Honestly if it works economically, I think this kind of infrastructure project should at least partially count towards NATO targets. Not all of war is moving troops, some of it is logistics, keeping your citizenry relatively happy, and an accumulated history of economic investment. If they can manage to get a lot of that money into workers’ hands, that alone is a huge benefit when combined with the transferrable skills you’re reinforcing in your workforce.

Not that we should have to justify infrastructure as military expenses. But I do think it kinda works.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_States

In 2009, Congress increased it to $7.25 per hour with the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2007.

This is the normal way to talk about changes in deficits and surpluses in English, and it’s not ambiguous, although it may look that way initially. In everyday speech, a “deficit” already means a shortfall or a negative amount. When we say a “surging deficit,” we mean the size of that shortfall is increasing. We generally treat deficits as only positive or zero (never negative), and if it flips, we call it a “surplus” instead.

There’s a reason you separate military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state. The other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people.

For those who haven’t heard of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug

Exactly. Attention mechanisms excel at extracting signal from noise. This would simply reinforce that noise can come in this shape.