If you add together the sizes of the EU + Chinese markets in nominal dollars it's less than the American one.
I used nominal dollars over PPP because that is what determines where multinationals choose to sell products. If one sells something for $5 in China and $10 in the USA, the PPP adjustment doesn't result in one receiving $17.
I'm not sure what other mechanisms I'd use to measure the size of the consumer market. Physical volume or mass?
X items per 100k then normalize #s for population. Or actual consumptions of atoms, i.e. electricity, metals, resources.
Depends on what you want to measure, real economic activity or spreadsheet value. Nominal good rough indicator, but countries calculate consumption differently, i.e. PRC lowballs imputed rent, doesn't include social transfers in kind (basically gov expenditure that US bundles into private / household spending). Same with EU welfare state math. These numbers aren't derived from same formula (US formula distorts up).
There's also considerations like value vs extraction... i.e. huge % of US consumption is high rent health care and education. PRC generates magnitude more tertiary with fraction of education spending, we don't say they consume less education. Or American spends 40k on tertiary + healthcare vs Europoor spending 10k. US simply overpaying vs others good for nominal but not actual consumption #s. Or US healthcare spend is ~8% higher than OCED average for comparable / worse outcomes. That's ~2T per year right there, for reference entire PRC HSR network is 1T.
Now spreadsheet $$$ is also "real" in the sense it buys stuff / certain advantages / capture market demand, but it can't buy everything... i.e. a PRC industrial base. On paper it should, but in reality having massive $$$ circulating due to overly extractive consumer economy encourages other easy extractive (service) business models. Service dutch disease. So higher nominal = both strategic and detrimental. Hyper optimized for quarterly profits at expense of overall political economy.
Even with actual asbestos, the risk goes up a lot with duration and intensity of exposure. Probably, the risks of getting cancer from a brief exposure is fairly low, and combined with the ridiculously small sample size of only 12 people to ever set foot on the moon, it's natural that none of them got "moon cancer". That said, with asbesto, it's still possible to get cancer even from brief exposures:
> Although it is clear that the health risks from asbestos exposure increase with heavier exposure and longer exposure time, investigators have found asbestos-related diseases in individuals with only brief exposures. Generally, those who develop asbestos-related diseases show no signs of illness for a long time after exposure. It can take from 10 to 40 years or more for symptoms of an asbestos-related condition to appear. [1]
Part of what makes asbestos (and also fiberglass) dangerous, isn't just the sharpness but also the long shape which means that macrophages can't engulf them.
Moon dust is still problematic since although smaller it also can't be digested by macrophages and it's believed it would accumulate in the lungs, building up on repeated exposure.
Only 4 are still alive, all in their 90s so that’d be a long time - even if some do have cancer at this stage it’s not likely to affect life expectancy I guess.
We also have to remember that those astronauts were some of the most physically fit individuals in a nation of hundreds of millions which may skew the expected medical outcomes. Especially if we assume they always had the best healthcare available, if from nothing else than doctors asking similiar qiestions about the effects of space travel.
That's just simply not true at all, I don't know where you're getting this idea. Literally every Olympic athlete was more fit that an any astronaut ever.
Most astronauts were chosen from a decent sized pool of military pilots. Pilots are some of the most expensive assets the military has (moreso than the planes they fly) and they have to be physically fit. People wanting to become astronauts are subjected to rigorous physical testing.
No, they're not Olympic athletes but they're considerably more fit than the average American.
The exposure was brief, too. Wikipedia says mesothelioma has been known to develop from exposures of "only" 1 month. That's a scary short time if it's in your home or workplace, but comfortably longer than an Apollo mission. Could be an issue for a future base, though.
The military does not survey the population and then select the fittest. So, as a function, it cannot actually perform as you say.
It's the same with F1. "We have the best drivers in the world!" You have the best drivers from the self-selection mechanism you impose on the sport. There are zero reasons to think these categories have good overlap.
They don't need to have sampled the entire population to have ended up with some of the most x individuals of the nation of y population size, they just need a large enough pool that the top end up among some of the best.
I mean Neil Armstrong literally smoked and did not "believe" in excercise so they were absolutely not the most physically fittest people. They were just freaks in terms of enduring a lot of stress tests. Physical endurance is just one aspect they train for. Other aspects were much more valued like them being military flight pilots/smart enough to understand the systems/mentally strong enough to not break down etc. You were not selecting for absolute raw fitness for the apollo missions.
