This is "broken window fallacy"[1] territory. In economic terms defense spending is mostly waste because a lot of it doesn't get used (hopefully) or gets used to blow other stuff up causing net damage. The fact that it creates jobs is better than nothing, but spending the same money on infrastructure would increase the future productivity of the country.
The defense budget is a social support program that conservatives will agree to. Rather than just providing people a basic income and healthcare directly, they add the hoop of holding down a job to access it.
It also is meant to keep American industry active (to some degree) in case it is needed.
No one else can project conventional military force anywhere on the global like the US. China is getting there but not quite yet. India and Russia are still regional.
The Europeans couldn't deal with a few land pirates practically in their backyard.
If the US has convinced itself that able-bodied young men who are good at following orders are the people who need social support then it is quite a bit worse than mere waste. That is $800 billion spent keeping the US's best labour out of the labour force.
The US isn't sending sad cases over to Japan to cash welfare checks.
I strongly agree with your main point that pythons syntax design is objectively poor, but content that even the grace you seek to extend to it is wrong
>Python encodes structure in only one way, using indentation
Except when you write a multiple line string using """ notation.
Or when you put things inside parenthesis, which i have seen as the preferred solution for method chaining.
Point is, python claims indentation is all that is needed, and then very quickly breaks it's own rule.
Open parentheses and "multi-line" strings are simply Python's way to allow a single statement to span multiple lines in a nicer way: incomplete expressions continue across the newline (you can also do that with a common Unix way of escaping the newline — backslash right before you start the new line). FWIW, even """ notation does not require a string to be multi-line — it mostly allows using less escaping for things like newlines but also quotes.
A preferred way to chain methods is to store values in descriptively named intermediate variables: it would also ease debugging as you'll get a direct pointer to the line that is problematic. Though, TBH, that's probably bad API design (I know it's common with DB query syntax, but that's attempting to turn SQL query construction into objects when they really aren't).
Python, like most languages, doesn't really stop you from doing crazy stuff. But also like most languages, it can be done really well.
My sentiments aside, I'd like to know if it will actually help, and if my ebook reader (which doesn't scroll) is actually okay. So, looks like they could have extracted more knowledge here...
I don't think anyone is confused whether hiking or doomscrolling is better for you.
But to understand the mechanism behind the claim in the title it would be useful to know whether social media plays a role here, or if it's continuous scrolling, or something entirely different. Understanding that might not make people go outside more, but it would help make the things people are already doing less harmful.
So it doesn't cost the US anything.