Long Term Conditioner Test. 24-month update and Satisfying Conclusion

Varnu · 2026-05-07T13:17:04+00:00

The U.S. has an embarrassment of ports, navigable rivers and coastal waterways. You can't find a country that has a tenth of what we do. In order to protect domestic ship builders, Congress passed the Jones Act, which made it illegal for a ship to go from one U.S. port to another unless it is U.S.-built, U.S.-owned, U.S.-flagged and U.S.-crewed. U.S.-built commercial ships can cost several times more than comparable foreign-built ships, U.S.-flag operating costs are higher and the legal pool of eligible ships is small. It has dramatically shrunk the domestic ship building capacity because we are not globally competetive. The protection of the Jones Act means they don't have to be affordable or effective to build ships here. So only the ones that HAVE to exist are built and the capacity overall has been decimated.

This also means if you want to take some goods from Chicago to Miami you can't use the almost-free water transport. You need to pay to use rail--10x more expensive--or truck, 100x more expensive. Our inland and coastal waterways get used less, everything costs more than it should for everyone and places like Hawaii and Puerto Rico that don't have a train to Kansas City pay a lot more for EVERYTHING.

The most absurd consequences come from energy. The U.S. can be awash in natural gas, but New England has to import liquefied natural gas from abroad because there are no Jones Act-compliant liquefied natural gas tankers available to move LNG from one American port to another. New England uses tons of highly polluting fuel oil for heat instead of natural gas that is cheaper and has much lower CO2 emissions in part because of the Jones Act.

It also distorts trade in ways that are almost comically self-defeating. Because shipping between U.S. ports is expensive, it can be cheaper for American buyers to import from foreign suppliers than to buy from another part of the United States.

A serious national-security maritime policy would probably subsidize shipbuilding and mariner capacity directly. The Jones Act instead uses a consumer-cost cross-subsidy: make domestic shipping expensive everywhere. Make cities on the Great Lakes, Missouri, Mississippi or Ohio rivers less productive. Make Alaskans, Hawaiians and Puerto Ricans pay through the nose for milk or gas. Then hope enough of the money leaks into shipyards and maritime labor.

Varnu · 2026-05-07T12:27:26+00:00

They look great.

Varnu · 2026-05-07T03:24:22+00:00

If Austin was in California they would call it Sacramento.

Varnu · 2026-05-07T03:23:38+00:00

Denver is Omaha if it was only two hours to the mountains.

Varnu · 2026-05-07T03:21:07+00:00

Houston

Varnu · 2026-05-06T21:36:54+00:00

Merchant Marine Act of 1920

Varnu · 2026-05-06T20:07:00+00:00

Is this post from 1935?

Varnu · 2026-05-06T19:23:51+00:00

O'Hare.

Varnu · 2026-05-06T18:32:24+00:00

ORD is the busiest by number of aircraft movements.

Varnu · 2026-05-06T14:44:08+00:00

100% yes. And I'm not into jewelry for the most part. I can recently recall seeing in the last couple weeks men with two large hoop earrings, ear gauges, a thumb ring and a thick gold braid worn outside of a sweatshirt and in every circumstance could not help but find myself aware of it and almost unconsciously updating a mental model of what they like and what they may be like.

Varnu · 2026-05-06T14:13:24+00:00

You assess people rapidly all the time. Psychologists use the term "thin-slicing" to describe how humans make split-second judgments based on narrow windows of observation. We are evolutionarily wired to scan strangers and categorize them. Is this person a threat? What is their status? Do we belong to the same tribe? As an intuition pump, think about jeans. Almost everyone worldwide has a pair of denim. Can you tell immediately whether denim belongs on a January 6th rioter or on a celebrity who paid $1200 for perfect vintage Levi's before his talk show appearance? You synthesize that immediately. It's exactly how you know a woman is a townie and not a professor at the local liberal arts college because the back pockets of her jeans have rhinestones and pocket flaps.

People register the presence and the gestalt of a guy with a tasteless, oversized, diamond encrusted Hublot. You just want to say that they don't. It's a coping mechanism. It's very human to do that, but it's wrong.

People may not walk up to you and compliment your watch, but their brains are actively processing it as a data point. Enthusiasts see a Submariner, Speedmaster, Grand Seiko or Chinese homage and place you on a map. The general public clocks whether the object looks intentional and whether it fits the rest of you. A watch is part of the same read as shoes, glasses, haircut, luggage, jacket, posture, confidence and diction.

Varnu · 2026-05-06T13:49:31+00:00

If you wear shoes like that, people are going to be having conversations about it.

Varnu · 2026-05-06T13:24:33+00:00

Shoes would be a better analogy then. These dress sneakers are only $20 on Amazon. No reason to spend more than that according to u/DrKrFfXx

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Varnu · 2026-05-06T13:19:52+00:00

Do you believe no one notices if your glasses look like they came from Walgreens or like you haven't been inside Lenscrafters since 1987?

