jandrewrogers

IIRC, the pivotal case involved individuals arrested for possession of illegal firearms while staying in a hotel. The firearms were being moved between States and were legal in both the origin and destination States but not in one of the States they were transporting them through.

The court viewed this as unconstitutional interference in the commerce between the origin and destination States, which seems correct on its face. There must be evidence of intent to distribute the firearms in the State where they are illegal. This case created a safe harbor for mere transport of goods between States.

Cannabis is different because it violates Federal law. It is technically illegal everywhere even though it is legal under State law in many locales. The Federal government has chosen to not enforce this law in States where it is legal, largely because enforcement could create a Constitutional case that could bring into question Federal authority to enact those and many other laws.

There are limits on the laws of a State when it involves inter-State commerce.

The US Supreme Court recognizes a general principle that you can transit a State with things that are illegal in that State. An individual State cannot impose a de facto ban on commerce between States, which includes the right to transport goods through a State in the normal fashion regardless of the laws of that State.

The minimum legal salary where I live will be >€80k in a couple months. The minimum hourly wage is equivalent to about €40k annualized. Does the average person in Western Europe earn €80k?

These types of minimum wages used to be limited to expensive locales but it is spreading across the US pretty rapidly. Now you see minimum wages rapidly approaching $20/hr in places far enough from a major city that houses still cost $250k.

Poor people in the US have fully subsidized healthcare and education.

Americans don't have vacation in the same way Scandinavian countries don't have a minimum wage. Even the most left-leaning States in the US have not written it into law because it is effectively addressed by custom. Americans are sufficiently happy with it that vacation isn't a political topic.

Almost half of US households earn $100k+ now. The median American is affluent by European standards. The "middle class" of Europe and America has become less comparable over time because median incomes have significantly diverged. You see it in many aspects of lifestyle and the kinds of things they can afford to buy.

20 years ago this was not the case. The minimum wage in some parts of the US is now higher than the average wage in most of Europe.

The US has a population that will always struggle to survive without government assistance. Per multiple US statistical agencies that is about 10-15% of households.

Infection by hantavirus is correlated with where you live, not socioeconomic status. It is endemic to parts of the high desert in the American Southwest and a background risk you accept by living there.

For example, Gene Hackman's wife, Betsy Arakawa, famously died from hantavirus. They lived in a wealthy gated community in Santa Fe.

It follows from the wages being allocated from a relatively fixed pool of available money. What people think they are worth can be significantly different than what they are empirically worth, both high and low. There is some price discovery that needs to happen at the individual level.

When wages are opaque, an employee only needs to justify their worth to the employer. Employers pay for value net of wages, so they are often happy to pay someone much more if the individual value generated justifies it. When wages are transparent, an employee needs to justify their worth to everyone else because a higher wage is tacitly reducing their wage. This creates social pressure separate from the economic argument.

Other employees are incentivized to maximize their own wages regardless if it maximizes value for the employer. And there are many more average employees than high performers. Employers can leverage this social pressure to cram down the wages of anyone who wants to be paid above average because they no longer have to defend a lower wage on a purely economic basis. Empirically, this is what happens.

Anecdotally, I've seen this play out countless times at companies.

FWIW, wage transparency has been studied quite a bit in economics literature. The short version is that while it does reduce wage variance i.e. wide differences in pay for the same job, it also consistently reduces average wages.

On a purely economic basis, wage transparency primarily benefits employers because it reduces how much they need to pay based on actual performance in practice.

The US government spends $1.4T on education. They already invest more than anyone else. That spending may not be productive but no one can credibly say the US hasn't spent enough money on education.

I had completely forgotten about NIMA. That's pretty obscure!

FWIW, I’ve known some of the OG NGA people a long time and they always referred to it as NGA in my experience. If anyone referred to it as NGIA I never heard it.

FWIW, I think you mean NGA instead NGIA. They added a hyphen between “geospatial” and “intelligence” to avoid the eternal embarrassment of a 4-letter acronym.

The mission scope of the various intelligence agencies has evolved a lot over time as capabilities and requirements have changed. Even the histories of how these independent agencies came to exist is pretty interesting.

And yeah, that mission patch is fire.

The Space Force has existed for decades before Trump. It was part of the Air Force and is still organized under that Department. They have been slowly increasing its independence as a branch of the military for a long time.

It isn't much different than how the Air Force was eventually carved out of the Army Air Corps.

The naval terminology reflects a displacement class and use case, not a specific design.

The now-cancelled DDG(X) next-generation destroyer already had a larger displacement than a heavy cruiser. And it was cancelled for not being large enough to support its mission load-out as a modern destroyer.

The name “battleship” may be archaic but the displacement requirements for the next-generation destroyers (or whatever they are eventually called) are roughly in “light battleship” territory.

To put it another way, we were calling battleship-class ships “destroyers” for historical continuity reasons. Over time, ships in a class have become much larger but we kept the old names. Even the older Arleigh-Burke destroyers would be traditionally classified as heavy cruisers if they were commanded by a flag officer.

The bugs in Mission Control are a deal breaker for me. I use spaces extensively and they are almost unusable in macOS 27. It is inexplicable that they did not notice how badly they broke things.

Fortunately I only upgraded a single computer, immediately noticed the bugs, and noped out on the other computers.

You have your facts backward. The US refineries are famous for being some of the best in the world at refining sour crude. It is why so many countries ship their sour (and other difficult) crudes to the US for refining.

