zhdc1

Seems reasonable and closer to American averages than I would have expected.

Yes, well over a hundred iirc that the US can requisition on day one of a conflict. America still leads here.

Worth noting that, outside of WW2, the US has never really had a large merchant fleet.

Good article but, like a lot of stategic studies pieces, grossly underestimates what the American industrial base is capable of.

1. The US is second in the world, behind Ukraine, in military drone production.

2. The US is a close second to China in logistics + last mile drone production.

3. The US is still the only country with the proven ability to move mass anywhere in the world.

None of this means that the US will win a hot war against China. However, that has - always - been the case. The US fought against China in Korea and SE Asia/Vietnam and had the opportunity twice to move the conflict into Chinese territory. They didn't, for obvious reasons.

Geography + LOCs + population are a b***h.

Bought a TI dev board with c7x and c66 dsp cores. Have it doing PEQ and FIR room correction, along with tube amplifier emulation.

Will be trying to implement a virtual bass array next.

Maybe slightly higher.

…

They’re just about dead even. Maybe slightly higher. Not unreasonably higher.

Inflation is a pain in the rear.

A Big Mac meal in the states (fried and drink) cost 2.99 USD in 1990.

It now costs around 8.50 USD.

The inflation adjusted value of 2.99 USD in 1990 is about 7.88 USD.

Did the price go up? Sure. Are you likely getting slightly more in 2026 than you were in 1990? No idea, but it seems plausible to me.

Inflation is the answer.

This. It’s ugly.

All of talk about the technical merits or demerits misses the point. I can spout of a dozen or more memorized IPv4 addresses. IPv6? Good luck.

It's a very US-centric perspective to assume that density = cities.

Almost every town in the US, at one point, was dense enough to support a vibrant main street. Many (most?) of them even had tram lines and other forms of public transportation.

It's not an either or proposition. You can have cost-effective infrastructure through relative density without having to deal with all of the trappings - good and bad - that come from a city.

My source -> https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/003/033/089/164...

which can still be far less dense than urbanists really want.

And this was my comparison?

The Swiss public transport system is a century-plus old at this point. Compare pictures of the Zurich tram system in the early 20th century with today - squint your eyes and you won't notice any difference.

That said, I'm willing to bet that San Fransisco and the surrounding communities had comparable public transportation in the 19th and early 20th century. While I can't speak for the bay area, you can still find exposed tram tracks in many US cities - Philadelphia, for instance.

The US's move from having the best to arguably the worst public transportation system in the world among developed countries is a lesson in disastrous government policy.

East coast cities were built before modern building codes.

Something that, for some reason, people in the states don't want to accept is that - when given the choice - the vast majority of people prefer living in dense urban environments.

The same way people in every other country do it (rental vans)

Rail <-> Road isn't an either or issue. It wasn't in 1850 and it isn't today. The only difference, at least in the US, is that poorly designed government intervention/policies forced low population densities.

Rail and other forms of public transport simply don't work with suburban sprawl. Large roadways also don't work - compare the state of US infrastructure against pretty much every other country out there - it's just that the financial bill from an unbelievable amount of deferred maintenance hasn't come due yet.

Or just rapidly spinning up something.

Codex -> LiteLLM -> VLLM

           |____> MCP

Completely agree. I don’t see why people view this as an either or decision.

Also worth mentioning that some paid MCP providers offer an actual value added. Sure, I can use curl or a self hosted crawler for web searches, but is it really worth the pain?

Do you want issues of Nature and cell to be replication studies? As a reader even from within the field, im not interested in browsing through negative studies.

Actually, yes, I do. The marginal cost for publishing a study online at this point is essentially nil.

Langstrasse is as close to a red-light district as you'll find in Zurich.

It's gotten a lot better over the last couple of years, but stating that you were offered drugs there is like being offended that you walked past a casino in Vegas.

"waiting at a bus stop in Langstrasse" -> what were you expecting?

Shortage -> Glut

Contrarian here. I've fell in love with Firefox's AI Chatbox sidebar. It's extremely helpful to have Gemini immediately available to help with translating and summarizing text.

Reintroduction of phonics has been pushed - hard - by academia.

Construction in the USA is driven by capitalism. From my own observations, a big part of why we build less in recent times is the real estate market crash in 2008. We're still feeling the effects.

An efficient market would see an increase in supply to meet demand. This is exactly what happened in Minneapolis, Raleigh, and many cities in Texas, which made it comparatively earlier to get construction permits (in some cases, particularly for multi-family housing).

We have too much space relative to our population

If you're arguing that there's an abundance of space, this is true in many countries (and was certainly true prior to the Federal-Aid Highway Act or Levittown).

We have too much space relative to our population and our cultural focus on individualism mean that people will always prefer single family homes

Why? There are plenty of locales in the US where this very much isn't the case.

Those cant exist without cars and people with cars need to be able to commute.

If we're simply talking about the average daily commute for the average person, why? There are still plenty of cities in the US that have effective public transportation.

MB provided a cash infusion during the GFC in exchange for 10% of Tesla. Both companies saw it as a strategic partnership.

Tesla planned on sticking to luxury vehicles and selling electric power trains to companies, like MB, that would handle everything else. MB, as far as I’m aware, thought that Tesla would prioritize this more than they did.

Tesla helped develop the MB B 250e, MB’s first BEV. At the same time, they developed and launched the Model S, which was far more expensive but a complete game changer.

Who knows what happened between this and when MB sold their stake in Tesla, but it’s easy to imagine that both companies became less enthusiastic about their partnership over time.

That’s completely by design.

Heavy subsidies to get the industry up, which are then retracted slowly to force competition.

It’s a well tried model at this point (a century or more, across a large number of countries).

Not going to happen.

MB had a large stake in Tesla. When they realized that Tesla could out innovate them (Model S vs the B 250e), they sold out.

This is still an economy where ‘digitalization’ is a desirable buzzword.

I expect the EU will introduce hefty tariffs on Chinese EVs when the local automakers will lobby for it to protect local jobs, but hardcore protectionism long term only ensure your domestic industry lags behind technologically and falls behind globally.

Not sure what the EU’s strategy is here. The impact of Chinese EVs is going to be the same as electrification would have been without them in the first place.

Think about it this way. The EU automotive supply chain was perfectly healthy when US owned manufacturers had a large chunk of market share. Throw on the tariffs, force local production, and everything is good.

Chinese manufacturers will eventually do the same thing. Tesla and Greely have already done it. There are plenty of recent examples of traditional manufacturers doing it as well (Suzuki comes to mind).

The EU automotive industry is still in bad shape. The level of production and employment across the entire supply chain simply isn’t needed for BEVs.

I’ve transitioned a lot of my work over to Julia, but R is still the most intuitive language I’ve used for scripting out data collection, cleaning, aggregation, and analysis cases.

The ecosystem is simply better. The folks who maintain CRAN do a fantastic job. I can’t remember the last time a library incompatibility led to a show stopper. This is a weekly occurrence in Python.

Wonder how this differs from something like Airalo or bnesim then, aside from the free tier.