MrSkelter

You are making a good point but blaming the wrong thing.

Caution needn’t spiral cost. The reason US weapons cost so Much is because it’s profitable.

Building things that work 80% of the time makes sense in wartime. It doesn’t as a rule. Hence wartime production will always be cheaper.

Americas problem is that the military industrial complex is built to maximize cost and profit for private corporations, despite them being entirely dependent on government.

Until they are nationalized, and the profit margins are eliminated, you will always pay 20-50% more than you should and gains from efficient won’t be realized.

Look at the auto industry in the US. It’s protected by tariffs and still incapable of matching the Chinese and others on cost. It mainly survives because of incentives which subsidize vehicle types other countries don’t want (pickups) and Americans only buy because of incentives.

Iran is building drones for £3k. The US clones cost 30x that for “additional features” the spec didn’t ask for.

The industry is a joke.

Meta requires tens of thousands of engineers to maintain a social media site. Google even more for an ad platform.

Never have so many achieved so little and the joke is all those clowns think they are “10x engineers”. Meanwhile WhatsApp got to global scale with less than 30 people (before Meta bought it and piled on the inefficiency).

Vibe coding is many orders of magnitude more efficient than the industry standard and that’s why it’s so disruptive.

You are completely right.

I have decades of experience building products working with everyone from remote teams I have never met to FAANG employees in Silicon Valley.

Pretty much every product and site is a combination of good work, hacks and hope. When people attack LLMs on the basis of quality I don’t know what they think the standard is?

Outside 8-bit games which shipped in cassette and the Apollo flight computer most modern code only works because it’s been consistently updated and fixed in flight. It’s sad but true.

LLMs write code the way they write English. It’s not pretty but is of much higher general quality than the human average.

Europe is already competitive, or leading, in many areas.

The US only has leverage over ASML due to other ties. If those are broken the leverage disappears and without ASML Americas tech industry suffers greatly.

Similarly Rolls Royce engines and BAE manufacturing are critical to the US military. The F-35 cannot be built without critical parts made only in the UK and which have no second supplier.

Europe doesn’t need to math the US military and wouldn’t want to in 2026. Look at what Ukraine is doing to Moscow. The US military is a machine built for a war that never came and now which never will. No one wants 11 carrier groups anymore because fighting that way is the past.

Europe is in many ways a mess, and I say that as a native born European with American citizenship who’s spent my adult life in the California tech scene.

However America is totally dependent on Chinese manufacturing, global supply chains and European partners and bases. America can’t produce N95 masks, nitrile gloves, or a chip fab to compete with Taiwan despite billions in government funding to accelerate these projects as critical.

Americas situation is as messed up as Europes and the US has fewer people, less land and fewer resources as a whole.

You make some reasonable points but the implication, that cannabis is as benign as water, is farcical.

The popularity of cannabis doesn’t justify pretending it’s entirely harmless.

Consumed as an inhalant it’s impossible to claim that it won’t have similar negative impacts to putting anything in our lungs which isn’t clean air.

Consumed orally the harm will be in the dose. But there no evidence that the doses people consume for their pleasurable effect are within the safe range long term.

I am sure based on the available evidence cannabis is less harmful than alcohol, but it’s so unproductive that any research on its harms is immediately shouted down by fans who want to pretend it’s “water”.

Even more likely, high frequency ringing in the higher res file, caused by the converters, has the same effect analog distortion via tubes does creating the perception of clarity where there is none.

No one can hear the difference between properly mastered high res files. I will happily put money on it.

The casualness with which you suggest AI can produce better films than the Disney archive makes the rest of your assertions irrelevant.

You misread your link.

That list is of the change in moving to cashless since Covid. Sweden is low in the list because it’s been cashless for such a long time already. Those places aren’t more cashless than Sweden. They are the ones that are moving towards cashlessness most dramatically in recent years.

As a sometime Swede the idea of dealing with daily life in cash is farcical. Possible, sure. Convenient. No.

When my coffee shop in Sodermalm’s card readers weren’t working they just gave me free coffee over taking cash. Cash in Sweden is a burden. Banks don’t want it and most won’t accept it.

I also think the days of cash being anonymous have passed. With cameras everywhere and the trivial ease with which numbers can be recorded and shared a government could probably trace the path of a bank note if it wanted to.

