The amendments were passed/ratified in accordance with the rules within the Constitution itself. So it’s a philosophical distinction in the sense that the Constitution was not scrapped or discarded, and that any modifications came within the permissible framework that the Constitution prescribes.

A much stronger argument than 1993 is that the Constitutional system itself did break during the civil war, and the Union forcibly installed new state governments, through military conquest, to pass the Reconstruction Amendments. Arguably, that military and legal history did step outside of the Constitutional framework in order to preserve the Constitution, but the Supreme Court did rule in Texas v. White that secession itself was impermissible, and that the Guarantee Clause of the Constitution required the federal government to quash an insurrection and reinstate loyal governments.

It’s not a clean legal analysis, and lots of people had to kill or be killed to make it work in principle, but you can still see how it fits within the legal framework.

That being said, applying that standard to other governments shows that plenty of other governments have been in place for longer. In the UK, the relationship between parliament and the crown have evolved over the years, including periods of violence and usurpation and even the occasional regicide, but the basic framework is that truce of competing bases of power agreeing to share that power, or distributing that power (see all the independent nations that have emerged from that British empire), such that the government of the UK can truly be traced back far longer than the government of the United States.

I think the key to understanding the context is that GDP is a flow, not any kind of accumulation.

If Person A earns $100,000 this year, gets a 4% raise every year, will they be richer or poorer than Person B who earns $120,000 and gets a 5% raise every year, after 10 years? We have no idea, because we don’t know from the question what their starting wealth was, how much they save or spend, whether the stuff they buy retains its value or appreciates or depreciates, etc.

So Russia can have growing GDP, but can still be running its economy into the ground if the stuff they’re producing is getting destroyed, or has no lasting value.

About 40% of that generation was in the military. 8% were drafted, but a lot of the 32% who voluntarily joined did so in order to exercise some control over where they ended up. Even those who didn’t serve, often had to deal with the overall risk hanging over their head, or were actively committing crimes to avoid the draft. The draft might have only directly affected 8%, but the threat of the draft, and people’s decisions around that issue, was a huge part of that generation’s lived experience.

Cars were somewhat cheaper back then, but they were also a lot shittier. Most odometers only had 5 digits because getting it to 100,000 miles was unusual.

Advances in body materials made it so that they no longer disintegrated into rust by the 1980’s, and advances in machine tolerances and factory procedures made it so that cars were routinely hitting 100,000 miles or more by the 1990’s.

A 1969 Plymouth Roadrunner MSRPed for $2,945, in an era when minimum wage was $1.60/hour. That’s 1840 hours worked at minimum wage (46 weeks of full time work), for a car that could probably drive about 100,000 miles, and required a lot more active maintenance.

Now that cars last longer, too, the used car market exists in a way that the 1960s didn’t have. That makes it possible to buy a used car more easily, and for the new cars being purchased to retain a bit more value when they’re sold a few years later.

And that’s to say nothing of fuel economy, where a Roadrunner was getting something like 11 miles per gallon, or safety, back when even medium speed crashes were deadly.

The basic effect, in the end, is that the typical household in 2025 is spending a lower percentage of their budget on transportation, compared to the typical household in 1970.

The golden age for being able to buy and use cheap cars was probably around 2015-2020, before the used car market went nuts.

Page 45 of this PDF has a good chart. It shows that about 26.8 million men were draft eligible in that generation, and about 8.7 million enlisted, 2.2 million were drafted, and 16.0 million never served, including about 570,000 apparent draft dodgers.

About 2.1 million actually went to Vietnam, and about 1.55 million were in combat roles in Vietnam. 51,000 were killed.

So roughly:

• 41% of that generation of men were in the military
• 8% of that generation went to Vietnam
• 6% of that generation fought in Vietnam
• About 0.2% of that generation died in Vietnam

That’s the joke. It’s why the price keeps getting marked down.

Fundamentally, you’re never going to be able to compete with the economies of scale of an assembly line with the same people putting together all the parts that were shipped to the same place. If the repairman has to keep an inventory of hundreds of parts for dozens of models, and drive around to where he only has time to diagnose and fix 2 appliances per day, while the factory worker can install a part for 100 appliances per day, there will always be a gap between the price of replacement versus the price of repair.