They didn't select for pure physical fitness but they were already selected for fitness as a pilot and then again when they were selected from the pilots to train as an astonaut. Its not like they just picked arbitrarily from the potential pool of candidates and gambled on getting better than average.
Again, they don't select for pure fitness when it comes to pilots as well. The fact is that you didn't need to be super fit to handle those crafts. Fitness today is much more prioritized because astronauts spend exponentially longer time in space now than they did then and they have to work out in space to keep their bodies from getting used to being in space and zero gravity. They now spends months in space, previously max they would go for is like a week.
So no, pilots or astronauts are not "some of the most physically fittest people in America". They were exceptional human beings but lets be realistic.
Armstrong literally did not believe in physical excercise though. He thought the human heart had a fixed number of beats and didn't want to "waste" them. Look it up. They guys really did not care about physical fitness back then.
Whether he believed in it or not, he passed rigorous physical tests for the Navy and NASA. They don't let just any slob be a fighter pilot, much less a test pilot or astronaut. If you don't have good cardiovascular fitness, you can't handle high G-forces or maintain good judgement while sleep deprived (those jets didn't fly themselves while the pilot napped like modern ones do).
Maybe he was just naturally fit. Some people are. But he was undoubtedly fit.
Look up those tests and see what they selected for, its not as much as raw physical fitness but rather how their bodies reacted to stress + a host of other pyschological factors + flight training. Yes, it is without a fact that they are no slobs but calling them the most fittest is also hyperbole and paints this image of hyper fit astronauts which wasn't true back then. They also didn't care much about long term effects of space travel on the body back then because missions were very short back then.
Wow, an example of AI engaging in powerseeking behaviour in the wild.
This is an AI system given power to improve itself with zero oversight. One of the many Gas Town instances took an ethically questionable decision to accelerate its future rate of improvement. Since nobody reads code it got merged.
I don't understand how we can be willfully ignorant of a scenario happening right in front of our eyes.
Normally I might dismiss a comment like this without much thought, but there is an evolutionary pressure that auto-updating AIs will experience for this type of behavior.
> Subscription revenue is gone because newspapers don't monopolize their localities.
What do you mean by this? Do you mean newspapers don't utilize their localities as much as they could, or that they're unable to create monopolies on local information nowadays?
Just genuinely curious, I have a brother in law who's the editor at his small town newspaper, so I'm tangentially interested in this kind of thing.
A local newspaper traditionally paid wire services[1] like the Associated Press or Reuters for the majority of their articles.
They would only assign journalists for important or local content.
The daily newspaper was a news aggregation subscription service more than a news creation service.
It was inherently geographical because they had to print the newspaper overnight and deliver it to you every morning.
They would also select different articles depending on what might interest readers, e.g. an Iowa paper might syndicate an article on corn subsidies that a Floridian paper would ignore.
Computers fixed both the distribution problem and the recommendation problem.
The New York Times can distribute news nationwide instantly and simultaneously tailor my feed to my specific interests. They can do so better than local publications thanks to economies of scale. If you do have a subscription, it won't be to the Syracuse Herald-Journal but to the New York Times.
[1] named after telegraphic wire, which is how old this business model is.
A free press is important to democracy, so the government should move some tax money to journalists, and then this link could instead be to a taxpayer funded site (like NPR) instead of to a for-profit ad-powered spam-site run by billionaires who pay journalists as little as possible while pocketing as much as they can.
Unfortunately, PBS and NPR are so severely under-funded that they need to run donation drives and can't do journalism of this level.
We adopted this in Canada and Facebook/Instagram have banned news since 2023.
The idea is that social media companies offer summaries of news that replace reading the article for most people. Thanks to commenters bypassing paywalls they can get the full article too!
News companies cannot effectively negotiate with large social media companies for a slice of ad revenue due to discrepancies in size.
The government proposed a compulsory licensing scheme where websites with an "asymmetric bargaining position" (i.e
Big Tech) that link to news must pay.
Google is paying $100 million,[1] Meta walked away from the negotiating table.
I can’t believe someone actually makes this suggestion after seeing what has happened in the last year. The Trump administration cut funding for PBS and NPR because he didn’t like what they were saying.
This isn’t new. The government has been trying to cut funding for PBS since the 60s.
