You are exactly right. This is how I have calculated it since I took MicroEconomics as a Freshman.
P.S. Union Journeyman Welder, Bay Area median salary is $26 ~ $36.82 =
$52,000 to $72,400.
"The median household income in the Bay Area was $128,151 in 2022, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. This represents a slight decrease from $132,586 in 2019. "
So.. 56% of median household income? If him, and his gf worked, then they would collectively make 112% of median household income.
The economy seems to be working still (numbers go up), because its a full on war-economy. You eat your country from the inside out, everything you produce explodes, and there's no way to transition out of it except by winning the war.
I agree with you now, but I also remember everyone, all kinds of experts, saying Putin is just postering. I think it's important to remember that.
It is important to note when things are not normal. Putin actually invading Ukraine was a very unexpected move.
Unfortunately, we as people are very good at rationalizing after the fact "oh of course this was coming", shrugging our shoulders and just moving on as if nothing happened. "It is what it is, this too shall pass".
The problem is that posturing can turn into reality (which is perhaps what you're trying to say). I do think Russia was posturing. They began seeking negotiations 4 days after they invaded, and outside of an absurd longshot decapitation strike all of their early maneuvering was much more performative than military in nature.
With Ukraine's entry into NATO appearing increasingly imminent, they likely felt they could force matters with a semi-bluff thinking they could catch Ukraine by surprise. Then the West jumped in thinking they could catch Russia by surprise. In the end nobody was really "surprised" and so we got a war that I expect nobody, especially in hindsight, really expected, let alone wanted.
The most clear trend in modern times is that rules are "flexible" when convenient. Here [1] is the relevant Wiki page, dated to the day before Russia's invasion. NATO had repeatedly emphasized that Ukraine would be accepted into NATO, all that was missing was a date. In the context of this, there was ongoing escalation between Russia and NATO. Russia repeatedly sought any sort of means or agreement to ensure that they wouldn't end up with NATO setup on their doorstep. And NATO increasingly antagonistically disregarded and even belittled such interests. At the same time being ever more provocative with things like NATO-Ukraine military exercises in the Black Sea.
It feels very much like the intent was to provoke, especially when this largely parallels the Cuban Missile Crisis with roles reversed. When the USSR wanted to expand their military reach to Cuba, we nearly started a nuclear war over it. And in that case, Cuba doesn't even share a border with the US! So it's not like we simply lacked the ability to understand why they might have a genuine concern here.
The reason I backdated the article is because when you read that it sounds exactly like Russia is making their intentions of an invasion, if a compromise cannot be reached, rather unambiguously clear. And so if you read it, with hindsight, one might think it was edited with that outcome in mind.
In the absence of a membership action plan, NATO saying "Yes, someday Ukraine will be a member" (something that they were barely able to agree on in 2008, and nothing changed in the 15 years after that) is hardly "imminent".
Nothing changed is a rather odd way to read that page. The US not only began actively and publicly disregarding any protestations of Russia, but were actively carrying out NATO-Ukraine military exercises in seas right off the border of Russia. All the while you also had things like British warships intentionally entering Russian waters around Crimea. [1] There were constant provocations that would not have even been considered in 2008.
Things were obviously headed to a climax rapidly. It was likely going to be war or NATO, or perhaps both.
HMS Defender was sailing from Odessa in southern Ukraine to Georgia. To get there, it passed south of the Crimea peninsula, which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014 in a move that has not been recognised internationally. While Moscow claims the peninsula and its waters are Russian territory, the UK says HMS Defender was passing through Ukrainian waters in a commonly used and internationally recognised transit route.
The US government warned everyone the invasion was really going to happen, the Ukrainian government warned everyone the invasion was really going to happen, and the Russian government warned everyone the invasion was really going to happen. The mainstream media warned everyone the invasion was going to happen, and the financial markets responded.
Some people don't have the sense to come in out of the rain.
Zelensky repeatedly said that the West was creating a panic. Ukraine's repelling of the attack was heroic and legendary, but the truth is that if it wasn't for the astonishing incompetence of the Russian assault, where there was a massive traffic jam almost all the way from Belarus to Kyiv, it really would have been a quickly conquered nation.
>and the Russian government warned everyone the invasion was really going to happen
But they didn't. Russia kept portraying the build-up as drills with Belarus.
> Zelensky repeatedly said that the West was creating a panic.
I still have no idea if it was serious, or a fake "look at us helpless and not preparing at all". It was reported in media that he was given early warnings and briefings from the US about the incoming attack. There are so many cases like that that were may never learn about for sure...
Ukraine kind of wasn't prepared at all. The US was screaming warnings and giving precise intel, but Ukraine's defence didn't seem to plan for an actual attack at all.
It is just shocking incompetence by Russian forces that Kyiv wasn't taken in days. Russian units faced negligible resistance right to the outskirts of Kyiv, where their own lack of training, planning and logistics stalled their efforts.
Ukraine is now a potent military force and Zelensky is a bonafide hero, but they were in a profound state of denial and got incredibly lucky in those early days.
I'd forgotten about Zelensky's prewar media strategy. Whoops.
Regarding Russia: did the strange televised meeting of Putin's war cabinet (whatever it would be called), wherein everyone went around the room and voted "yes" to invasion even though a couple of them looked like they were in a hostage video, happen before or after tanks rolled into Ukraine? In my mind that's a "prewar" thing but maybe I got the sequence of events wrong? (I'm finding it hard to google this even though it was a fairly important event. Weird.)
> Western intelligence predicted Russia's plans perfectly
I remember thinking the white house handled communications surrounding the invasion very well, kind of a rare foreign policy bright spot for them. Too bad it didn't make a difference.
