The communist party broke down traditional family structures, and replaced kinship ties with the state. To the point of massive intervention in family formation itself, through the one child policy.

It’s not about Anglo-Protestantism per se, but about a general progression towards atomized societies with weak family bonds. Multiple different cultural changes pushed in that same direction. Protestantism was one, but before that so was the Catholic Church: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/11/roman-catholi....

There is a plausible argument that it’s causal. Europe had weaker kinship ties—for various reasons, including the Catholic church’s ban on cousin marriage—back in the middle ages, before Europe began pulling away from the rest of the world in terms of GDP per capita. Even within the U.S., communities with weak kinship ties (e.g. Northeastern Anglo-Protestants) are more economically successful than communities with stronger kinship ties and clan structures (e.g. Appalachians).

Arguably, more atomized societies with weak kinship ties foster the development of civil institutions and governments to compensate for the social structural functions that would otherwise be performed by kinship networks.

> At this point, the system was trying to find a framebuffer driver so that the Mac OS X GUI could be shown. As indicated in the logs, WindowServer was not happy - to fix this, I’d need to write my own framebuffer driver.

I'm surprised by how well abstracted MacOS is (was). The I/O Kit abstraction layers seemed to actually do what they said. A little kudos to the NeXT developers for that.

So why don't Japan and Germany have high inflation, since those country's currencies aren't the reserve currency either?

I find it very difficult to imagine that composting is actually legit.

Do you mean that we’ll have high inflation because we’ll keep running massive deficits? Because many countries that don’t have the reserve currency also have low inflation.

By 1991, France already generated nearly 80% of its electricity from nuclear. Pointing to the falling cost of solar today overlooks the fact that nuclear would have allowed a massive decarbonization of the developed world two generations ago. France couldn't have done that with solar back then. The current feasibility of solar and wind is the result of fundamental scientific advances in semiconductors and batteries that didn't happen until the early 2000s.

Remember, CO2 is a cumulative problem. Massive CO2 emissions reductions from solar/wind in 2026 are a lot less valuable than the massive CO2 emissions reductions we could have had using nuclear 40-50 years ago.

Also a scam.

There is a more straightforward counterfactual. If the hippies had just sat the fuck down and the developed countries had nuclearized their grid the way France did, CO2 emissions would be so much lower that we could afford to have the entire developing world increase its CO2 emissions up to the French level while remaining within the same total global emissions level as today. And we would have had a huge runway for further decarbonizing our economies because we could have done all that by the 1980s like France did.

Male 20-24 employment rate is down 14 percentage points since 1960: https://ycharts.com/indicators/us_labor_force_participation_...

That’s democracy.

This is only true if you define “unemployment” narrowly to exclude people who are in school. In 1950, you could get a job out of high school. Today, you need to spend four years in college, sometimes more.

Counting people who are in school as “not unemployed” ignores the opportunity cost of school. You’re spending 4 years in the prime of your life. And during that time you’re not earning any income, but instead paying money. So even if eventually your job prospects are as good as they were in 1950, clearly the economy isn’t as good as it was when you could hit that same rate without people making that up front investment.

What America is full of is fake employment statistics that are artificially inflated by young people hiding out in school to avoid the bad job market.

But being able to originate legislation in the directly elected legislature is important. Even the original U.S. constitutional design, which was quite anti-populist, made the directly elected House the main originator of legislation. (Either the House or Senate could do it, but only the House could introduce appropriations bills giving it primacy in the legislative process.)

A tariff isn't a ban either. Imposing a tariff and eliminating a subsidy are both just ways of reducing a foreign drug maker's sales in a local market by making the product more expensive.

Fundamentally, neither Australia nor the U.S. can force companies located in Switzerland or Denmark to sell them drugs at a particular rate. The only leverage they have is hurting drug maker's sales by reducing the demand in the local market.

> You understand the US is the most expensive place in the world for medicine right... If you don't change your strategy this won't change.

The executive negotiating with drug manufacturers is a dramatic change in strategy from what the U.S. has done before.

Here, there is no threat that the drugs will be banned from the market completely. The threat is that the drug companies will face high tariffs that reduce sales. That’s a much less extreme threat than what the European countries use as leverage.