1987, literally the peak cold war military spending, is an interesting year for comparison. Much of that high tech manufacturing (and employment) was underwritten by the taxpayers through the Pentagon, and that military tech eventually made its way into the civilian market.
Very soon after the US took a decade-long "procurement holiday", and we lost an enormous amount of manufacturing expertise.
Can we bring those jobs back? Sure, with a lot of tax money. Do we want to? I do - the value of "service economy" jobs is in free fall as companies replace white collar employees with LLMs.
Is this really about military spending? The US used to make so many products and appliances domestically - everything from steel to uranium to doorknobs to refrigerators to chemicals to CRT displays to roofing shingles, and everything in between.
The military benefited from the massive industrial base that supported this production - but it didn’t create it.
And now the loss of that domestic manufacturing base is largely why military production - and indeed, any kind of large-scale endeavor in the US, including construction - is slow and expensive.
Carryons are by far the best experience for a passenger - your bag is there with you and you don’t have to arrive at the airport early, nor wait around at baggage claim. All business and frequent travelers would pay extra for this.
Meanwhile, carryons are worse for everyone else, and for the airline! They massively slow down the boarding and deboarding process while you wait for people to heft their massive suitcases up into the bins.
Fewer carryons means faster turnarounds which means more profit.
Thank you for listening to my talk.