Yaztromo

We’re already past the point where calculating more digits of pi is either interesting or useful. The formula for calculating pi is well known, so at this point all it is is how much compute power and time can you throw at the infinite series equation.

Pi is only useful for practical purposes out to around 21 digits — with that many digits you can calculate the diameter of the entire universe down to an accuracy of a single electron. Anything more has no real practical benefits. Even NASA only uses 16 digits of Pi for any calculation in-solar system; anything more is just burning compute power (and possibly running into issues with floating point rounding issues) for no additional benefit.

Ten years from now when computers are significantly more powerful, someone will break this record for the lulz.

The Conservative Party led Canadian Government and the Regan-era Republican US Government started working on the US-Canada Air Quality Agreement, which was signed by the George H.W. Bush administration into law in the US (and the Brian Mulroney led Government of Canada).

That’s right — two Conservative governments identified a problem, listened to their scientists, and enacted a solution to acid rain. And now the problem has virtually disappeared.

Oh how low Conservatives have fallen on both sides of the border since those days.

You’re scared??? Try living immediately above them!

Yup — I’ve been gaming since the Coleco Telstar. It’s not that I can’t “git gud”, it’s that I have a life and responsibilities outside videogames. When you work full time, have volunteer responsibilities, and a wife and children at home you don’t have hours a day to “git gud” — you’re lucky if you have hours a week to sit down and enjoy a game in peace.

And I can’t do that with FromSoftware’s games, because they make them inaccessible to people like me. I know they’re laughing all the way to the bank — but they could be laughing even harder if they didn’t limit their (admittedly already huge) market.

But From apparently doesn’t want people like me as a customer — and so I’m not. Their loss — I’d likely play some of their games if they made them so I could kick back and enjoy them, but I admittedly already have a bit of a backlog due to limited playing hours so my gaming life is just fine without them.

(If anyone has an hour, ask me sometime how much I hated Bloodbourne with the passion of 10 000 dying suns).

And that’s what many people (myself included) have done — but honestly, it wouldn’t take anything away from anyone nor detract from the game, and certainly wouldn’t be difficult to implement if they just put some very basic skill settings in there to make their games more accessible.

If I were purely greedy, I’d wish my Province (BC) used the Federal backstop programme most of the rest of the country is using. You guys don’t know how good you have it. I don’t get any rebate cheques from the BC Government — and as someone who was paying attention for the last 30 years I’ve done a lot to decarbonize my life, so the Federal rebate would be nearly 100% pure profit in my pocket.

“Criminals with no shame trying to game the system for their own benefit” is rather why we have courts in the first place. Courts have been dealing with things like this forever, and know how to slap down defendants who pull this kind of crap.

We can say, because the things you list are almost completely independent of the fact that Germany, Japan, France (to a certain extent), and later China all made major advancements in their industrial capabilities post-war, and they (along with countries within their geographic and political spheres of influence) didn’t have to buy from the US anymore.

Would a 1970s and 1980s green energy revolution in the US have been a good thing that would have benefitted the United States? Most likely yes (and everyone else for that matter) — but again, that doesn’t change the fact that the countries left with minimal industrial output post WWII were going to rebuild that output. Individually many of them my not have surpassed the US (and may never do so), but in aggregate they (especially China) have reduced the US’s near sole-source influence they had on the supply chain for manufactured goods in the 50s and 60s. This was always going to be outside the US’s control and ability to change in any significant manner — they were always going to go from “virtually no competition” to “competition with virtually everyone” in the post-war years.

Insurance companies understand risk. Trump undoubtedly had to put up some serious collateral to secure the bond. Like casinos

No, Trump’s casinos are worthless 🤣.

You accuse me of ignoring the high cost of Vietnam — but ultimately your own argument supports mine. Toyota and Volkswagen couldn’t have challenged the American automotive hegemony in the 1970s had it not been for the re-industrialization of Japan and Germany that allowed this to happen in the first place. The US got “stuck” in a 1950s mentality (cheap overseas oil, no significant international industrial competition), and re-industrialized countries that 20 years prior couldn’t compete had built up enough that they could.

The US wouldn’t have regained its edge even without Vietnam. At best, it would have slowed the slide — but ultimately every other country on earth was also going to grow its economy, and the re-industrialization that happened in countries with much cheaper costs of living (and yes, in some cases with regressive political regimes that worked to keep costs down) was always going to happen anyway, and no amount of US protectionism was ever going to prevent it from happening. As I pointed out elsewhere in this post (as one example), Australia in the 1950s bought the vast majority of its automobiles from US companies — but now they buy primarily from Asian manufacturers. The US lost that business because those other manufacturers focuses on cost and quality — and it’s not likely getting it back anytime soon. Multiply that by virtually every industry in existence today, and it’s not hard to see that the 50s and 60s were a special economic anomaly that won’t likely ever happen again.

And none of that would change the fact that other countries are now able to buy goods they once bought from US manufacturers from other countries.

China, Japan, Germany, and other modern industrial powerhouses that were decimated after WWII are now competition for US manufacturers. Even if the US went full on protectionist and kept their own factories from offshoring, that wasn’t going to prevent China (or Germany, or France, or whomever) from pursuing its own industrialization, and then going after countries that were buying American in the mid 20th century to buy from them instead.

A good example to look at right now is Australia — in the 1950s, they were dominated by American vehicles, either importing them directly from the US, or via locally built Holdens (which may have been manufactured locally, but the company was owned by General Motors — the profits flowed back to the United States), with some small British cars thrown in. But today only two American brands even make it into the Top 10 — Ford at #3, and Tesla at #8. All of the other brands are now primarily out of Asia (Toyota, Mazda, Nissan, Mitsubishi, Kia, Hyundai, Isuzu).

The US “not offshoring” manufacturing wouldn’t have changed this. And the story is the same across all of the rest of the world — back in the 1950s, the world was buying from the US (or to a lesser extent Canada and the UK). Today they don’t have to — and US protectionism was never going to change that. Forcing American companies to stay in the US and only hire Americans would have just made life for Americans more expensive, and wouldn’t have changed the fact that money that had been flowing into the US during the post-war era had more or less dried up once the major economies in Europe and Asia had re-industrialized.

I have as much problems with the hoarding of wealth as everyone else here does, but it’s not enough to change the calculus here.

The top 0.1% in the United States hold approximately $20 trillion dollars in wealth. If you “ate the rich” and handed this over to the other 99.9% of citizens evenly, that would give everyone a one-time payment of about $58 000. And sure — we’d all love to have an extra $58 000 in our pockets, but when you divide that by 40 years of inequality you’re looking at less than $1500 per year per person — and that isn’t going to make up for the fact that a lot of high-paying jobs left the US in that time because they weren’t needed anymore.

And you ignore the fact that the wealth that has been hoarded isn’t sitting in a Scrooge McDuck-like vault full of gold. Most of the wealth held by the top 0.1% is tied up in investments which back real, tangible industrial and civil infrastructure important to the US economy.

None of which changes the fact that as the rest of the world (re)industrialized post WWII, those other countries didn’t need to do business with the US as much anymore. The US didn’t become the global financial powerhouse it was in the 50s and 60s and 70s because people inside the US were wealthy — they did it by selling stuff everywhere around the world, because much of the rest of the industrialized world had to rebuild their infrastructure to build their own stuff. But now the US gets to compete with China and Germany and Japan and Taiwan and France in ways they didn’t have to back in the middle of the 20th century, and other countries are buying from these countries instead of the US. And no amount of US regulation was ever going to change that.

The US benefitted from a one-time bubble that can’t be repeated. No duh things changed for the worse.