The original Moon mission was masterminded by a literal card-carrying ex-member of the Nazi party (Wernher von Braun) and the American public back then didn't seem to mind.
All rocketry was, back then. You wanted ballistic telemetry? If you didn't know someone who worked on the V-2, you had to launch your own sounding rockets.
I think the parent's point stands. There's a lot more pragmatic concern with the damage SpaceX could do in 2026, versus the damage Nazis could do in the 1960s.
"Satellites have to be boosted all the time because of drag."
On Low Earth Orbits (LEOs), sure, but the traces of atmosphere that cause the drag disappear quite fast with increasing altitude. At 1000 km, you will stay up for decades.
Looking at the Russo-Ukrainian war, battery-powered drones seem to be more important than tanks right now. Russia, famously, had a lot of tanks; now, Oryx has a lot of their metal carcasses. Gone are the days of mass T-34 attacks that decided entire wars.
I will concede your point on heavier aircraft, though.
Everyone with any military training has been laughing at how bad Russia was using their tanks, thus allowing them to be destroyed. Losing some tanks in battle is a given, but it is generally believed that if Russia was using tanks according to the Soviet doctrine they knew well they would not have lost near as many - as proof of that Thesis, Ukraine has been using the Soviet doctrine and not lost nearly as many tanks. (Ukraine lacks enough artillery to apply the Soviet doctrine of war which is why they are using drones - they have now developed new styles of fighting that uses the drones they have, but tanks are still an important part of war)
Tanks are the heavy cavalry of the modern era, their main use is to break defensive lines.
Or rather, was. Neither the Russians nor the Ukrainians, operating diverse tanks on the bases of different doctrines, managed to do much breaking with them. The battlefield of today is just too different and much more hostile to anything that moves in the open and is big and slow enough to get hit.
Between zero fossil and full fossil there's a world of nuances, too often ignored. How much oil are those heavier aircraft using, as percentage of the whole country usage? The difference is the answer needed.
It is not just oil, but the necessity to keep up the entire separate infrastructure for its refining, processing, storage and distribution.
Imagine a world where the railroad, for some reason, is still stuck with steam engines and black coal. Everything else moved on, but they cannot, thus keeping the mines open etc. Very uncomfortable and far from optimal.
We still have coal mines open, what do you mean? For less and less uses, yes, but they still have their uses, and we are not (nor should be) judging them for that.
The last coal mine in my country just closed a few days ago, 244 years after mining started. I am a bit influenced by this, because I live in that region.
Yes, moderation here is better than elsewhere and the usual bad actors cannot do more than "drive-by downvotes", which are annoying, but nowhere near as disruptive.
The voting seems to work a lot better than the flagging mechanism, for what it’s worth. It’s rare that the top-rated comment is nonsense, or that a bottom-rated comment for more than a few minutes isn’t close to a waste of time.
That is true, but I would say that transnational units of, say, 1 billion people and more, should at least strive to be as resilient to blackmail as possible.
The current situation is such that if China and the US decide to sanction any third party at the same time (be it India or the EU or Russia or Saudi or whoever), the targeted party will suffer like hell.
Sure, as of 2026, this sort of coordinated action between current Chinese and American leaders seems unlikely. But leaders change. Sometimes in the most unlikely way.
That’s majorly moving the goalposts. Other than Saudi Arabia, I can’t think of any country in the world today that has more energy independence that you would get if you ran on renewables + battery + nuclear. You’d have years and years of buffer, compared to the US strategic oil reserve which has maybe a few months of buffer.
The US is currently a net oil exporter, and has been for a few years.
Now of course that's not the whole picture, but if push came to shove, the US could achieve energy independence (at least technologically, if not poitically).
True, the US could supply all of its energy needs through great effort and by making its population pay much higher energy prices. In contrast, if a country were to build around e.g. solar, and then all countries that made the panels embargoed them, the price of electricity would merely stop falling.
I think whether the economies of scale and profit incentives get fucked up depends on the size of the before and after markets we are talking about.
For these to collapse, I believe we would need the international market for US oil specifically to be substantially larger than the entire domestic market for any oil. Is that true?
Czechia is quite nuclear-friendly and yet we ran into a problem with nuclear fuel supply; you don't feed raw uranium into the reactor, you need specially designed fuel rods. Switching from Russian to American ones for our nuclear power plants took several years. We just finished doing so, and now there is a conflict between the US and the rest of the world as well. Lovely.
All solvable, all better than just running out of oil, but I wouldn't call the situation "independence", just "having a better buffer".
How does Poland manage to be industrially active and growing? Despite having only 10 per cent of the total EU population and not being in a federalist relation with Malta, Cyprus and Portugal?
Partly by not importing Germano-French bureaucratic dysfunction (Papiere, Papiere über alles). Which would only grow more prominent with further integration.
Brute force does not matter nearly as much as quality of governance does. Qing China was a big, helpless monster eaten alive by smaller, more agile competitors.
Moldova or Pakistan has even cheaper labour. South Sudan has even cheaper labour than Moldova.
