I only very recently learned this, from Jefferson Cowie's 'The Great Exception.' I had heard the sentiment from family for years without ever thinking about why the program was structured that way.

FDR and his team structured it this way intentionally! FDR: "We put those payroll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pension and unemployment benefits. [That way], no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program.”

Knowing when people go to bed in Portland, that may have been on purpose.

Purely by accident, as a side effect of finding those reviews, I chanced across other, contemporary op-eds in mainstream magazines of the time.

…guess what? The “War on Christmas” rants were already underweigh—and you know what they claimed as proof? You could get SECULAR HOLIDAY CARDS WITH PUPPIES

BRICS is within one standard deviation of nothingness. If you look at it too hard it disappears.

Giving up on canister interoperability and building dedicated thin-wall quad packs for the mk61 seems like a way easier solution.

How LONG is this vls??

That wasn't the intended implication?? I thought there were a few places through the games where they had NPCs imply asari looked different to each species

Inarguable! but there are advantages to and needs for large platforms (esp for big sensors). that's the main purpose of the Japanese ASEVs and the biggest difference between them and the BBG concept, imo

this is a very good point. I initially wanted to disagree since Japan is building big missile-armed ships, but the difference between their mobile BMD platforms and the "BBGs" is night and day - specialized vs unfocused, based in political/economic/strategic constraints vs fevered imaginations.

Here's my most frustrating example, where 2/3 of these books do not exist at all!