Does anyone else think 3% return isn’t that spectacular?

But that’s not the percentage return on investible assets. That’s the increase in his net worth in a year.

Think about the typical upper middle class retiree who might have a 401(k) worth $1 million and a paid off house worth $500,000. If they get a 10% return on their portfolio, their house price appreciates by 5%, and they get $10,000 in social security income while their spending rate is $100,000/year, their net worth would go up by $100k + $25k + $10k - $100k for a total of $35k, which is only 2.3% of their total net worth. Even though their investments did pretty well that year.

Bezos is getting more than 3% return. He’s just spending a lot of it. Like on a $55 million wedding.

You make periodic deposits

We pay a premium, which is a monthly or weekly payment to the insurance company in the same amount each time.

Then, when we see a doctor, we have to pay a copay (a single payment in a fixed amount), coinsurance (payment of a particular percentage of the whole cost), and a deductible (either a per-visit or per-year amount where we have to pay ourselves before an insurance company pays). Together, these types of payments are known as member payments, member responsibility, or out of pocket payments, and they’re capped at a particular amount per year (at most $9,200 for an individual or $18,400 for a family).

It’s a complex system, and insurance is only a part of the problem. Plenty of countries have private insurance and don’t have these issues (Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Japan, South Korea). And many of the providers in the US (hospitals, doctors, clinics, labs) are scummy corporate profit-driven providers and try to enrich themselves at the expense of insurance (including government and nonprofit insurance), so there’s a lot of fraud and anti-fraud measures creating messy overhead and inefficiency.

Pretty much every plan has an annual out of pocket max, and in order to be listed on an exchange it has to be under $9,200 for an individual or $18,400 for a family. Balance billing is also now illegal, so whatever the insurance won’t pay can’t be billed to you. That’s the bare minimum, and it’s already the law.

So if you can find a plan that will cover any doctor you find (even if “out of network”), you can have what you’re looking for. It probably won’t be cheap, but what you’re asking for is in most plans in some way or another.

Resistance takes many forms.

Completely lawful resistance can include social pressure or ostracism, economic influence (boycotts, refusal to serve as customer, etc.), messaging/speech/persuasion, protests, strikes, etc. Keeping the cameras rolling, telling them how you feel about them being in your neighborhood, warning your neighbors about them.

Civil disobedience goes up the ladder a bit, and can cause disruption and might be nonviolent, but might at times actually be illegal. Generally speaking, this type of resistance is designed to clog up the system without being violent, and doesn’t even require anonymity or evasion from authorities.

Sometimes simply playing dumb can slow things down without actually committing a crime of putting yourself at much risk. Apply for a job at ICE with 1000 of your closest friends so they waste resources on your application. Forget to put in their order when you’re their waiter, or give them the shitty hotel room when they check in at your hotel, and program their keys incorrectly. Give them the wrong bay/spot when they’re renting a car from you. Call in tips for everything you see and flood their lines with bad information.

Most people jump from that category to outright violent resistance, but there are other tactics available, too. Sabotage, property crimes, plain old financial crimes, fraud, impersonation, hacking or denial of service, even things like theft, embezzlement. Locking a fence with a bicycle lock, blocking a driveway with a van, flooding a field with mud, impersonating their boss and giving them fake orders, sending them on a goose chase with a bad tip, etc.

If you shoot an ICE agent you might turn them into a hero. Steal their badge or ID when they’re drinking at the bar, though, and you might actually hurt them in ways that they won’t feel like a martyr, and will actually sap resources from their management.

Everyone is in a different situation, with different capabilities. Every war has plenty of roles, many of them nonviolent. There’s probably something you can do today to contribute to the cause, from your unique position.

It’s a quote post, not really a reply.

That’s true. Definitely more public facing, and more on the “fair game to discuss” side of the spectrum, probably between normal replies and full blown screenshot: probably triggers an inbox item in the original poster’s place, invites commenters to follow the link to the poster’s page, possible for original poster to delete and break the quote tweet, but not an actual reply that can be seen on the default view of the poster’s page.

him then going to such an extreme extent of publicly humiliating the other user (though the username is not visible; at least he does that)

In a sense, that’s even further down the “fair game to discuss” end of the spectrum. Replies to the substance without identifying that particular source or providing a link to that profile (but not actually hard for someone to find). Even further down would be a simple paraphrase “I’m getting a lot of people saying something to the effect of X and I want to respond to that point” without a screenshot.