The design is wrong in a fundamental level. The rocket equation says it all. By adding so much extra weight for “reusability” (which they don’t release numbers on in terms of cost and means nothing when the rockets end up in the Indian Ocean) they nerf the performance.

Hence tens of launches to make the moon and zero payload to orbit in a dozen flights.

This forum is full of fanboys but their arguments don’t hold up to reality. Saturn 5 had men on the mock. This much time and this many rockets in. Starship has launched a dozen times for $15B - over a billion per launch - and it hasn’t made orbit.

Say what you want about SLS, it works.

Musk is a conman and Starship is a failure. Like the F-35 supposed libertarians and conservatives will happily throw money at it until it achieves its targets, after multiple redesigns, and then claim success as if the neigh-sayers weren’t right all along.

It’s just bad writing. There is no such thing as a universally understood acronym. Even within fields. The cost of clarity is zero. Not elucidating means that over time the writing rots as meanings change and new “universal understandings” supersede old ones.

Bridge City Toolworks have been made in China for a long time now. China makes some fantastic stuff but Bridge City built a name on being American.

Woodpecker are a better choice. Expensive but high quality.

Mafell and Festool get a ton of hate from people angry at the prices but they are totally worth it if you know. Feel and precision matter. Balance matters. “Design is how it works” applies here. You can’t tell how a tool is to use off a spec sheet, and numbers for things like torque are very easy to manipulate (what’s the load!)

Good power tools are a joy. They change what you think is possible.

The whole premise of this rebuttal is wrong in a self serving way.

Purchasing power and income are meaningless without accounting for what needs to be bought.

Americans can make high incomes for decades only to be bank d by medical debt. Having to own a car per household member can add thousands to monthly outgoings and is common in many places. Even schooling, which should be free, isn’t when sports cost thousands per year and parents are required to furnish their kids classrooms with books, pens and paper.

I am a US/European dual citizen. American wealth is an illusion. Average Northern Europeans are much better off in real terms.

Bitcoin is arguably the worst designed technology product in history.

Burning $88k of carbon to run the world’s slowest payment network and produce a tiny corpus of data is stratospherically dumb.

The technological equivalent of raising a forest to produce a toothpick.

Just because “it works” (which is arguable in itself) doesn’t mean it isn’t stupid.

Musk and his ilk have mesmerized a lot of people.

It’s easier for them to believe in the fantasy superiority of a rocket which hasn’t achieved orbit than the real achievements of NASA and other space agencies.

It’s supercharged by a desire to politicize science to defend their sexist and white supremacist worldview. It pains them to see people they dismiss achieving great things. There are no able minorities. Just unfairness. A fair world to them is white men on top, everyone else below.

What’s funny is how different they are from the people they idolize. Just as SS officers would be disgusted by your average ICE recruit, you average NASA engineer from Apollo would have seen through Musk in an instant.

A rocket that requires tens of fueling trips to make a single moon run would be an anathema to them and they would call it out of the bad engineering it is.

There is so much anger that reality is stronger than prejudice and whatever they say and do women, brown and disabled people will be increasingly prominent, powerful and influential whatever they wish the case was.

Anyone who writes that VC investment in defense was zero five years ago is neither informed nor credible.

It’s funny how mandatory registration and tracking is fine in the US when it’s in support of war or to track minority groups, but impossible when the aim is serving the public, increasing access or safety.

Africa contains a billion people over hundreds of cultures. Referring to “African” tradition is like referring to “Asian” or “European” tradition. Do better.

It assumes you have an internal monologue which is a problem if like me you don’t.

Here’s a reality check.

There are two types of vaccine be coders. Those who review the code generated and those who don’t.

Either because they don’t understand code at all, or because they don’t have time and don’t care.

Code quality is only one factor. Naive vibe coders, who don’t code otherwise, rate performance based on output alone.

I love architecture and falling water disappointed me.

It was in terrible shape firstly. The new round of fixes has just been completed so it would be good to see it again before it resumes crumbling (those cantilevers have been drooping from day 1 and were 4 inches off by 1955, when I saw it there were seismic sensors all over).

Secondly as a tall person, 6’4”, the ceiling heights are just uncomfortable. Wright sized things for himself and he was a little man. For me I had the feeling I needed to duck constantly and the sense of unease destroys the other positive aspects of the house. A real shame.

You are just moving the goalposts to criticize a position without being required to provide a reason. You could pick any phrase and mark it as beneath intelligent discourse. You are choosing “problematic” because you don’t like the implication.