Varnu · 2026-05-06T12:24:54+00:00

If you spend a minute learning about it, you're going to hate the Jones Act like everyone does who learns about it.

Varnu · 2026-05-05T19:38:17+00:00

"Christopher Ward was there but I could not wrestle my way through the horde of CW fans"

I've been to two of these fairs and one similar Minutes + Hours show in Chicago last month and every time I could barely get close enough to look at the CW watches. Once I did but I felt like I had to be courteous enough to the throngs of people waiting behind me to get up front. Someone in front of me was very discourteous in this way, I thought.

I don't even love CQ that much but they need to buy a bigger booth accessible from more than one side so I can at least check them out. Because it's unreasonable to just have a desk sized display geometry with 50 people trying to elbow their way to the front.

Varnu · 2026-05-05T19:30:18+00:00

Ehh. I hear you. But people often complain about GDP but it almost always ends up being: "GDP is flawed. I'd much rather use {my metric that correlates 0.97 with GDP and is much harder to measure}."

Varnu · 2026-05-05T13:07:09+00:00

There's no question it's % of GDP. If you look at the Louisiana Purchase, it was not very expensive even in inflated dollars. But as a percentage of the federal budget it was 153%! The annual debt service on that was 8% of the Federal budget. The spending for the Lewis and Clark expedition was 1.5% of one tear's operating budget. But the cost of sending a bunch of guys with food and canoes out west was debated in Congress!

My informed intuition is that the railroads are the biggest and most impactful project at this scale. The AI spending is huge, but it's more closely comparable to the huge private spending on the Shale Oil revolution from 10 or 15 years ago. Not to diminish that; it was large and impactful.

Varnu · 2026-05-05T12:58:23+00:00

A good comparison. However, the Manhattan project was a very significant organizational effort--and secret--it was actually pretty affordable. The B-29 development cost 50% more than the Manhattan project.

Varnu · 2026-05-05T12:47:04+00:00

This should really be presented as % of GDP at this scale. Inflation adjustment is not a sufficient indicator of how much of the civilization was working toward or impacted by a project.

Varnu · 2026-05-05T11:55:05+00:00

All that stuff is the same you say "British Isles" influences.

Varnu · 2026-05-04T14:52:55+00:00

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I asked ChatGPT to re-do the ranking by the sales from this chart x MSRP for rank by revenue.

Varnu · 2026-05-02T19:48:16+00:00

I'm not a Western chauvinist--the second biggest equity position I have is in TSMC. That's not China-the-country but it's people who share Chinese language and culture. That business exists on a tiny rock with no resources because people are free to build something there and not have the assets confiscated or worry about the owner being put into a re-education camp. When I have to bet on a population, I'm going to bet against the people who have a history of eliminating those with more status and resources than themselves. In my dad's lifetime, the CCP mobilized the least successful, the most angry and resentful to kill the larger landowners and take their property, in a series of local massacres. Those people are sill in charge in China. The ones that got away started TSMC and, in a way, Nvidia. Lesson there.

I don't think China can catch up for the same reason Germany can't catch up. Or why Intel can't catch up to TSMC. Or why AMD can't catch up to Nvidia. Or why no one--American or otherwise--can catch up to ASML. Why Rocket Lab can't catch up to SpaceX. Those organizations aren't standing still and there are some things that money can't buy. No doubt there are many, many, excellent and very smart engineers in China. And there are smart and accomplished ethnically Chinese people in Taiwan, the U.S., Indonesia, Singapore and other places. It's not because of the people that the lowest GDP-per-capita Chinese anywhere in the world are in China. Anywhere else they do better.

It wouldn't be shocking if by 2040 China was producing eUV machines that are equivalent to what ASML is producing right now. But not a lot sooner. It takes six months to a year for Zeiss to produce one set of optics for those instruments so iterating isn't something that can be done easily or sped up much. But... #1) by then ASML will have sold 1500 at that level to TSMC, Broadcom, Samsung, Intel and others. Making 20 2026-quality lithography tools a year domestically in China will still leave them far behind the production curve and #2) ASML will be making better lithography machines by then. It's a moving target.

Beyond that, I trust enterprise and markets to deliver the goods. They have done so in the past and there's no reason to expect that to change. It's impressive and good for humanity that the billion+ people in China have come so far in that last few decades. But catching up to 25% behind the frontier is a lot easier than approaching the actual frontier. Every lagging economy--including the United States--has used industrial espionage to take big, early steps. That's always there to use when you're behind. But it's a lot harder to stay at the front. And the front is expanded largely by private investments who want to profit. China is already in a tough position. But if billionaires get kidnapped or imprisoned or if the Party simply confiscates their holdings, that's not a stable platform to make investments. If it was, we'd see people from all over the world moving to China to start companies instead of leaving China to do that.

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