About 40% of that generation was in the military. 8% were drafted, but a lot of the 32% who voluntarily joined did so in order to exercise some control over where they ended up. Even those who didn’t serve, often had to deal with the overall risk hanging over their head, or were actively committing crimes to avoid the draft. The draft might have only directly affected 8%, but the threat of the draft, and people’s decisions around that issue, was a huge part of that generation’s lived experience.

Cars were somewhat cheaper back then, but they were also a lot shittier. Most odometers only had 5 digits because getting it to 100,000 miles was unusual.

Advances in body materials made it so that they no longer disintegrated into rust by the 1980’s, and advances in machine tolerances and factory procedures made it so that cars were routinely hitting 100,000 miles or more by the 1990’s.

A 1969 Plymouth Roadrunner MSRPed for $2,945, in an era when minimum wage was $1.60/hour. That’s 1840 hours worked at minimum wage (46 weeks of full time work), for a car that could probably drive about 100,000 miles, and required a lot more active maintenance.

Now that cars last longer, too, the used car market exists in a way that the 1960s didn’t have. That makes it possible to buy a used car more easily, and for the new cars being purchased to retain a bit more value when they’re sold a few years later.

And that’s to say nothing of fuel economy, where a Roadrunner was getting something like 11 miles per gallon, or safety, back when even medium speed crashes were deadly.

The basic effect, in the end, is that the typical household in 2025 is spending a lower percentage of their budget on transportation, compared to the typical household in 1970.

The golden age for being able to buy and use cheap cars was probably around 2015-2020, before the used car market went nuts.

Page 45 of this PDF has a good chart. It shows that about 26.8 million men were draft eligible in that generation, and about 8.7 million enlisted, 2.2 million were drafted, and 16.0 million never served, including about 570,000 apparent draft dodgers.

About 2.1 million actually went to Vietnam, and about 1.55 million were in combat roles in Vietnam. 51,000 were killed.

So roughly:

• 41% of that generation of men were in the military
• 8% of that generation went to Vietnam
• 6% of that generation fought in Vietnam
• About 0.2% of that generation died in Vietnam

Seriously. The rhetorical shift:

Study of American men’s self-reported political affiliation shows that “moderate” aligns pretty closely with “conservative.”

Headline assigns “moderate” political affiliation to Joe Biden, to suggest that Joe Biden’s policies align closely with “conservative.”

Biden campaigned on being the most progressive president in U.S. history. Did he deliver? Not on all metrics, but whatever it is he did, he wasn’t a secret conservative pretending to be moderate. The most you can accuse him of is being a moderate pretending to be progressive.

I know several people in this category: still employed by the government and subject to government ethics rules, unhireable by any company that still needs to follow that government agency’s rules about conflicts of interest.

It’s not moving from one company to another.

It’s moving from the government regulator to a company regulated by that former employer. The rules on government conflicts of interest still apply, and you can’t accept a paycheck from a regulated entity while you’re still technically employed at the regulator.

Back from Yet Another Globetrotting Adventure, Indiana Jones Checks His Mail and Discovers That His Bid for Tenure Has Been Denied

They’re basically the proto Pacific Islanders. It’s believed that their civilizations all trace back to a group of people from the island of Taiwan/Formosa, who learned how to sail over the deep ocean and set up new communities, bringing chickens, pigs, taro, coconuts.

They settled modern day Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, as far west as Madagascar, to Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia, and most of the other Pacific Islands, as far east as Easter Island. Native Hawaiians, Samoans, Guamese, etc., are all Austronesian. Most ethnic groups considered native to these islands trace back to Austronesian expansion.

There are shared linguistic and cultural ties that showed that they had recent comment ancestry, that has since been confirmed by DNA genealogy.

I ask because it’s hard for me to imagine how one individual can amass $100 million in wealth without theft from those actually producing value.

Services and intangible property.

If I write and record a song, and 100 million people like it enough to pay me a dollar for it, that’s $100 million right there. If I then tour and sell out stadiums and arenas and negotiate a cut of $10 per ticket (and make sure that the staff that actually makes the event possible gets paid fairly, and incorporate that into the ticket price), and end up selling 10 million tickets, that’s another $100 million to myself.

