cyd

Apologies for the mistake.

But the point remains: 2% of GDP is the NATO target, getting even to that point for Germany has been like pulling teeth, and a serious implementation of universal conscription would be a much bigger ask.

My phone is better at navigation etc anyways.

You could similarly argue that phone makers should concentrate on making and taking calls. Turns out, that's not what consumers care about once a certain bar is cleared (a pretty low bar; call quality is notably bad on many modern cellphones). They care more about other stuff like... being good at navigation.

This has been put to the market test in China. For EV purchases, most consumers turn out not to care about the "car" aspects beyond a certain point. If the car drives okay and has acceptable safety, what matters is the Internet-based bells and whistles.

If AI really was such a game-changer, it would increase the chances of finding extraterrestrial aliens, not decrease it. If AI allows for superhuman feats of intellect and engineering, then even if 99.9% of all strong AI leads to the destruction of the original civilization, you'd only need the 0.1% of civilizations that develop stable benevolent civilization-boosting AI (let's call them The Culture). Those would spread around, and we would have seen them. So we're back at Fermi's paradox.

since at least the 80s

People have been reliant on "ole’ techno-solutions" since the dawn of humanity 2 million years ago on the African savannah, long before capitalism was even a thing. Just sayin'.

Eh, I think this is excusing too much. There's a lot of territory between "writing blank checks with no oversight and reporting" and "a process so anal, only 7 EV chargers are built nationwide over two years".

"The wealthy and corporations" have choices of how to invest their money. If housing supply is sufficiently elastic to meet demand, they'll find somewhere else other than housing to put their money. Ain't nobody trying to corner the Chinese real estate market in 2024, for instance (*).

There are a few places where land shortages genuinely constrain housing supply, like Singapore and Hong Kong. But the US has tons of land; things are simply not well optimized. That, plus high interest rates due to fiscal/monetary mismanagement.

(*) Not saying the Chinese real estate market is worth emulating.

This is an unserious proposal. Germany spends about 1.5 percent of its GDP(*) on defence, much of it wasted, and increasing it to even 2 percent has involved painful and extended political wrangling. If the country collectively cannot find the will to tweak its budget to fund a modest increase in defence spending, it is not going to countenance universal conscription.

(*) GDP, not budget; error pointed out by Enkrod

US policymakers screwed themselves with crappy urban planning, leading to insufficient housing supply and bad transit options. Blaming AirBnB for high housing prices is like setting up a chain of dominos, and criticizing a guy who comes by and knocks it over. If it wasn't him, it would have been someone else, or the wind.

It's more about bureaucratic inefficiency than political opposition. Common story in US infrastructure.

Irrelevant. Because of India's population, the only way for it not to eventually surpass Japan in total GDP is for India to remain perpetually mired in backwardness. Since the 1990s, India has undergone successive rounds of economic liberalization, thereby achieving catch-up growth. All that stuff with Japanese demographics, bad management, etc. are secondary factors. Even if all the factors for Japan had been more favorable, it would only have postponed the day of overtake by a few years.