> The reality is the roman heavy infantry was a machine.

The beginning of the 1999 film "Titus" ( an Anthony Hopkins starring adaptation of Shakespeare's "Titus Andronicus" ) has a Roman square in maneuvers in a ... soundstage? not an exterior sequence anyway.

It's one thing to read it and another to actually see it.

> That's actually the heaviest infantry rifle ever adopted by the US military.

True.

> I'm willing to bet that cost considerations are going to ensure that the reduced version gets used in combat.

Huh. What I've read says the gain of function looked for was piercing body armor. So maybe you're right.

> but they shouldn't be significantly heavier than an M-1 Garand or an M-14.

Most likely. I imagine the M16 will still be in use.

The original was .45 ACP and the FBI got 10mm conversions.

I think the new weapon adopted , the Next Generation Squad Weapon or XM5 they use "practice" rounds at lower velocity and only switch to "combat" rounds when it's For Real. The barrel seems to wear out with the fairly extreme round chosen for that. That's a sea change from prior doctrine.

Part of it is the tradition of measuring weapon effectiveness in shooting competitions within a military. There are people who frame the M14 debacle as sort of a conspiracy :) The whole story of the Armalite designs is complex; some still consider the AR10 the best in breed .

I can't recommend Ian McCullough's ( aka Gun Jesus or Forgotten Weapons ) channel enough. A general pattern emerges where this process is failure prone.

Doctrine in that area has been turbulent to say the least.

One of the best YouTube videos of all time. I had a family member who told me about that decades ago ( they ran out the end of their career at Electric Boat ) but this covers it so well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQ5Ru7Zu_1I&t=5s

I have not.

Heh. Are those still a thing?

Oh, absolutely. I'm using the smallest number as a "we can do at least this well." A baseline.

I have to wonder if some of the increase in both gun deaths and traffic deaths has a common cause.

That too. But the traffic death ratio has simply declined a bit faster and I (arbitrarily) picked the leading statistic. Peak traffic deaths US was 25.51 ( edit: per 100,000 ) in 1973 vs 2013's 10.40. 2.5ish is just a tad over <2.0 .

Traffic deaths are rising again as well :(

> Expedia

DAWT CAAAAAAHM!

That's mostly because cars are safer now.

Time signatures used to be a thing. Dave Brubeck's "Time Out" sold very well and his schtick was time signatures.

https://bestsellingalbums.org/artist/2969

Mike Post has interview/oral history stuff on YouTube. Fascinating guy. His career was a lot an accident. I wanted to be Mike Post when I grew up.

The percussion on that owns the song.

That made me sad. A very public admission they can't do 5/4.

https://onlineasciitools.com/convert-morse-to-ascii

I hope that Y is okay... :)

No, that industry is starting to have dumpster-fire characteristics.

There was a wig and later a shaved head, but Stephan Gierasch in "Jeremiah Johnson" as Del Gue. I've seen him in other things and he is never the same - a character actor's character actor.

They also gave him the best lines in the film.

I remember.

ELIAAAAAN!

> It’s clearly been a 100-year failure.

I'm less sure of that than you are. I made the mistake of reading ( most of ) "A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960" and the various panics and crashes of the 19th century were a big problem. Some of that is having money denominated in metals, some of it was stubborn attachment to other ideology.

Also - I suspect that the "Bernanke Put" worked great. That's more or less what the Fed was designed for - it was inspired by JP Morgan's ending of the Panic of 1907. Morgan died in 1913 so that avenue was lost. I think it shows well just how important an historical figure he was, regardless of any negative perception of him.

> Like a Sears home built in 1920 - the purchase price when adjusted with “silver math” comes out to almost exactly its current market value. CPI calculator had it at half.

Interesting. I'm just hoping that is not a coincidence.

I did find this:

https://en.macromicro.me/collections/3351/commodity-silver/26743/consumer-price-index-sa-yoy-silver

I'm not 100% sure there's always been signal there. But the 10 and 5 year '"breakeven" rates seem pretty stable ( which is literally half of the dual mandate ). Does that mean it's an overly managed figure ( if I read you right ) ? Possibly. They could work out to the silver figures run thru a "low pass filter", something econometricians do.

> the hunt brothers saga is a bit of a boone

If our currency was silver-backed I don't think speculation would be legal so it's a wee bit specious on my part to bring that up. It does however show that commodity money earns the seemingly-counterintuitive property of feeding instability. You'd think otherwise, right? Well...

This is a very good point but it will only hold for certain goods. Sorta "pawn shop goods" if you will. I don't think it holds for all such goods.

I don't know of a vetted data set that shows this correlation holds over time, either. Do you know of one? I'd be interested if you do.

Over time, the fashion has been to emphasize the "unit of exchange" property of money over the "store of value" property. There are practical reasons for this.

It's known ( to monetarists , not everybody ) that inflation is usually - the present one is the exception - caused by error in money supply creation. Some people think the error is necessary but some do not. SFAIK, the main goal isn't anything more than avoiding deflation and another Depression. There's the use of it of maintaining government funding. If the economy could actually treat the government as an outage and route around it, I suspect it would. But there's actually emerging Marxist theory about why it doesn't. It's Marx-based and not completely contained in works like Kapital. It could also be wrong; it's emerging.

I'd also throw in the the Hunt Brothers attempt to corner the market in silver shows another weakness of specie.

But SFAIK it's known that CPI has problems. It's required because of the Fed's dual mandate. That sort of thing is again done in memory of the Depression.

Asset inflation is not monetary inflation. That rather is the point. To the extent that is has any use at all, CPI models monetary inflation.

I'd expect them to be decorrelated. Trying to make the correlated brings real problems.