I was really hoping, and with a different administration I think there was a real shot, for a huge influx of cash into clean energy infrastructure.

Imagine a trillion dollars (frankly it might be more, we'll see) shoved into clean energy generation and huge upgrades to our distribution.

With a bubble burst all we'd be left with is a modern grid and so much clean energy we could accelerate our move off fossil fuels.

Plus a lot of extra compute, that's less clear of a long term value.

Alas.

I'm also always curious to know what happens if you remove wealthy boomers from this pool.

I forget the exact numbers, but let's say ten billionaires own 50% of all the wealth in the US; how many of those folks are boomers?

That'd remarkably change this ratio if it were the case that much of this wealth is held by only a few very wealthy boomers.

If anyone's curious, from https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...

- Top 1% -> 31.0% of total US household wealth

- Top 10% but excluding the top 1% -> 36.4% of total US household wealth, i.e. the top 10% have 67.4% of total US household wealth

- The bottom 90% -> 32.6% of total US household wealth

IIRC a current statistic is that the top 10% overall own 60% of the wealth.

Also I believe that actual surviving boomers are underrepresented in that 10% compared to the general population now. And that trend can be expected to continue predictably.

I would expect many/most billionaires to be boomers or older. It takes time to accomplish anything. Idk how many are "new money" vs "old money" (majority inherited) but I sure don't expect a high proportion of young people among the ultra wealthy.

> Do 30-year mortgages make the other houses more expensive somehow?

OP didn't mean to say this, but yes, unfortunately they do. Anything that "increases affordability" will result in an eventual increase in the principal value for things that are supply constrained.

Those might be the only ones? Desert Storm being the one that I'd probably call out, Just Cause was just so small.

One minor win, every major operation being a loss doesn't change the conclusion though imo.

I think it's also instructive to look at each of these operations and note that the two that were won were small, had clear objectives, and were executed quickly to meet those objectives and had no scope creep.

Iraq had one of the largest militaries in the world at the time of Desert Storm. They had tons and tons of arms and equipment and a huge standing army to counter the persistent threat (and/or to provide their own threat) of resumed hostilities with Iran (that war was still pretty recent when Desert Storm took place)

I would agree that the US is notably terrible at occupations and getting involved in civil wars, at least since WWII, but Desert Storm was pretty much an unqualified slam-dunk take-a-victory-lap success against one of the top armies in the world that wasn’t an ally or a nuclear state—carried out on the other side of the planet from the US, to boot. Like I think Iraq was ranked top-10 at the time by many ways of reckoning military strength, and that wasn’t enough to effectively resist the US effort at all, really.

If that war seems small, it’s only possible for it to seem that way from the victor’s perspective, and only because we did such an amazingly good job of totally destroying Iraq’s substantial capacity to fight in a matter of weeks. In terms of deployed and engaged men and materiel it was really big, just fast because it was so very one-sided, and “cheap” in terms of casualties on the US side for the same reason.

You're agreeing with me, or rather I agree with you.

I consider Desert Storm an unqualified victory in an engagement that is in the same conversation as a Vietnam or Korean war, but still not quite to a WW level in scope or complexity.

A punishment that was felt by decision makers but was unable to be offloaded as a cost to the public, except maybe in the form of rent. Prison :)

I've found Google's default Weather app to be quite poor starting around six months ago. Consistently off by two to five degrees.

On the advice of someone here on hackernews I tried out weawow, and though it is a terrible name it is _very_ accurate. So much better and consistent. Love it so far.

You may be surprised (or not?) at how many important scientific and historical works are done by armchair practitioners.

Typically you incorporate union representatives onto boards of companies, make the members shareholders etc. You tie incentive structures together.

Even so, I'm a reject your framing to a certain degree. Employees, and by extension labor unions, typically want to see the company they work at succeed. Labor always pays the price, e.g. forgoing wages during a strike.

And even when a deal is struck, employees often put the interest of the company ahead of their own, e.g. trading away already agreed upon wage increases in a labor contract in order to keep the company solvent.

Are there examples of both situations? Of course! I've seen both first hand, but it certainly isn't completely one or the other. Some companies have a good relationship with their unions, others are very antagonistic.

How would you prefer to write those examples?

Separate templating from computing I'd assume.

