I like the light.

Pleased to help

Hah I can believe that.

I’m not technically synaestehtic but I do have strong associations between numbers and colors, days of the week and colors.

Saturday has always been blue. Sunday is red. Number 4 is green, 3 is yellow, etc.

For a time I moved to an Islamic country where Friday is the holy day, not Sunday. So the weekends were Thursday-Friday and not Saturday-Sunday.

What was weird is that my red/blue associations with Saturday/Sunday shifted onto Thursday/Friday after a long time of living like this. And then I left that place and my associations shifted back.

The “nineness” of a thing, as you say, is hard to describe.

No I don’t work in finance. I consider myself pretty low on financial literacy to be honest. But that may help with writing explainers. I find that advanced people very often make poor explainers because they don’t realize when they are using jargon or high level concepts that their audience doesn’t have the foundation to understand.

And no I didn’t use AI.

I grew up with a Betamax tape player under the family TV. It had a 24 hour clock and it was the timepiece in the house that was in the right spot to tell us all that it was bedtime. As a result I have an intuitive feel for the 24 hour clock. But if you haven’t used it regularly, which most ordinary Americans don’t, then yeah you just have to stop and do the arithmetic before you can connect 21:00 to your sense of time.

He did say it always fucks him up :D

The US has worked steadily to make Iranian nukes absolutely inevitable.

I agree. A US blockade of Hormuz was actually always a reserve strategy to put a chokehold on China if they invade Taiwan. Now we’re just playing that card for no fucking reason at all. This administration is dumb as fuck and I can’t believe there isn’t even anyone in the military who can stop them. I guess that’s what we see with Hegseth’s long line of dismissals.

Iran was allowing some ships through. The logic is that if it’s closed to the US it must be closed to everyone (it was not before).

Do I think this is a good move? No. Do I think Trump and Hegseth have three brain cells between them? No.

But it also isn’t hard to understand their angle here. It’s not better for anyone. But the idea is to make it worse for Iran than the previous phase, where they had control of the strait.

I hate people who consider trees nothing but problems. Such people should be cut down.

The United States government raises money by issuing bonds. It’s a “bond” as in “a promise.” It is literally a promise that if you buy one for a dollar, they will buy it back from you for a dollar and five cents next year. Not the highest interest you can get, but it’s always been rock solid reliable, unlike the stock market which earns more over time but also crashes periodically.

These bonds are just one more investment type that you can buy on the market, like stocks or mutual funds. So anyone can own them. Your grandma can own some. Jeff Bezos can own some. The government of China can own a lottttt of them.

The national debt is the five cents we have to pay every year on top of the dollar we borrowed last year. If we didn’t use that dollar to earn more than 5 cents of economic growth during that time, it was a losing bet for the US to make. We’ve made a lot of those losing bets. And now we have so many 5 cents coming due, and not enough new incoming tax revenue from our general economy to easily pay them.

Borrowing money makes sense if you can use it to grow. We are still paying off the massive borrowing we did for World War 2, but the thing is our economy has also grown massively since then so that debt is like nothing to us. WW2 put the US into a position of world dominance that has been hugely beneficial for us monetarily. So that debt was a good bet.

But we’ve been borrowing more and more and growing less and less. Now we’re borrowing to pay off the borrowing we did before, and that’s a rapid spiral down the drain.

So in the end, the national debt isn’t scary if you think America can keep growing rapidly. It’s built in that growth mentality that we’ll just keep getting bigger and bigger and have more and more to work with. That’s held true for 75 years, but it really can’t hold true forever. It’s the same dumbass growth mentality that fuels the rest of capitalism.

The reason grandparents always think the debt is scary is that they are past their own growth phase of life and spend their time trying to figure out how to live long term on what they’ve got now and nothing more. This is old people’s daily reality. And then they look at the government behaving like a teenager saying no no I can borrow like crazy to go to college because when I get out of college I’m going to earn so much money I won’t even feel it when I pay it back.

You get that college —> big earnings leap once in a lifetime (if you’re lucky) and we’ve been trying to live that leap continuously as if it’s going to just go on and on for centuries.

‘Surprising, illogical and very troubling’

We have a rhetoric problem in the US. Trump does something dumber than a bag of rocks, and smart people react with statements like this that actually elevate what he did even while they are trying to lambaste him.

It’s not “surprising,” it’s dumb as fuck.

It’s not “illogical,” it’s dumb as fuck.

It’s not “very troubling,” it’s dumb as fuck.

Call it what it is, guys. Your polite high road responses to this lunatic serve to dignify him.