Why would anyone want the government to fund the press? How would you actually expect it to cover government corruption?
It functions fine in many countries though. E.g. a lot of European countries have public broadcasters paid by tax money and they sure do criticize and mock government.
Commercial broadcasters tend to lean towards entertainment (needs ad revenue), so news becomes entertainment too.
It works as long as the state and public believes in democracy, accountability, etc. It’s very vulnerable, but everything in democracy is. Democracy and free press can only work if the population also defends it, which is what is failing in the US. The majority of population does not want to defend democracy.
So my point is invalid that you shouldn’t depend on government funding of media because if the government doesn’t like what you say they will remove funding when that’s exactly what they did?
But I think the hard on for PBS that conservatives have is that PBS admitted gay people exist.
Back in the 60s PBS was controversial partially because it showed black and white kids playing together on Sesane Street…
Well it worked for 80 years it seems and now that the USA does not have a democratically acting government anymore they want to get rid of the funding.
Press that does not need to be profitable is extremely valuable to a democracy as it can openly talk about any issues without a conflict of interest.
Good democracies have that funding and no meddling of politicians with the content enshrined in their constitution.
So exactly when was the US a “good democracy”? 80 years ago segregation was still in the South based on a ruling by the Supreme Court “separate but equal”.
Even until the 80s it was legal to arrest a homosexual couple for having sex in their own home based on “sodomy” laws.
Today women are dying because doctors are afraid of performing medical necessary abortions to save their lives because they might go to jail
They have been trying to get rid of funding since at least 1969 when Mr. Rogers himself went before Congress to try to keep it.
Let's be clear that Democrats support democracy and the democratic process. Republicans support oligarchy and a new gilded age of robber barons.
If government actually funded news in the public interest, it would mean that Democrats were in charge. Sure, Republicans could always cut funding or pressure publicly funded news if they returned to power. It would be our job to make sure that didn't happen. Publicly funded media can't work under corrupt Republican administration.
But, it's also true that commercial media is being bent under pressure from the Trump administration. Republicans will try to break anything which they perceive as limiting their power. Your narrow focus on publicly funded media seems to miss that big picture.
Democrats don’t support “wrong speak” any more than Republicans - it’s just a different type of wrong speak. I a socially liberal Black guy who supports almost every type of equal rights imaginable would immediately get cancelled and liberals would try to de platform me once I speak out against the one bridge too far for me - biological men in women’s sports or other women only competitions.
Most white collar jobs require a university degree. They don't care what it's in or your GPA or if you understood history/philosophy/English. Just that you have literally any degree.
I agree some do, but I am very skeptical about most. It's also changing rapidly.
To be clear I'm not disagreeing that a manufacturing engineer role would require a degree in engineering (and countless other examples). I'm pushing back on specifically "most white collar jobs require any degree regardless of what it is".
I believe that assumption is incorrect and harmful.
It's truer than ever because of applicant tracking systems that allow HR to automatically filter out people without degrees before they are even seen by the hiring manager.
In combination with oversaturation of university graduates, it's an easy box HR can tick to lower the applicant pool.
University has never been more not difficult. Cheating is rampant and the whole institution is organized arpund prioritizing students graduating over protecting the integrity of credentials.
> In August 2025, three of the most notorious financially-motivated crews on the planet, ShinyHunters, Scattered Spider, and LAPSUS$, formally combined into a coordinated alliance widely tracked as Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters (SLH), sometimes called “the Trinity of Chaos” (Resecurity; Cyberbit; Infosecurity Magazine; The Hacker News; Computer Weekly; ReliaQuest). Scattered Spider provides initial access through highly-effective social engineering and vishing. ShinyHunters handles exfiltration, leak-site management, and extortion. LAPSUS$ contributes its own brand of identity-system compromise.
Lmao that cybercriminals are closing M&A deals to create vertically integrated SaaS companies.
Do you think anyone was made redundant through kinetic means?
These kinds of groups operate as businesses and in some cases government agencies. It would be the same experience as working for any other tech company.
I used nominal dollars over PPP because that is what determines where multinationals choose to sell products. If one sells something for $5 in China and $10 in the USA, the PPP adjustment doesn't result in one receiving $17.
I'm not sure what other mechanisms I'd use to measure the size of the consumer market. Physical volume or mass?
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