Plenty of short-lived stuff back then, too. Survivorship bias means that all the stuff that happened to survive to today is not necessarily representative of the typical thing that was manufactured back then.

Yeah, investing in a company is investing in the whole company and all of its projects. Lies about your company are only fraud when the lies rise to the level of making a material difference to how a typical investor would value that company. If the lies are about a very minor percentage of revenue or profit, then it’s not gonna rise to the level of securities fraud.

You serious? Your own examples aren’t even isolated to Boomers. Beanie babies was primarily a Millennial and Gen X phenomenon (which made sense because it was a toy trend amplified through the rise of the internet as mainstream, and took off among those early adopters of dial-up), and was one of many consumerist toy trends of the 80’s and 90’s, like pogs or Cabbage Patch Kids or Magic: The Gathering cards.

Satanic panic was driven as much by Silent Generation as it was the boomers, and is unfortunately part of a long line of religious othering that traces back to the dawn of human history. Mike Warnke’s The Satan Seller hit bestseller lists in 1972, and Silent Generation authors like Lauren Stratford and Lawrence Pazder ran away with their made up stories (and made a killing on book sales). By the time that panic hit its peak in the early 80’s, most parents of young children were boomers, but the collective messaging was still driven by older people in publishing and news.

Meanwhile, the basic idea of fads or trends are universal. The people mimicking TikTok dances or YouTube pranks transcend any one generation. More seriously, people are falling for conspiracy theories en masse, of all generations. Is anti-vax, or anti-seed-oil, or 9/11 truthers, or QAnon believers confined to a specific generation? This shit is everywhere, and believing that these things will die off with the boomers is going to result in a lot of surprise and disappointment that these things will always be with us.

That’s not unique to any one generation. Herd behavior is, like, part of the human condition.

Your link is wholesale prices of white non-organic caged eggs, updated daily. It also excludes the eggs sold on long term contracts.

The AP article takes the CPI report of the consumer price of all eggs (white vs brown, organic vs non organic, caged versus cage free versus free range) in a weighted average of how much is sold, and averages over the entire month. Plus retailers simply can’t update prices daily, and prefer to price things at numbers that end in 9.

The bird flu issues seemed to affect caged non-organic producers harder, so that those prices moved a lot more than the free range organic stuff. That led to some unexpected flips of which was more expensive, as I’d seen some traditional eggs going for $8.99 (up from around $3 before) while the free range organic stuff was only slightly up to $7.99 (up from about $5 before), literally in the same store on the same shelves.

Taken all together, you’d expect the monthly CPI price of an average of all types of eggs to be much less volatile than the daily wholesale spot price of the cheapest type of grade A whole fresh eggs.

Anecdotally I’ve already seen egg prices drop this month. Lots more availability of the sub-$5 options when I was in the store earlier this week. I’d expect next month’s CPI report, about the current month, to reflect a drop in retail egg prices.

Not all Americans are in those three generations, certainly not in 1990 when it started. In 2019 maybe 3% of the population was older than boomers, and maybe 15% were younger than millennials.

Here’s the article it comes from.

One big issue is that the generations aren’t the same size. The article explains:

So we can say that in 1990, boomers owned 21 percent of the nation’s wealth and represented 31 percent of the population, for a wealth-to-population ratio of 0.68 — each percentage point of the total U.S. population represented by boomers, in other words, owned 0.68 percent of the wealth.

In 2008, on the other hand, Gen Xers owned 9 percent of the wealth and made up 22 percent of the population, for a wealth-to-population ratio of 0.41.

That’s a smaller generational deficit than the raw numbers suggest, but it’s still a significant one. It illustrates the size of the financial hole today’s young adults are in relative to their parents. It’s a hole they’ll never truly be able to dig out of, given the way that money draws other money to itself via the gravitational pull of compound interest: The less money you start out with, the less you’ll make during the rest of your life.

In addition to the problem of different generations having different percentages of a shifting population denominator, the graph also has to deal with a shifting wealth denominator. Americans cumulatively were much wealthier in 2019 than 1990.

Plus, the interesting thing is that since this chart ends in 2019, the stock market and housing prices have boomed. Millennial wealth tripled between 2019 and 2024:

In the first quarter of 2024, the collective wealth of millennials and older Gen Z stood at $14.2 trillion, up from $4.5 trillion four years earlier, according to the Federal Reserve.