Personally, I'd either just put the content in an ID-ed span and have a script to replace the content. Another, perhaps better, way is to use Alpine.JS which excels at this kind of stuff.

> I'd either just put the content in an ID-ed span and have a script to replace the content

And so your script is broken when someone else in your team (or maybe even yourself) renames or removes the ID and forgets to search in the whole project if some piece of code depends on this ID. JSX fixed all that mess 10+ years ago.

Yet you still need IDs for ARIA attributes, so now the JSX also needs a pile of shared variables

Either solution sounds more verbose than the example and require writing code in at least one other source file

But that separation is sometimes the point. A designer tweaking the looks has no chance to break the computation logic, and an engineer tweaking the computation part won't disrupt the design by mistake.

Terseness is good for code golf [1]. I disliked CoffeeScript after writing it for some time: nearly any typo can result in another syntactically correct program which, of course, does not what you wanted the original program to do, or fails the compilation in an unrelated place. A practical language has safety margins, aka some redundancy.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_golf#Dedicated_golfing_la...

Unless the designer removes the id, or the engineer introduces new output that is not styled.

But they're both framework-agnostic.

This snippet works with any framework and any build step.

  <script src="https://unpkg.com/alpinejs@3.x.x/dist/cdn.min.js" defer></script>
  <div x-data="{ 
    today: new Date().toDateString(),
    randomNum: Math.floor(Math.random() \* 100)
  }">
    <p>Today is <span x-text="today"></span></p>
    <p>Random number: <span x-text="randomNum"></span></p>
  </div>

I'll concede that Alpine.js is harder to understand and more verbose than Marko's syntax, but in order to use Marko you have to commit to the Marko framework. If you're willing to choose a framework solely for its JS-in-HTML capabilities, there are much better choices (like SvelteKit that handles JS-in-HTML wonderfully).

Fwiw, Marko predates svelte quiet significantly.

It was originally created by eBay iirc, back in 2014 or so.

It's syntax was even stranger back then, like writing "h1.myClass my header" to create a <h1 classes=myClass>my header</h1> and similar

You should give this a read, it explains why they chose to put everything within the markup

https://markojs.com/docs/explanation/separation-of-concerns

Turns out that separation of powers was incorrect. Each branch needs its own enforcement arm and our plan of having the Executive carry out the law instead of just enforcing the law was a bad idea.

The limit to separation of powers is that many people will align themselves with the most powerful existing entity as the easiest path to self advancement, and this results in a natural consolidation of power even when that consolidation is outside the formal hierarchy. So once an entity or institution becomes too powerful, it tends to just reinforce itself.

No, because then you’re just centralizing power in the hands of a specific group of people—Ivy League law school graduates—that have distinctive cultural and class interests. Maybe you think that’s a good idea today. But in the mid-20th century these institutions were the bastion of WASPs, long after that group lost electoral control of the country due to immigration. (Watch the movie The Good Shepherd.) Your system would’ve given the FBI/CIA/DOJ powerful tools to destroy the presidencies of FDR and JFK. There’s a reason the conspiracy theory exists that the CIA assassinated the first catholic president.

The founders were right that nobody can be trusted to neutrally enforce “the law.” If you could trust Harvard graduates as a class to do that, there would be no reason for checks and balances or separation of powers.

> The founders were right that nobody can be trusted to neutrally enforce “the law.”

Well my point is two-fold. First, what you say here is my point, all branches need an _enforcement_ arm. Today Congress has the Sergeant at Arms and courts have bailiffs and may deputize members of the Executive Branch.

However that's clearly inadequate in the face of the Executive's current balance of power. A rebalancing is necessary imo.

Could that result in a Roman-esque problem of the three branches having "tug of wars" with each other's law enforcement arm, but I don't think so. We have this problem today with the dozens of law enforcement organizations within the Executive...which brings me to my second point!

My second point is that carrying out the law in the Executive was clearly the wrong choice. The Legislative branch should actually carry out the law, i.e. USPS should live under a committee in Congress, and mail fraud would continue to be prosecuted by the Executive.

I'll caveat that I'm had waiving a lot here, but I hope we can all agree at least on the problem statement; too much power has concentrated in the Executive and _drastic_ measures would be required to resolve that situation.