2026-01-14 02:05:15
The main point of Adam Bonica’s post The Wall Looks Permanent Until It Falls is about the optimism of this moment: that the US could be ripe for a Berlin Wall-falling moment that opens the door for a better future. I’m not in the mood for that message these days (IMO, our Wall-falling is a ways off in the future), but Bonica’s analysis of how the US compares to 30 other wealthy democracies, our economic peers, is important.
Start with work and economic life. Americans work longer hours, pay more out-of-pocket for college and childcare, lack parental leave, and enjoy less economic mobility. The share of income going to the top 1 percent is nearly double the OECD average. American CEOs earn, on average, 354 times as much as their workers. More workers are trapped in poverty-wage jobs. Collective bargaining covers fewer workers. And social protections are less generous for those who fall on hard times, with the government raising less in taxes and spending more on the military.
The economy is just the beginning.
We spend nearly twice as much on healthcare as other wealthy countries do. Yet life expectancy is well below average, infant and maternal mortality rates are alarmingly high, and more Americans remain uninsured.
We suffer from overlapping public health crises — the highest rates of teenage births, drug overdoses, obesity, and gun deaths among peer nations.
His description of our unique exceptionalism goes on for several more paragraphs. But then he does something quite simple and revealing: he does the math and imagines, in concrete terms, what the US would be like if it were just an average country in its cohort. Bonica calls it “Latent America: the nation that would exist if our democracy functioned to serve the public rather than protect the already powerful”. Here’s part of his analysis:
I don’t think I’ve seen this analysis done in quite this way before. You should click through to see the whole graphic, but some of the other stats are:
And this is just if the US were an average nation. Imagine if the US took its exceptionalism seriously and tried to maximally improve the lives of its citizens & residents instead of generating, as Bonica puts it, “enormous prosperity while deliberately withholding it from those who need it most”.
Tags: Adam Bonica · crime · economics · healthcare · poverty · USA
2026-01-14 01:20:48
Astronomers have discovered an “almost-galaxy” called Cloud-9 (no, really), a failed galaxy that contains no stars. “There’s nothing like this that we’ve found so far in the universe.”
2026-01-14 00:15:57
Condé Nast forgot to renew the trademark for Gourmet and so a group of journalists grabbed it and are relaunching the food magazine as a worker-owned co-op. Love it.
2026-01-13 23:54:36
Discover the 100-Year-Old Self-Playing Violin, One of the Most Complex Music Players Ever Made. “It featured three vertically mounted violins, each with a single active string, played by a rotating bow of 1,300 horsehairs.”
2026-01-13 05:44:59
“I feel stuck and sad and I don’t know what else to do.” Yeah, same.
2026-01-13 04:39:46
Bees use polarized sunlight scattered by the atmosphere in order to navigate; they always know where the sun is, even if it’s cloudy or behind a mountain. Then they waggle dance to inform their hive-mates about food source locations.
So if a bee wants to fly straight towards the sun, it waggles straight up the hive. If the food is 30° away from that polarization line, it waggles 30° away from vertical. If the food is directly away from the sun, it waggles downward.
And the distance they should fly is encoded on how long the waggle lasts. It depends on the species of bee, but a waggle of about 1 second means about a kilometer away. So a 45° waggle for about 0.6 seconds means fly at 45° angles from the sun polarization line for about 600 meters.
The bee repeats this waggle dance over and over. And the more excited the dance, the better the food source. And if other bees verify it and perform the same dance, the signal gets amplified until the whole hive knows where to go.
As shown in this video, it’s possible to construct an optical compass using polarized filters in order to wayfind like the bees. Pretty cool! (via damn interesting)