On the flight upgrade, if it is your honeymoon, I think by far the best move is to tell the person at the desk that its your honeymoon so you would prefer not to sit seperately.

I think the odds that you both get upgraded given the honeymoon thing are worth playing for, and you still score good-partner points if it doesnt work out.

While truck drivers might loose out, I dont think it follows that they need to be compensated. People loose out from various changes in government policy the whole time. If you raise taxes, you obviously dont compensate the people now paying more because that would exactly cancel the gains. 

What you want, is to make it gradual enough so that if many trucker jobs go they do so at a pace that people can adjsut to (eg fewer new hires and a few early retirements rather than mass redundanvies). I suspcect repealing the Jones act would have a gradual impact, as buying the ships, crewing them and advancing the port infrastructure all sounds like a thing that happens over a decade at least.

Something that may be relevant is that the quote (at least when I read it the first time) did not seem to be advocating a nuclear first strike per se, but instead making the argument that if a first strike is going to happen it should happen as soon as possible.

Depending on the wider context that could imply a pro first stike position (if we are going to do this it should be soon, so lets get on and do it) or an anti first strike position (if you are so sure in your first strike sabre rattling, why havent you done it already? Could it be that if we move the discusion from 'first strike at some point' to 'right now' you suddenly see the issue in a different way and realise how dumb you sound?).

Agreed, but when one sees a graph like that one assumes that the person making it has ensured their sample draws equally from every age group (not proportionally from every age group).

Interestingly, I would have made a prediction analogous to your own, but for trains. I also would have been wrong.

If I am reading Wikipedia right, Since the late 1980's the Dockland Light Railway has been running completely automated driverless trains. For some reason, basically every other train in the UK (and presumably in most places) has a driver.

I predicted a while ago (probably a over 10 years ago) that this was an unstable situation that would soon change. Trains are cheaper to automate than cars. Train drivers are more expensive to hire than car drivers. I was wrong, I am still not really sure why so many trains still have drivers. 

The costs being part of the outcome is an interesting point. But the example is maybe weaker than it first seems. If both sides knew perfectly in advance that the cost of taking Eastern Examplestan by force is 300,000 fighting-aged males, then the aggressor could probably find something that they valued less than 300,000 of their own lives, but that the defender valued more highly than their deaths. Eg. The aggressor might think paying $100 -million was better than all that death, and the defender might rather have $100 million than to inflict those casualties. In other words, by negotiation both sides could do strictly better than by fighting.

This obviously involves a few assumptions, firstly that both sides know exactly what the military outcome would be. Secondly, that the governments involved actually like good things (less people dead, yay!) rather than personal reputation/posing ("You coward, you surrendered!"). Thirdly, that both sides can actually be trusted, (so the aggressor won't use the soldiers saved by negotiating to try and force a second round of negotiation). 

Personally I strongly gravitate to the idea of trust, that wars are generally avoided if the two sides can trust one another to some extent. Appeasement before WW2 is a good example, if it had worked (IE avoided the war) it would obviously have been "super worth it". That it didn't work was largely down to the fact that a trust was betrayed.

On the culture thing, a simpler theory seems to be that every country invests heavily in what people think is cool or prestigious.

So, in the USA, you tell people you invest in or work in AI datacenters or software and people think it seems awesome. Where as (maybe) in Korea super giant awesome ships blasting over the oceans would be the coolest thing. American investors probably have a very different risk appetite - if you imagine a weird model where (for some reason) people overwhelmingly invest in their own country, and (reasonably) each investor wants a certain amount of risk/reward. Then in a big country an investor can reduce risk by investing in lots of different companies that are individually high risk. In a small country, there might just not be enough of these lottery ticket companies to split, so a dependable one is more attrative.

AI data centers sound more high risk/high reward than shipbuilding dry docks.

Presumably Trumps tarrifs are a big part of why Nippon Steel are buying US steel - they think its worth making steel in America if it is impossible to effectively get steel into America.

I havent looked at it in much detail, but it sounds like a bad idea. Mostly as I am not sure the 'benefits' listed make much sense.

'No fresh water needed' - if your heat disipation tech is good enough to run it without water, then why not run it on land without water? Land gets air cooling for free in addition to whatever tech you are running, space doesnt.

'Frees up space on land' - if you dont care about internet ping, then land has plenty of empty deserts you can build in. If every square meter of the earth is filling up then going underground or underwater are also surely cheaper than space.

'Solar' - This one makes sense.

Another downside to note - increased radiation exposure. That presumably cuts the lifetime of the chips.

I think all those points are probably correct and most of the answer.

Another contributing factor is in the single-use nature of kamikazee style drones. I have this strong intuition from boardgames and computer games that kamikazees are defensive. A battle ending in 'Everything on both sides is dead' is a kind of succrsful defense 

As a toy example, lets say that a force of 100 tanks can defeat an enemy force of 10 tanks with only one lost. (So 99 remain). This allows a focussed army to snowball, maintaining momentum.

But, if 100 drones take 10 casualties to destroy an enemy force of 10 drones. Then any offensive peters out as the larger army errodes down. 

I suppose put another way, the power of an army is at best linear in ammo, probably sub-linear. But its often going to be super-linear (approaching quadraric) in units. Drones are more like ammo, they get expended. The attacker likes super-linear, it allows a snowball effect, it gives them something to counter the natural ways defenders are advantaged. 

I have some big machine (a combine harvester). The machine is worth a lot more than the individual components (gears, screws and so on) that make it up. Similarly, Microsoft is worth more than all the office buildings, patents etc that make it up put together.

So, value is not just in the number of physical things, but in the arrangement of them. I suppose that, ideally, the price difference between a bunch of gears and screws and a combine harvester should be equal to the cost of paying someone to assemble those gears and screws into one. So the price difference between Microsoft the company and all its stuff should be equal to the cost of hiring a bunch of managers to turn a similar amount of stuff into another Microsoft. Put that way ignoring that "arrangement value" does seem a bit artificial.