I’d argue that there’s no exploitation or theft there. It’s just scaling to a huge, almost unfathomable volume of sales.

The same can be true with other forms of intellectual property. A popular book may sell billions of copies. A popular piece of software might be downloaded billions of times. Even without copyright, one can imagine a patron/tip/donation model raising billions for some superstars.

Other services might not have a property model, but can still scale. There are minor celebrities making a living doing Cameos for $500 per video, who can easily do 20 a day. Nobody is getting hurt when someone does that.

So I’d argue it is possible to earn a billion without exploitation. They should still be taxed, though.

Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.

Executive Orders aren’t unconstitutional on their own.

The president can do meaningless gestures in an Executive Order, like declare a happy birthday to a foreign head of state or something, and that’s not unconstitutional.

The president can also exercise the inherent constitutional powers of the office through executive order, too: grant a military medal to somebody, tell executive branch employees that they have Christmas Eve off, provide for a system of classifying state secrets, etc. Those might have real effects, but so long as it’s the exercise of power that the presidency actually has, there’s nothing unconstitutional about that.

Then the president can also exercise the powers given by Congress: tell the EPA to start a rulemaking process, declare a public health emergency and invoke some of the powers under the procedures previously defined by Congress, etc. If the powers involved were granted by Congress, and the power itself was not unconstitutional, then there’s no problem there.

The big issue is that a lot of people misunderstand when an executive order is performative and has no legal effect, or when an executive order merely directs an agency to do something with legal effect. That agency’s actions need to be evaluated for legality, but the executive order itself does nothing, except communicates the president’s preferences to that agency in a public way. The president could just as easily call up that agency head by phone and say the same thing, and wouldn’t even need to publish that order.

It’s not the procedure that’s unconstitutional. It’s the actual contents and substance of the orders that are probably illegal.

You heard the man, fire any employee and expel any student who participated in the January 6 insurrection.

Wondermark did a version of this joke that’s pretty good.

We can agree to disagree. I don’t miss the days of paying for long distance phone calls, all the waiting around in trying to link up with friends at a designated place, looking up addresses in a physical book of map grids, manually maintaining a calendar in a planner, driving across town and waiting in line for tickets to a show. The internet made things better.

The other stuff back then wasn’t always better, either. Smoking eveywhere, unreliable cars, air pollution, crime, etc., really cut into quality of life.

Peak was mid to late 2000’s. Late enough for most people to have broadband Internet and lots of websites with user submitted content that bypassed the traditional cultural gatekeepers, before smartphones and social media ruined everything.

People have containerized (like literal shipping containers that comply with ISO 668 and its successors, not just software like Docker) data centers that can operate wherever they can hook up power. Put some antennas or satellite receivers on the outside, and you might be able to literally have services running from a moving vehicle or ship.

Enforcing against screenshots would be difficult, especially if screenshots of Bluesky/Mastodon are allowed but X/Threads isn’t.

By cherry picking a few Republican priorities designed to spite big tech and totally ignoring the big enforcement efforts that the Biden administration has pursued through the FTC and the DOJ Antitrust Division, in both tech and non-tech industries.

The communication that kicked off this whole thing was saying something positive about Trump and something negative about Democrats in direct comparison, on an issue that the Democrats are actually way better on.

It’s not just saying something positive about a political official or party. It’s actively saying “this party is better than that party.” And he was wrong on the merits of the statement.

And then amplifying the message using an official account is where it went off the rails. CEOs are allowed to have opinions as individuals. But when the official account backs up the CEO, then we can rightly be skeptical that the platform itself will be administered in a fair way.

These fuckers act like they’ve never heard of Lina Khan. Let’s see if Republicans try to replace her with someone with a stronger track record. Or, if they’re so serious about tech competition maybe they’ll get on board with net neutrality.

And look, I actually like Gail Slater (the Trump nominee that kicked off this thread). She’s got some bona fides, and I welcome Republicans taking antitrust more seriously, and rolling back the damage done by Robert Bork and his adherents (including and probably most significantly Ronald Reagan).

But to pretend that Democrats are less serious about antitrust than Republicans ignores the huge moves that the Biden administration have made in this area, including outside of big tech.