(I recalled it as well and with normal searching could not find it, even with date winnowing, but asking Gemini 2.5 Pro and it immediately gave me that resource)
This meeting happened just before the invasion. Far too late for anyone to really do anything, and long after most of the "are they/aren't they?" discussions happened. Up until that point Russia was repeatedly denying their "special military operation". Just as they denied their invasion of Crimea and their little green men in the Donbas.
As an aside, that absolutely bizarre security council meeting is virtually indistinguishable from the North Korea-style Trump administration meetings that we now see weekly, where it's a circle of embarrassingly laughable platitudes and servitudes by a cowed and pathetic administration.
>I remember thinking the white house handled communications surrounding the invasion very well
These are good comments and there's a lot more that could be said.
> As an aside, that absolutely bizarre security council meeting is virtually indistinguishable from the North Korea-style Trump administration meetings that we now see weekly, where it's a circle of embarrassingly laughable platitudes and servitudes by a cowed and pathetic administration.
To be fair there was a lot of this during the first Trump administration, only moreso near the end when plenty of the cabinet secretaries weren't real secretaries, just "acting" secretaries of various sorts. It's just that now they're all operating on that level.
> Some people don't have the sense to come in out of the rain.
Those people included almost all western governments who had blithely assumed Russia was not threat, did not react to the previous invasion (and some took the stance Russia had the support of the inhabitants of ethnically Russian areas), did not react to the invasion of Georgia, and generally just assumed it would be OK - which Russia took as a signal the west would be fine with an invasion of the rest of Ukraine.
Perhaps my impression was colored by the US government actually having a clear picture of what was about to happen. I won't defend Europe too much. It seems to me like Poland, the Nordics and the Baltics see Russia pretty clearly, but everything kind of falls apart the further away from Russia you get.
Very much so. The Biden administration was sounding the alarm, loudly, and the general vibe was, "well that wouldn't make any sense, there goes America crying wolf again like Iraq"
It's premature in the sense that you need to care about it before you do profiling, which is the usual advice for perf improvements: "you don't know where the hotspots are, so write your code, profile it, and fix the slow bits".
I'm not in England but in mainland Europe and yes, I don't know a single person who sees Brexit benefiting the Brits. It was all lies and pandering for politicians benefits.
Honest question because I'm ignorant, but did any (well, many/most since I'm sure there are outliers) mainland Europeans think it would benefit the British?
As an American generally uninformed on the manner, I only heard of pro-Brexit people in Britain.
Brexit was a vote by Britain to lose all influence in its largest export market and instead hamper its industries with dual regulation and increased barriers to trade. Nobody thinking rationally would think it was a good idea. The referendum passed because people were largely ignorant of what Europe actually is and because the referendum put a boring, complicated state affairs against a fill-in-the-blanks fantasy option.
The fact that they had literally no idea what would happen to Northern Ireland after Brexit tells you all you need to know about how well considered the idea was.
Part of this is down to the politicians who were running the show - David Cameron, the prime minister at the time, thought the referendum was a good way to put the issue to bed - you've had your vote, we're staying in, shut up.
He more or less directly said that they weren't going to make any concrete plans, because he thought the idea was so bad that they weren't going to spend the money on them, and because releasing explicit plans would probably just give ammunition to the 'leave' side. It certainly would have torpedo'd one of the major arguments of the 'remain' vote, which was that a vote to leave was a vote for uncertainty.
So in that way it was a self-fulfilling threat - you don't know what's going to happen because we refuse to make a plan!
> The referendum passed because people were largely ignorant of what Europe actually is
This too is a failure of politicians over several decades - the EU was always 'them', not 'us'. It was something that happened somewhere else. It was convenient to blame the EU when UK politicians couldn't or didn't want to fix something. MEPs were always pretty anonymous, unknown by local people who then (predictably) didn't turn out to vote in EU elections very much.
No, except every countries eu-exit party. Every europeen country has a ~20% block of people who want the ratatouille of leaving EU, no immigrants, etc. Luckily countries with a multi party democracy evade being hijacked by them so far.
To the rest of europe brexit looks like voting Donny back in: the bicycle-stick-frontwheel meme. Except brexit was a bit more contained so easier to laugh at, Donny siding with the enemy in our biggest armed conflict is no joke.
They stopped talking about it. They dropped the issue from their list. In my country they went to covid masks, siding with Russia in Ukraine (one of our ministers literally called zelensky a dictator) and now back to border controls I believe. It's like the "today I'm an expert in X" meme.
They always have like five taking points to whip their base in anger and it doesn't really matter what they are but they're always a bit lunatic.
I always find it so confusing - the same people that want group X (Palestinans, Kurds, Tibetans, Catalonia, etc....) to have their own government/country, hate that Brits want to control their own country.
You're talking about two very different sentiments. People see leaving the EU as a foolish decision. But Britain has every right to make that decision if it wants. I don't know of anyone outside of Britain who "hates" that they left (in the sense of feeling anger or offense).
In fact a lot of the sentiment tends to be more like "good riddance".
You're talking as though there were blue EU tanks rolling through the English countryside and bombers from Brussels flattening biscuit factories. Britain is not and was not oppressed, it's just a former imperial power with a heavily financialized economy that is no longer the biggest wheel in a larger regional economy.
Yeah the EU is totally to the UK like Israël is to the Palestians or Turkey to the Kurds. The EU put a wall around the UK and is slowly colonizing the area.
The Italian socialist opposed joining ww1. The nationalists wanted to join, and the Italians joined, on the British and French side. They fought so bad that the British had to send troops to the new Austrian - Italian front, effectively weakening the allied effort and thus the spoils of the war were none for the Italians. Who did the fascists blame, the nationalist for joining this folly? No, the socialists for sabotaging their efforts.
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