But my broader point is that these interactions do exist on a spectrum, and on-platform interactions on Twitter-like platforms is less than a full blown public forum.

If I post something on a public forum

If you don’t want people to respond, make a blog.

It’s somewhere in between, though, right? On a traditional forum, you can create a thread, where being OP on that thread doesn’t give any privileged moderation powers within that thread.

On a traditional blog (or, like a newspaper’s website where they allow commenters on the articles), it’s well understood that the comments attached to the blog post or article are subject to moderation, and that the person who posted that has strong moderation powers.

With social media sites, the platforms have all given the users the power to post freely, and then moderate their own reply threads from there. It’s obvious on platforms like Facebook or Instagram, where someone posting a comment on someone else’s post is understood and expected to be subject to the moderation decisions of the original poster (including the power to just disable comments entirely). But on microblogging sites, replies often are considered on more equal footing, and are posts of their own, instead of being clearly subordinate to an original post/comment relationship.

In the end, I think the power to mute or disable replies (even on an ad hoc basis, even after the fact) gives the impression that replies are a semi-private space subject to the original poster’s own moderation decisions.

None of that would apply to someone commenting on the substance of the post on their own chosen space (writing a new post with the screenshot), but going off platform doesn’t actually ping the original poster within that platform. In a sense, the power to ping that user’s inbox also carries some level of responsible etiquette.

They posted it on a publicly accessible forum, my dude.

Yes, but there is a qualitative difference between posting an original top level post, versus posting a reply under another user’s post. Twitter-like platforms generally give users the power to control replies to their posts in a way that is less than perfectly open public access. It’s probably somewhere in between a forum where everyone can post (and where moderation rights are generally independent of who created a post) versus a blog where the blog owner can moderate the comment thread under their own posts.

I don’t think hosting Jeopardy gives any kind of special status, but I’d argue that being one of the greatest contestants in the history of the show counts for something.

It’s not “your space”, it’s a public forum.

I’d argue there’s a spectrum from a totally public forum to a totally private forum, and replies to social media posts on platforms where users are followed are somewhere in the middle.

It’s kinda like comments on a blog post. The blog owner still controls the space, including the power to block users and delete their comments from that page, and enjoys a privileged position with respect to what is essentially publishing and moderation powers in that particular space.

It’s within that particular accountholder’s powers to block, ignore, or mute other commenters’ ability to interact with the content posted (including simply turning off replies for certain users or all users). So in that sense, the platform itself is public while that particular user’s profile page and the feed of that user’s posts is curated by that user.

And perhaps most importantly, these commenters are leveraging Ken Jennings’ account popularity to magnify their own comments’ visibility. They could post something on their own, but they also know that their replies to Ken Jennings have a much higher reach than their own original posts would.

In other words, there’s a fundamental difference between capturing a screenshot and posting a reply somewhere else, versus replying on platform.

We’re just going to have to agree to disagree.

I think that’s right. To summarize, here’s where I think we agree and disagree:

We agree: GDP is not a particularly good metric for measuring international economic influence.

We disagree: You think adjusting GDP by PPP makes it better for this context, and I think that adjustment makes it even worse.

We agree: Exports matter for discussing economic power on the international stage.

We disagree: I think imports and investment also matter. You clearly don’t, by dismissing them as mere consumption and financial engineering.

We agree: United States economic power overseas is in decline, including in the hegemony of the US Dollar, and its importance/influence through organizations like the World Bank, IMF, WTO, or even things like the SWIFT banking network.

We disagree: I think the United States is still much, much stronger than China on global economic influence. The lines may cross, where China overtakes the United States, but I think that would be in the future, whereas your comment suggests you believe those lines crossed in the past.

In the end, a country like Venezuela wants to sell barrels of oil to buyers, for a good price. That means things like U.S. sanctions (especially when enforced by the entire west) will hurt more than Chinese aid helps. At least as of 2026.

Maybe you’re not dreaming big enough on what makes ideal conditions. The fraudulent Nikola company managed to film a semi “driving” a few km without a powertrain, by just letting it roll downhill. I bet there’s a place that has a high enough altitude and smooth enough roads for a long downhill descent where 600km on a 300km battery is possible.