Musk is easy to laugh at and to criticize. Problematic encompasses his lying, pettiness, racism, sexual weirdness, ego and fraud as well as anything. Regardless of the proportions of specific traits, as a whole, he’s a problematic individual. That’s perfectly cromulent.

It doesn’t work for that either. That’s the point. It’s akin to looking at a Texan middle grade schoolbook and then concluding everything significant was invented in America.

It has been obvious for decades that Americas beloved, insanely expensive, carrier groups were weapons of the past.

Every time this is mentioned the comments fill with naval fans pointing out that in fact carrier groups are invulnerable due to layered defenses and air support.

Whenever vulnerabilities are demonstrated, most famously by Sweden's cheap, quiet, diesel electric subs ability to sink carriers during war games so effectively the US begged to borrow one for training, the fans just return to their talking points.

YouTube has a library of videos like this.

Yet reality bites. The truth is the most aggressive administration in living memory is afraid to sail into troubled waters for fear of losing materiel.

The age of carriers is over. Dinosaurs in an age of mammals.

This is why floor to ceiling windows in living spaces don’t feel quite right. It’s much more comfortable to have a low barrier and then a window because there’s something involved into us which makes being on a platform feel precarious.

People are confused by this because generally, they see the options as full height window or conventional window. Everyone knows that more light is better. But the ideal is either a full height window, which is blocked at the bottom by seating or a sofa or plants or something, or a window that comes within 30cm or so of the floor. It also means that people outside on the ground have a much more obscured view in and people in the room can continue their visibility by moving back-and-forth very easily.

The US is a war at the behest of Israel and Israel would like the US to fight as it does.

There are very recent images from the current war of Israel, Israeli mothers commenting on the fact that their children schools have been taken over by the IDF. She walks past the playground and it’s full IDF trucks.

This is in a country that claims it’s legitimate to strike schools and hospitals because they’re being used as cover for the military. Yet what would the response be if Iran was to target is ready children?

In Israel, the double standard doesn’t exist because they see the people they’re fighting as less than fully human. The current administration in the US is moving America towards holding the same view because it’s being led by foreign policy experts, who are uniformly staunch Zionists, with a “Hebrew school“ level of understanding of the regions history.

The premise of the article Is so easy to refute that it makes any conclusions drawn ridiculous.

Wealth and intelligence aren’t correlated at all. Wealth and education are quite strongly correlated but education isn’t intelligence.

Your problem is evident in your question. What does “black” mean? It’s entirely subjective. Dwayne Johnson? Liv Tyler? Nelson Mandela? Barack Obama? Mariah Carey?

This is a semantic issue. Ethnic groups are constructs. A system which misidentifies people identifies all people poorly.

It doesn’t track across regions either. People labelled “white” by law in some countries (Brazil, South Africa, etc) would be classified as “black” elsewhere.

In England, the example here, we do not classify people the way the Us does, with its history of “one drop” politics. Many British people considered “white” are “black” in the US.

There is no scientifically valid way of defining who counts as “black” so any discussion of tuning a system based on this definition is a disaster.

Even the people commenting are talking about different groups based on their own culture and prejudices.

As a Brit it’s been very obvious CdG was right since the start.

The final straw was almost 50 years ago when Thatcher gave up the UKs space program and satellite plans in favor of giving the money, in cash, to the US.

In return for paying for 1/3 of the keyhole satellite network Regan said we could borrow them when needed.

Then we asked to use them to look at the Falklands and Regan said no.

That was the same period where we traded British missile technology for renting D5s from America. So though we make and own our own nuclear warheads, the delivery systems are American and must be returned to the US for maintenance on a regular basis. Essentially robbing the UK of an independent deterrent.

I am all for unilateral nuclear disarmament but if we are going to have nukes in the current climate they should be entirely homegrown and independent.

The British support of the US military industrial complex doesn’t benefit the UK as it means we have no ability to act alone or in opposition to the US. We are as dependent on resupply as the Israelis.

Obviously that’s great for the US.

Couches aren’t known to have guns and the cops in Afromans house search the couch as if it’s about to bite them.

It’s a very American mixture of fear and bravado in a feedback loop which means every piece of evidence of cowardice has to be compensated for with even more overt aggression.

Hence cops in full body armor with guns drawn behaving like black and tans in Palestine.