US refinery capacity is much larger than its world-leading oil production. Oil refining is a major export business for the US.

In the last few years I’ve seen multiple startups describe normal systems running on AWS as “air-gapped” because there is a firewall. LARPers have diluted several terms that had specific meaning in a system isolation and security context to the point that I can no longer trust when people describe their systems using them.

There are far too many unserious people representing our industry.

US refineries are highly configurable and can refine any crude. They make more money refining difficult crude because they have the capability to handle it and many refineries do not, so naturally they prefer it for profitability reasons. The difference is extra refining steps that can be bypassed if they are not needed. Processing light sweet crude means some of their capital assets are sitting idle because they aren’t needed.

The US also exports its own crude for blending with other crude at foreign refineries. A refinery may not be able to process some types of crude but can process that crude if blended with a different type of crude to change its average properties. The limit to this for refineries is the cost of buying and shipping enough suitable blending crude to the refinery.

On a pure price-performance basis it is difficult to justify buying US domestic wine over French imports. The quality of the latter is consistently higher at reasonable price points. California wines haven’t justified their price tag for a long time on average.

I went to a high school in California. The school district had a separate dedicated campus where they sent all of the violent and antisocial kids in the rest of the school district. They weren’t hesitant to use it either, repeat offenders weren’t a thing. All of us were aware of it.

The antisocial kids sent to this school received focused, dedicated attention in an environment where they were minimally disruptive and with much higher staffing ratios. The kids in the rest of the school district were never exposed to this behavior because antisocial kids were identified early and removed quickly. It was and is widely regarded as one of the top-tier school districts in California.

I consider it a solved problem. Yet many people will argue that this is bad actually even though it is demonstrably effective at the nominal objective.

That was addressed circa C++17 IIRC, same with all of the technically UB surrounding DMA memory. You needed non-obvious incantations for some use cases but they were expressible. C++23 eliminated most of those incantations. Before all of this you had to use “blessed” incantations that were technically UB but which compilers needed to allow because the code was expressing a valid use case.

I find it crazy that popular systems languages didn’t have an explicitly valid way to deal with all of these ambiguous ownership and lifetime issues around memory until relatively recently.

That’s a normal run for long-distance driving in the US. You stop for only a few minutes when you run out of fuel to fill the tank, which may coincide with a concurrent bathroom break. I don’t know anyone that regularly makes 20-30 minute stops on these kinds of trips even once. That adds up to a lot of unnecessary lost time.

Human endurance is more about the end-to-end time. Breaks barely help at all.

There are stretches of highway in the continental US that are >100 miles between exits, never mind chargers. That is almost a defining feature of the American West.

More importantly, these highways can be closed at unpredictable times for an unpredictable duration. It is not guaranteed that the route you planned is the route will take.

£18k is something like 60% of the median income in the UK after taxes. And that doesn’t even include the other associated costs. Average people would view that as a major expense.

Many people don’t have the elasticity in their month-to-month expenses that is assumed here.

In the US that would be many parts of the Mountain West, for example, though it is not the only region where it applies.

Unpredictable closures of highways can happen in the middle of nowhere after you’ve already been driving for 3 hours. I’ve had unplanned detours of up to 150 miles more than once. It is more common than people expect.

There are stretches of highway where it is 100+ miles between gas stations, never mind chargers, so it becomes a range risk even for ICE cars. I’m not the OP but when I’m driving in that part of North America I try to keep my range above 200 miles for this reason. It has saved me from being stranded more than once.

Alternatively, a backup plan for people with experience in those areas is to use ranch and forestry trails to route around the highway closures if feasible. This requires a vehicle suitable for that terrain. Few if any EVs are.

That said, most Americans rarely do long-haul driving in the backwaters of the American West. But if you do it enough, high ground clearance and reliable 400+ miles range in all weather conditions is a safety requirement.

The only reason I don’t have an EV is that most of my driving miles are like that. I don’t drive in the city where I live. No EV currently made credibly delivers that kind of performance but a lot of cheap ICE vehicles do.

Eventually EVs will get there but they aren’t there today.

Writing clear, concise, and efficient code in C++ has never been simpler or easier. The improvements in C++ over the last 15 years have been qualitative.

So many complex, esoteric, and difficult to maintain incantations that used to be required for efficient code generation are no longer necessary.

Depending on the specific code, the compiler may even eliminate the redundant lengths.

The “freedom of movement” in the EU is considerably more difficult and limited in practice than what exists in the US.

40-50% of US citizens live in a different State than the one they are native to. 4-5% of EU citizens live in a different country than the one they are native to. That is a very large disparity.

My point was that many of the oft-argued benefits of living in the US are relatively difficult to access in Mississippi. But if one finds themselves in that position it is relatively easy to improve their lot even if they are poor and don’t work in tech.

Been there, done that, and know many others that have.

The tax loading in the US on the equivalent of a 100,000 EUR salary is much lower than this.

At 100,000 USD (a bit lower than EUR) the combined tax load on income for both employee and employer is typically ~30-35% depending on locale. In the US, $100k is pretty close to the median household income.

If you have extremely high incomes (e.g. 1,000,000+ USD) the gap closes a bit but even in the highest tax locales the marginal tax loading maxes out at ~60% of top-line income.

US Federal tax rates are some of the most progressive in the world. Only ~20% of households are net taxpayers after transfer payments and subsidies. Ironically, this is why it is so difficult to significantly increase income tax revenue in the US. It would require the middle-class majority to vote to raise their own taxes.