Surely there must be more factors at play. For example, the general educational level in the country or its perceived reliability when it comes to FDI.
>How does Poland manage to be industrially active and growing?
Because in a single market new capacity will grow where costs are cheaper. If (Cost of Good X in PL) + (Transport Cost PL->FR) < ( Cost of Good X in FR) then it is clear where the growth will be.
With France it's pretty clear, in a single market with low cost Eastern Europe it can only be competitive in very high tech industries given how prohibitive its welfare/retirement system is from the business point of view.
"given how prohibitive its welfare/retirement system is from the business point of view."
True, the French government redistributes the most money in the entire OECD (close to 60 per cent of GDP) and this is mostly driven by heavy welfare and old-age rent spending. They are pushing the ceiling to see what is still possible.
One interesting question is: if this French model spreads across the rest of the EU, will the EU as a whole become more or less competitive on the global stage? I would guess "less".
0 chance it can spread. PAYGO systems in general were set up when expanding demographics were not in question. Nobody is stupid enough now to switch to a system that requires an ever growing labor pool in perpetuity.
The problem is that there is no "democratic" way to get rid of them because in most WEU countries retirees/close to retired already make up enough of the population to block any such measure at the ballot box. See for example France.
If you start from the bottom, it's easy to grow fast when you have others to copy and learn from. It's similar with startups and enterprises. The startup always appears sleek, fast, agile, sexy, but the slow enterprise, still moves much more in a short timeframe than the startup in their whole lifetime. It's the simple difference between relative and absolute numbers, and the caps of growth.
Moldova and Ukraine were economically comparable to Poland in 1990 per capita. They have fallen far, far behind it.
Always compare comparable countries (or startups for that purpose). It is easy to explain away successes as long as failures in very similar conditions are ignored.
That's German propaganda. The Poles have more common sense when it comes to welfare and work ethic. Most Ukrainians that went there are working and not even complaining (I mean why would they? they are a normal hard-working people), while in Germany most of them are on welfare (one gets spoiled very fast when you get free money and have no obligations).
Again, it is not the amount of money you receive as whether you can use them in a productive way. Poland invested heavily into infrastructure and was able to reduce the NIMBY problem that is so prominent in Czechia or Germany and leads to decade-long paper wars over every railway, road and housing project. Of course they now reap the benefits.
As a neighbour, I am a bit frustrated by the difference that is becoming ever more visible. CZ is stuck in a bad vetocracy, hopefully the new government, populist as it may be, will change it a bit. (One reason for my hope is that the Mayor party is in opposition. They were the biggest fans of the vetocracy, because it gave power to regional politicians.)
In general, if you can learn from somebody, adapt the good things and not the bad ones. If you are allowed to choose, of course. But that requires some degree of freedom.
Sure, but significant != dominant. That is why you compare comparable countries which had comparable EU funding available and look at the outcomes.
I know Poles quite well. There is a can-do optimistic mentality present there that is long gone from Germany. Young people aren't afraid to start their own businesses etc. There is much, much less "climate depression", ideas like degrowth barely survive on the intellectual fringes.
This, too, makes quite a lot of difference. Strong Green movements seem to be rather dangerous to most industries, not just directly (through regulation and fees), but indirectly, by nudging young people away from industrial professions. For example, the pool of nuclear engineers in many countries of Western Europe has seriously shrunk, which limits the general ability to revive the sector, even though there is some political will now.
They had one of the longest streaks of growth since the 1990s until Covid, even during times when Russia was a failed state with a drunken guy at the top.
Polish growth does not correlate with fluctuating levels of Russian menace at all.
Modern Western countries mostly drifted towards a mix of capitalism and social democracy.
"modern first-world capitalism often outsources the human cost of it's milieu to the third world"
This is a bit of "damned if you do, damned if you don't".
If you don't do any business with poorer countries, you can be called a heartless isolationist who does not want to share any wealth and only hoards his money himself.
If you do business with poorer countries, but let them determine their own internal standards, you will be accused of outsourcing unpleasant features of capitalism out of your sight.
If you do business with poorer countries and simultaneously demand that they respect your standards in ecology, human rights etc., you will be accused of ideological imperialism and making impossible demands that a poorer country cannot realistically meet.
My latest script which deletes the entire content of a downloaded Sharepoint (locally only) and the relevant MS365 account from the computer runs by default in a read-only mode. You have to run it with an explicit flag to allow for changes.
Also, before it actually deletes the account, you need to explicitly type DELETE-ACCOUNT in order to confirm that this is indeed your intent.
So far, nobody managed to screw up, even in heated situations at client's place.
One interesting thing about the situation is that Islamic religious authorities used to have conflicting views on permissibility of portraits and depictions of living beings in general, which is also why so much Islamic medieval art is abstract. Abstract art was religiously safe.
Ubiquity and practicality of photography basically destroyed the restrictive side of the conflict. As you can see, even the Taliban seems to be on the permissive side now.
(IIRC some of the most extreme forms of Islamic State in Syria/Iraq tried to ban photography of humans and animals.)
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