Makes me wonder about the wheel’s rotational inertia, too. In theory, a hubless wheel could be lower mass overall without the need for a center axle/hub and spokes connecting the outside to the center. But that’s all weight saved in the center of the wheel with lower effect on overall rotational inertia. Visually, the picture that makes the thumbnail in this post shows that the brake disc has to be further from the center of the wheel, which I imagine adds a lot more weight (more material necessary for the overall brake disc being a larger circle) and a lot more rotational inertia (further from the center).

Maybe the whole design itself can save weight in certain places that make up for the weight added in other places. But I just have a ton of questions, and am overall pretty skeptical of the long term potential of this design.

Looks cool, though, I guess.

The hubless wheel is on their current models. It’s basically their signature differentiator.

There’s reason to be skeptical of the company and its claims as a whole, but at least that particular feature has shipped and has been test driven by reviewers:

https://thepack.news/11000-km-in-2-months-marc-travels-rides-the-verge-ts-across-europe/

We are far beyond the GDP vs. GDP(PPP) that started this.

No, you started talking about PPP in response to a news story that described the United States and China competing over influence over the Venezuelan economy: Chinese aid and investment in response to United States sanctions. Those are essentially going to be dollar denominated, and PPP doesn’t matter. I’ve been saying from the beginning that you were wrong to bring PPP into the discussion, because this discussion, in this thread, isn’t about domestic consumption in either China or the U.S.

The US’s main problem is it’s lack of industrial production.

Again, when talking about the effects of sanctions and foreign aid and investment, we should be talking about transactions that occur in the currency at issue. If China wants to provide aid to Venezuela in RMB, Venezuela will either need to spend that on Chinese producers or exchange for another currency to spend elsewhere (including Venezuelan Bolivars being spent domestically). If there’s going to be a currency exchange, then PPP of the aid providing nation doesn’t matter. A million USD from China is worth the exact same amount as a million USD from the U.S.

On the world stage, as an economic power, the US is losing to China.

I think if we’re talking about on the world stage, as an economic power, the interconnected West is best understood as a power bloc. U.S. inconsistency and unpredictability on things like Russian sanctions actually show the limits of U.S. unilateral power while still showing the power of the broader Western order. Yes, China and Russia want to provide the world with an alternative multipolar order, and fragmentation of the Western powers may open up opportunities for that vision, but that competition is playing out along alliances, not isolated nations. In any event, PPP doesn’t have anything to do with that particular competition.

If we’re not comparing the ability of a citizen to buy things with the fruit of their labor. What are we comparing?

In this particular case? I think we’re comparing Chinese and American ability to project economic influence (from trade or aid, to outright bribes or coercion or boycotts or sanctions or everything in between) over Venezuela.

The normal person

But the normal person has nothing to do with governments dealing with other governments on the global stage. And that’s what this story is about, Venezuela being caught between two competing visions of their future in the international order.

If a country wants to build an airport in their capital city using the resources of foreign governments seeking to influence them, the question isn’t about how many eggs the citizens of those countries can buy in their home turf, but about how much concrete and steel and heavy machinery those other countries can provide in the country considering offers.

No serious economist uses GDP as a metric for actual economic production. Can we please at least use GDP (PPP)?

In terms of flexing on foreign countries on the international stage, though, raw GDP (or at least imports and exports) is pretty important.

The PPP calculation comparing China to the United States may tell us a lot about how much a resident of either country can expect to experience using the local currency domestically, but if we’re talking about influence over a third country, in that third country’s local currency, then I think each respective PPP back home doesn’t matter as much.

My “We’re totally different from Enron” accounting report has a lot of investors asking questions answered by the report.

Or maybe use excess power to electrolyze water for fuel cell use later?

Hydrogen storage presents a lot of challenges, because it tends to leak at normal temperatures found on Earth. So we either tolerate a lot of loss during storage, or we use lots of energy chilling it to a temperature where it won’t easily escape.

Linguistically, idioms can take on a meaning separate from its constituent parts, in a way that people can forget about the constituent parts but still understand the word or phrase.

The word “goodbye” derives from “God be with ye” and eventually morphed into the word we know now. The definition of the word “odyssey” derives from a Green myth but has a standalone definition that is understood by people who aren’t familiar with the myth. A ton of other words come from horse racing (“from scratch,” “across the board,” “hands down,” “frontrunner”) and maritime stuff (“groggy,” “show someone the ropes,” “even keeled,”). We draw on shared stories (ancient myths, folklore, the Bible, even classic and modern literature) for much of our vocabulary.

We shouldn’t be surprised by language arising out of modern movies and television shows, or even shared internet memes enter the common lexicon.