worth mentioning for a dose of realistic optimism.

We simply can't predict at this point what human innovations in the next 150 years of the UN/IPCC predictions of worst case climate warming will possibly improve things or let humanity adapt in ways that mitigate the worst effects of those evidence-based predictions (as opposed to sheer hyperbole pushed forward by people obsessed with emotional arguments over death and destruction.)

Then why is there no widespread pushback against this idiocy? It's grossly unfair and seems like a lite version of some notion of serfdom, by which you belong to your emplo0yer just because you spend part of your day working for them during some time period.