As it stands, the richest millennials are some of the richest young people the world has ever seen. Zuckerberg is on the older end of the millennial range. Taylor Swift is right in the middle. Not everyone has seen that kind of wealth, but for each billionaire there are thousands of millionaires who became immensely wealthy in some other way.

It’s not a super robust methodology. I’d definitely correct for population size, and maybe just show raw wealth numbers by age to get a sense of whether one generation is or isn’t on track. Boomers’ percentages were elevated by just how poor the silent generation and greatest generation were, after the Great Depression and World War 2 in their prime earning years.

I have a watered down version of this, but I’m a lawyer so it’s very very valuable. If I get a question I might not know the answer to, if I’ve read it somewhere I usually know roughly where to go back to get it. And since lawyers mostly look things up instead of trying to memorize everything, a powerful “indexing” memory is valuable in the profession. At least in my practice.

The Senate has already passed a bill that limits the President’s power to set tariff rates on Canada. The House probably won’t take that up.

Right now, there’s also a Senate Bill with 7 GOP senators signed on that would limit the President’s power to unilaterally set tariffs (requires 48 hours notice to Congress, can’t last more than 60 days without Congressional approval, gives Congress fast track procedures for voting down new tariffs). There are some serious constitutional flaws in it (most notably the legislative non-aggrandizement doctrine, but also an issue with tying to sidestep the bicameralism and presentment requirement), though, and I’m not sure it would hit the point where it could overcome a presidential veto.

So right now it’s not clear whether this GOP opposition would actually build into real legislation that could actually have an effect, or whether this is all showmanship trying to influence Trump himself to roll this back.

1987: Black Monday

That one didn’t really matter that much to regular Americans. Less than a third of Americans owned stock back then, and that crash didn’t have an obvious cause from actual economic fundamentals. And the Fed managed to contain the liquidity crisis, as your linked Wikipedia page describes, so that the broader economy was largely unaffected.

Recessions matter. Stock market crashes only matter when they are caused by, or are the cause of, an actual recession in the real world.

suffering for 50 years

In Europe, feudalism lasted 600 years last time, and only ended because a plague loosened up the nobility’s power over peasants. Vestiges of that old system endured in some parts of Europe for another 200 years after that, too.

In some neofeudalist future, where the lords and nobles have access to incredibly invasive technology for monitoring the thoughts and actions of all people, for controlling even more links in the chain of the production of food or tools or weapons, that power structure may turn out to be even more entrenched than the last time around. It’s not far fetched to say that the next time strictly inherited class comes around, it becomes a permanent feature of all societies that follow.

Sure, I get if the “good side” were to be as cavalier with the law as trump is, the entire thing falls apart even faster. But I have no doubt in my mind the “rule of law” in the USA is over.

I’m not willing to make that call, yet. It’s on life support, with the doctor in charge coyly hinting at whether he’s going to finish it off himself, but it hasn’t happened yet.

And in this case, the Supreme Court bailed out the President. They went ahead and said all 9 justices disagree on whether the courts have the power to review this dispute (rejecting the most extreme and most unaccountable theory of executive power), but said that the proper forum is in Texas, not in DC. So this DC judge who was weighing contempt was stripped of jurisdiction to do so.

That’s not a constitutional crisis, which is what I’m very concerned about being that uncrossable line, but it is still separately a bad result.

These are nuanced distinctions, and I don’t want to make it seem like I’m only watching out for a constitutional crisis and ignoring all the other ways that Trump is hurting the rule of law, but I think that violating court orders is a special kind of harm that needs to be viewed as its own especially dangerous thing.

This is one of the basic reasons why Political Compass Memes is such a bad idea.

No kidding. Not only do people fall on different parts of that two dimensional map depending on context (e.g. different positions on how much government support there should be for the arts versus for the sciences, how much government should regulate guns versus automobiles, etc.), but elevating these two axes above all the other unseen dimensions (ideological purity versus pragmatic compromise or versus consensus seeking, at what point process should yield to substance, the extent to which our institutions should have inertia that resists change, etc.), which causes people to oversimplify political issues into just those two dimensions.

There are many dimensions, and each problem may call for a different solution that would fall into a different place in any given dimension than the solution to another problem.

No. The 7% breaker went off 4 separate times in March 2020, though.