National debt tends to confuse people, because they imagine the government like a household, or maybe a small business: You have some income (taxes), which you use to spend on things (government services, military, social security, etc). If you run out of money, you have to borrow it. If you borrow too much, people stop lending you money, you're up shit creek and have to cut spending.

That's not really the case with a nation-state with sovereign control over their own monetary policy. In that case, currency works a lot more like an MMO currency like RuneScape gold. The government gets to set up sources (government spending, killing goblins), and sinks (taxes, buying stuff from in-game shops), with the risk of screwing up the balance being a shift in perception of value of the currency. Just like how I never need to worry that RuneScape will run out of gold, and the next goblin I kill won't drop any, the government can't run out of money. It can always print more. Taxes are used to induce a demand for the currency (since you need to pay your taxes in USD), creating a flow of money through the economy. Tax too much, or print too little, and you make people expect the money to gain value, and shrink the value proposition of investment compared to hoarding money. Print too much, or tax too little and you end up with money piling up in some subset of your participant's balance sheets, shifting people's expectation to the money being worth less in the future, leading to a devaluation of said currency (since the people with a bunch of money are willing to spend more of it for the same good).

The key is that whole "expectation of future value" element, which differentiates government debt from private debt. It's a much looser coupling than "I have 45 cents in my bank account, I can't buy groceries this month". A currency can be useful, valuable, and perfectly suitable even if it loses a couple percent of its value every year, forever. That would reflect as a forever increasing national debt, but it's fine, because national debt doesn't matter.

Unexpected changes to the rate of change of the national debt is the thing that matters, and even then only indirectly, by way of the public perception of the value of the currency, which leads to the inflation/deflation rate.

That all tracks, and it's a helpful framing. I think the alarmism here is more about the rate of increase rather than the absolute value.

Not even someone else's! A significant amount of the national debt is owed to themselves.

At the end of the day, in the world of fiat currency, taxes and spending are not intrinsically linked. They're mediated by public perception of the value of the currency, which can be sensitive to unexpected speed ups of the money printers, but is frankly unaffected by the normal rate.

Or it'll be a real-world test of the whole "three missed meals away from violent revolution" quote of Lenin's.

Where I live, private sector food programs are very healthy, and so it seems unlikely this will be much of any local impact beyond retailers’ bottom lines. For example, the Taco Bell drive thru down the street from me has a huge sign “WE TAKE EBT!!!” which I assume corresponds to the local consumers being largely subsidized chalupa eaters. I wonder if chalupas will decline in value from $7 dollars or whatever artificially inflated price they’ve reached, back down to their old timey price of $3? (I’m not sure I have those prices exactly right as I’ve only purchased Taco Bell once or twice since in the past few decades. I confess I don’t get EBT yet, so my perspective is a naive one. It may be the case that chalupas are a better value proposition than Safeway prices in the suburban food desert where I live. There’s certainly a dearth of drive thrus.)

When did EBT start being legal at restaurants? I thought it was only for unprepared food (e.g. grocery store items).

When someone realized that people exist who don't have ready access to kitchens?

I looked this up and it seems like restaurant meals are only available to SNAP users that cannot use a kitchen because they are homeless or too disabled. Programs like meals on wheels have waiting lists now so that might not be an option.

Taco bell seems ridiculous but the alternative is that they eat cat food.

That makes no sense. Who do you think pays the bill for EBT? If entitlement programs are done away with, no one will accept EBT, because it won't exist.

It's because there are a significant number of us for who tinkering with and building shit is basically a compulsion. And software development is vastly more available, and quicker to iterate and thus more satisfying, than any other tinkering discipline. It's probably related to whatever drives some people to make art, the only difference being that the market has decided that the tinkers are worth a hell of a lot more.

For evidence towards the compulsion argument, look at the existence of FOSS software. Or videogame modding. Or all the other freely available software in existence. None of that is made by people who made the rational decision of "software development is a lucrative field that will pay me a comfortable salary, thus I should study software development". It's all made by people for whom there is no alternative but to build.

I think you're grossly underestimating the number of people here who fell into software development because it's one of the best outlets for "the knack" in existence. Sure, this site is split between the "tech-bro entrepreneur"-types and developers, and there are plenty of developers who got into this for the cash, but in my experience about a quarter of developers (so maybe 10-15% of users on this site) got into this profession due to getting into programming because it fed an innate need to tinker, and then after they spent a ton of time on it discovered that it was the best way to pay the bills available to them.

I got stupidly lucky that one of my hobbies as an avid indoorsman was not only valued by the private sector but also happened to pay well. This career was literally the only thing that saved me from a life of poverty.

Yep, and the younger people like us growing up now are just fucked.

Nah, I've reached the point where I'll be just fine. Don't worry about me.

All the polo-likes (Hockey, Soccer, Water-polo, etc.) are extremely simple, only complicated by definitions of fowls and offsides and the ilk.

Basketball, too.

Humans are causing a change to the environment drastically faster than any normal ebb and flow. In the same way that you can get from 0-60 either by pushing on the gas pedal, or being hit by a train, rates of change matter a lot.

There are notable exceptions. The AKM and RPG-7 are some of the most widely marketable weapons of all time.

Yes, there are exceptions. The Soviets also poured resources into making quality watches.

But they were unable to generalize this.

After the Soviet Union collapsed, various companies sprang up to sell Soviet goods. I bought a marvelous small telescope, an old-fashioned electro-mechanical telephone, and a mechanical submarine clock. (Note that these were all obsolete technology.) They were all made by former military suppliers.

> Trying to cram in as much knowledge as possible when your brain is fried isn't going to help you all that much.

This strongly depends on what stage of the studying/cramming process you are on. If the option is between going over everything a third time, or going to bed, go to bed. If you've never successfully completed a problem in a certain part of the subject? Getting there will almost certainly be more valuable than the trade-off in sleep. No amount of sleep is going to fill holes in your knowledge.

If someone can't figure out how to take advantage of widely available stimulants, it's a dramatic disadvantage in frankly all facets of life. There's no prize for deliberately hampering yourself by refusing to use the tools available to you.